The only way ...

...to watch the World Cup.

Especially posted for mikeovswinton, yes only two Euros for one and a half litres. Mmm ... taste that pine resin.

Sanity ...

...from Larry Elliott:

The determination to cut budget deficits in these circumstances does not show that policymakers of probity and integrity have replaced the irresponsible spendthrifts of 2008 and 2009. It shows that the lunatics are back in charge of the asylum.

Insanity

"So remember this: the imposition of futile misery is not an act of wise policy, but rather a sign of folly."

From an open letter to George Osborne from Martin Wolf on the economic policy of the new UK government and, implicitly, on the austerity programmes currently being imposed across Europe (quoted here).

Back to Greece

It is a long journey going overnight via Athens, made more so by the bus from Volos taking a detour to drop some elderly people off in the village of Xinovrisi, blocking the narrow road for an eternity whilst the old man gathered his shopping as it had spilt all over the baggage compartment. Now, I can look out on an impossibly green garden for this time of year after a wet spring. Bird song is everywhere, the nightingale was blasting out all night long, and now it is hot enough for the cicadas to start up their constant summer row. And this is when my early retirement pays off. I shall be here all summer so who knows what you will get on this blog and how often.

Now, with a few chores done in the cool of the early morning it is time for some serious sitting in the shade of the vine.

Big is not always beautiful

A friend has emailed me some notes from one of those grim conferences that work decide that people must go to. One presentation was given by a consultant styling himself as a "Public Cost Reduction Specialist". I am quoting from the notes, rather than from any published documentation, with permission from my friend. They provide a glimpse of the workings of Conservative thinking on the Big Society, the idea of a limited state but with an active citizenry.

I suppose the one thing that the seminar showed was just how seriously this was being taken and I doubt whether the new coalition would put much of a brake on any real policies that emerged. There is an ideological preference within both the Tories and the Orange Book Liberals for this approach to the public sector, though it is hard to see where the demand lies outside the political class. A general distrust of politicians has not produced a populist upsurge in this country to match the Tea Party movement, "antipolitical Jacobins" as Mark Lilla describes them in this essay from the New York Review of Books.

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

I see no sign of this in the UK (other than from religious fundamentalists and alternative health quacks!). Popular protest is more likely to arise in defence of public services, rather than to ask for them to be dismantled.

So, unsurprisingly, much of the urgency behind the approach seems to come from a desire to cut costs and to reduce deficits, rather than from popular demand for change. Empowerment, individual autonomy and the breaking of dependency are the rhetorical justifications for a policy of reduced central government expenditure. It is a way of making cuts sound nice.

So what does this mean in practice? Firstly, it means marketisation and competition in the public sector to "empower" the consumer through consumer choice, thereby raising productivity and putting downward pressure on "wage inflation" in the public sector. This is all depressingly familiar and not new at all. They are the same assumptions that underpinned New Labour's public service reform agenda. The objections are the same too - public services are not the same as consumer goods, quality often rests on lower productivity (teachers with smaller class sizes, social workers with lower case loads, etc.) and consumer choice is not ownership and control.

You can see the difference between the parties though in health care. Instead of setting targets and performance indicators, marketisation will mean that prices will be set for hospitals to do given procedures, thus incentivising hospital managers to improve productivity and carry out more (just like the US insurance system - and in the same way it can lead to rampant over-medication).

The consultant also seemed taken with behavioural economic notions like the fashionable "nudge", as well as other fads, thinking that economic policy can be used to shape human behaviour - in the direction he wants it to go of course. Apparently, this process of subliminal social control is known as "libertarian paternalism" (an oxymoron if ever I have seen one).

What got to me most was the discussion of public libraries where he suggested a neat and cheap way to meet the demands of those who protest at library closures.

"Well,... if you look at the demographics of people volunteering to work at Oxfam shops, its nearly always the same as the demographic of people who campaign to keep libraries open...

Why not let the volunteers run the libraries! And you could have Libraries open 24 hours with this arrangement! And you could do deals with WH Smith to sell remaindered books!"

Hmm... Leaving aside the fact that going to a library at 3.00 am, staffed by an unpaid, well-meaning insomniac, to access a stock of remaindered books is not the most attractive vision, this is horribly simplistic. People campaign to keep a professional service going, not to make an opportunity for themselves for unpaid work. There is so much more besides ...

As well as cuts, there is a second agenda lurking around. The consultant continued,

"Of course although eventually government will give freedom, in the initial stages government will have to be quite hard, and tough with local authorities in ensuring they become sufficiently liberated and fully utilise their new found freedoms ... we know that ... even if you throw open the doors of an asylum, some people will always just creep off and cower in a corner rather than running away."

I see. The power being given away is not central government's - it is local government's. And to do this, central government will have to increase its power and control. This is a rather old-fashioned political struggle against municipal local authorities who are often the power base of other parties and work, in part, in variance to central government policies.

What this reminded me of was Jacob Levi's demolition of another associated piece of fashionable nonsense, Philip Blond’s Red Toryism. Remember these are Conservative Party ideas and Levi describes the social base of much conservatism in this way:

... conservatism is the party of the traditional elite, drawing on the votes or social support of those they have traditionally dominated. It is the alliance the aristocrat offers the peasant against the tacky, educated, often-Jewish new money city slicker; and the aristocrat sets the terms of the alliance.

This could not be a more fitting description of these proposals. The independent sector is being offered a deal and the terms of that deal, as well as the control of funding, is set by central government.

Thus the big society vision stands in opposition to democratic decentralisation and representative local democracy. It enhances central government control through purse strings rather than targets, though I see that central control of the school curriculum is also being embraced with enthusiasm. It also opens the way for the politics of communalism, funding independent power bases that can be used for advancing of narrow ideological and sectarian aims.

I must make it clear that I have no hostility to the voluntary and community sector. I worked closely with it in running adult education programmes, but it does not match the stereotypical view embraced by this consultant. It works in partnership with local authorities and other public bodies, not against them, and it is professional, most staff are paid for their work. It is a key player in regeneration and community development. However brilliantly it does some things, it is only too aware of the tensions between central funding and autonomy, a factor absent from the consultant's vision.

There is something to be learnt here from adult education too. There has been a hidden privatisation. As classes have closed, students and tutors have set up their own programmes on their own terms. Free from appalling bureaucracy, people can learn together as they want. And most importantly, they have direct ownership, no one can close their courses or take their classes away from them, as has happened in the past. There are problems with comprehensive coverage, access and qualifications for those that want them, but it could be the basis for a renaissance of dedicated adult learning.

This would seem to support the assumptions about the Big Society, as would some of the anarchist ideas of the late Colin Ward, but this is not the case. Autonomy is not something that is granted, and funded, by a central government or an elite. Nor is it about behaving in a socially acceptable way. It is is about self-organisation and self determination; it is taken, not given.

It is early days for the new government so who knows whether any of this will eventually see the light of day. Parties in opposition are very fond of flirting with ideas that they then abandon when faced with the realities of government and the attraction of exercising power. All I know is that if I had responsibility for cutting expenditure, Public Sector Cost Reduction Specialists would be the first for the chop.

Dwileing away the time

The ancient (is it 'eck; it was really invented in the 1960's) sport of Dwile Flonking is now doomed by binge drinking regulations.

...a council has warned bosses at the Dog Inn that they could be in breach of the the Licensing Act 2003 (Mandatory Licensing Conditions) Order 2010 if they stick to the age-old rules of the game ... North Norfolk District Council said the legislation, which came into effect in April, made it illegal to promote "speed drinking".

Where is Henry Porter when you really need him?

Manchester and Mahler

Last night was the penultimate concert of the Mahler cycle in Manchester, the Ninth Symphony, to my mind the finest piece Mahler wrote, with its agonisingly beautiful finale of life fading away. It was a fine performance and was recorded for BBC Radio 3. It can be heard on Monday at 19.00 and on BBC iPlayer for a limited period.

This YouTube is a remarkable clip of Leonard Bernstein in rehearsal and performance, talking through his interpretation of the symphony's finale.

Austerity

Patrick Barkham reports from "the most indebted country in the EU"; not Greece - Ireland.

For a decade, the "celtic tiger" economy was the poster child of free-market globalisation. Now, this bedraggled alley cat of an economy is neo-liberalism's favourite example of how to cut your way to recovery. Ireland's government has slashed public sector spending by 7.5% of gross domestic product with a series of drastic cuts this year: public sector pay by 15%, child benefit by 10%, unemployment benefit by 4.1%. Another €3bn will be removed next year, a total of 10% of GDP over three years: these measures are equivalent to the British government slashing its budget not by the £6.25bn planned by George Osborne in 2010, but by an incomprehensibly gigantic £150bn.

Yet despite the cuts, dubbed "masochistic" by the Financial Times, Ireland's debt is still growing, thanks to the desperate bailing out of its banks. Irish critics fear this economic death-spiral could lead to a decade of grinding austerity, a generation lost to unemployment and, worse, the return of a spectre that has haunted Ireland for two centuries: mass emigration.

Meanwhile, one of the better bloggers from Greece looks at life in Thessaloniki.

Sometimes it's the little thing that show you how grim things are getting here in Thessaloniki, the long lines of taxis waiting at ranks for customers to turn up even in the middle of the day when up till recently getting a cab was next to impossible. Or perhaps its the accents of wandering street vendors who are now more likely to be people from the city than some recently arrived immigrant from West Africa or a member of Greece's Rom community. The city centre has become a near ghost town on week nights, a mere shadow of its former, vibrant self with cafes uncharacteristically quiet and empty streets, this in a place that prided itself on 4am traffic jams.

He also links to this post about Latvia and its "internal devaluation" (a process bluntly described by Paul Krugman here)

Anyway, the essential thrust of the concept is that a country in a fixed exchange rate regime can still manage its relative competitiveness by reducing its labour costs through fiscal measures. For example, a country could finance a decrease in payroll taxes through increased income taxes. Such a shift reduces real labour costs and therefore increases the competitiveness of exports - while also being budget neutral and reducing consumer demand in that country. In theory, it therefore achieves a similar outcome as a currency devaluation...

In Latvia's circumstances, it seems that the term has departed somewhat from its original meaning. The IMF sponsored plan calls for 20% cuts in public sector wages, 20% cuts in pensions, an increase in VAT from 21% to 23%, rises in the average effective rate of personal income tax etc... There isn't much focus on labour productivity or unit costs. It's simply reduce the budget deficit at all costs.

And now there's Italy ... and so on and so on. And this is just the beginning of what promises to be a major European deflation in response to the public deficits that have rocketed and not just through 'profligacy'. As Edward Hugh notes, "another significant part of rising state indebtedness comes from having recently bailed out a significant chunk of the private sector".

I don't have the expertise to comment on the economics of this policy, other than to express a sense of unease and anger at the social cost. I certainly wonder if this is the wisest way to tackle the crisis. Treating this as a budgetary problem rather than a human one, other than by the routine expression of a sense of regret at the resultant 'pain' from people who will not feel it themselves, means that there is a danger of seeing the policy as somehow socially neutral, not having profound, and mainly unintended, political consequences. The historical precedents are certainly not encouraging, though economies and democratic societies are stronger than they were in the 1930s. Yet what is coming from the mainstream left? Nothing; no challenge to orthodoxy can be heard, no heretical voices. And this intellectual vacuum is the most worrying aspect of all about an economic crisis that is far from over.

Don't mention the Euro

Despite the successful vote in the German Parliament, some Germans are still peevish about the Greek bailout.

Cabaret artists have been making jokes about wheelbarrows of notes, or telling the one about the German and the Greek who go out to eat, the German choosing the cheapest item on the menu, the Greek gorging on a range of dishes, before the waiter brings the German the bill at the end. The audience doubles over.

But Stephanie Flanders raises a very salient point:

Whenever Germany tells you how much the Greeks are costing them, remember this: German exports to Greece have risen by 133% since the single currency started. Greek exports to Germany have risen by 13%. The resulting trade gap between the two countries is one reason why German banks are now sitting on so much Greek debt.

So maybe this is the time for a lesson in careful diplomacy.

Reasons to be cheerless

John Harris fingers the tone of the leadership debate in the newly defeated Labour Party.

You hear it in the pronouncements of the supposed leading candidates, and in anxious chatter around Westminster. The C2s – skilled manual workers, whose loyalties play a crucial role in so many marginals – have deserted Labour in droves, particularly men. Their key complaints are about supposed welfare malingerers, and new arrivals from abroad; and this is where Labour must focus that time-honoured ritual known as "listening and learning". So it is that the future of centre-left politics occasionally threatens to come down to kicking the dispossessed, and parroting the early summer's big Labour mantra: immigration, immigration, immigration.

He is pointing to a threat that the route to electoral recovery will be sought through pandering to a patronising and fictional vision of the atavistic instincts of a mythical white working class. He continues,

And on these most fundamental of issues, Labour's danger is not that long-imagined lurch to the left, but an ugly and reactionary step in the opposite direction.

I hope he's wrong.

Scepticism and denial

New Scientist has a special issue out about what Debora MacKenzie describes as, "denialism, the systematic rejection of a body of science in favour of make-believe". Though MacKenzie, whose piece is called "Why sensible people reject the truth", does talk about the role of vested interests in spreading misinformation, she tries to take a generous view of deniers:

Here's a hypothesis: denial is largely a product of the way normal people think. Most denialists are simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right. If this seems discouraging, take heart. There are good reasons for thinking that denialism can be tackled by condemning it a little less and understanding it a little more.

Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism.

Amongst the rest, Jim Giles points out the infectious qualities of a lie when presented to such an audience and Richard Littlemore writes about the corporate interests that benefit from denial.

At the heart of the phenomenon is the breakdown of trust, "suspicious thinking", something that is more pervasive than you might think. It is at the heart of the urbane cynicism, which is now a media requirement for interviewing politicians, something that has stifled any attempt at honest expression of anything other than the approved line. It has led the assault on public sector workers accused of being only concerned with 'producer interests', rather than the welfare of their 'customers', leading to a battery of targets and performance indicators as a way of controlling the brutes. It is also central to the idea of politics as nothing more than a vehicle for naked self-interest.

None of this is to deny the importance of evidence-based scepticism, but that requires work, research and the willingness to admit that you have been talking complete bollocks for the past twenty years (in my case actually teaching it) without too much embarrassment. That isn't easy. And sometimes we do have to take things on trust and, on many occasions, we will be right to do so.

Via

The mysterious case of the missing defence

Some astute readers may have spotted the absence of references to Swinton Rugby League Club in this blog this season. There is a reason. The pain is too great and I seem to have missed every game we have won. Tonight there was a bonus. Having been soundly thrashed by Halifax in the previous round, it was discovered that Halifax had fielded an ineligible player. Halifax were disqualified and Swinton went through to play for a place in the quarter finals this evening and were soundly thrashed by Batley. 6 -58.* And it was one of the better performances of a season where the defence has disappeared. Unless some miracles happen, don't expect too many other posts.

*BBC got the score wrong.

Famous first words

Norm has linked to a piece about the first sentence of novels and it reminded me of an interview I heard on the radio many years ago with Joseph Heller, author of the wonderful Catch 22. He said that all he had in his mind when he started a novel was the first line, everything followed from that.

There was one line that frustrated him though. He liked it, but could never develop a novel from it. The line?

"God's wife never thought it was a good idea".

Something of the night

As the newly conjoined twins of the establishment get to work, there may be wailing and gnashing of teeth in many quarters, yet some liberal voices are raised in, at least, qualified hope. I would expect Henry Porter to be rejoicing but Anthony Barnett?

Barnett thinks that the coalition has given Cameron the opportunity to abandon Thatcherism and return to one-nation conservatism.

"One way of describing it, uncomfortable as it may be for me to report, is that the transition from New Labour to a Tory led coalition promises a distinctly more progressive government in the UK. If indeed the Coalition agreement is carried out, then the new government will be to the left of its predecessor by being:

* tougher on the bankers
* more focused on helping the very poor
* more democratic
* ending New Labour’s assault on liberty
* Europeanising Westminster politics
* implementing greener policies
* reintroducing cabinet government "

There's that horrid and increasingly meaningless word "progressive" again, but hang on a second. Most of this is about governance and the role of the state. Thatcherism was essentially a type of political economy, not a theory of the state. State centralisation was the by-product of corporate-led marketisation combined with a notion of human behaviour that understood it as a reaction to the crude stimuli of enlightened self-interest. Thatcher was part of the neo-liberal intellectual revolution that broke the old social democratic consensus. This is the source of most of the mainstream assumptions about the workings of the modern economy. I don't see much of a challenge to economic orthodoxy coming from George Osborne's treasury. And let's not forget that Orange Book Liberals were fully signed up members of the neo-liberal club.

The doctrine isn't in the best of health, having taken a bit of a battering in the credit crunch. It may not be alive and kicking, but it is certainly undead. It is currently stalking the corridors of the IMF waiting to suck the blood from vulnerable, unsuspecting countries with nice weather, whilst here it is about to launch two years of unprecedented public spending cuts.

Surely the Labour Party will spend its time in opposition sharpening the stakes that would send Thatcherism to a dusty, eternal oblivion. However, listening to the platitudes of the leadership contest (do politicians really think in clichés as well as speak them?), I am not hopeful.

In the meantime we are promised six billion pounds of magic cuts this year, cuts that we are promised will miraculously not affect 'front-line services', though god knows what they will do to front-line staff. Contemplating this, I can only paraphrase Wordsworth:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be retired.

Escapism

I watched the DVD of Looking for Eric tonight. Entertaining enough, it is a sentimental feel-good film where virtue triumphs over evil and lost love is restored. And after watching it, I felt good. Ken Loach's films usually capture the little heroisms of working class life, this was closer to Hollywood heroism, a fantasy.

Then, of course, there was Eric - Eric Cantona. I have seen many of the best footballers of my generation play live; George Best obviously, less well-remembered ones like Johnny Haynes and once, as part of a friendly tour by Santos, Pelé. Pelé was incomparably the finest, but Eric was something else. He was my boyhood hero.

OK I was forty when he signed for United, but I think I had a second boyhood instead of a mid-life crisis. It was not just that Eric was a wonderful player and a catalyst for all that has followed over the subsequent eighteen years, I was hooked by Eric the person. He played with a sense of melodrama, with pride and poise. And he was one of the players who expressed himself through his football; you were always watching Cantona the person, not merely the player. And he certainly was not the stereotypical footballer.

So I wallowed in the warm bath of nostalgia, unable to escape the feeling that this too was Ken Loach's excuse for making the film, which ended with my favourite moment of Cantona's career.



Magnificent.

After the election

The papers turn to weightier matters.

First steps on the death spiral

David Blanchflower punctures the excruciating media enthusiasm for the new government.

"Anybody who is going to start cutting in that position is basically going to push us in that death spiral. That's what we've avoided until this date.

We need to stimulating growth, not withdrawing multiple billions out of the system."

"This is a scary day for the unemployed."

UPDATE
(I have just spotted that the video subtitle mistakenly calls him Danny Blanchflower. Those of us of a certain age will know that Danny wasn't an economist.)
Oops. It's his nickname. See comments by John.

A new era

Change is with us. This principled new government, dedicated to serving the national interest at a time of peril, has released its new anthem.



Thanks to Julie

A chill wind

It's unseasonably cold tonight with a threat of frost. I blame the government.

Oh well

At least we will have a government that I am supposed to hate.

Keeping things in proportion

Shuggy wavers between agnosticism and heresy over proportional representation and has prompted me to do something I never intended to do, comment on the election ... well the one in 1951 anyway.

This is because he starts by asking a straightforward and pertinent question; "Why, for example, has this election 'discredited' FPTP more than the last one"? The simple answer is that it hasn't, it is just that the media are more interested and the Labour Party have started to think, once again, that PR might just be in their interests. I do support electoral reform, though, for me, the election that discredited the current system took place a year before I was born, in 1951.

I have lost count of all the fatuous arguments I have seen about the reason for Labour's defeat. The simple answer is that it was the electoral system. 1951 was their best ever result, the largest share of the vote any party has achieved since the Second World War and a popular endorsement of Attlee's government, despite the election being held, unnecessarily, in difficult times. And Labour comfortably lost, in the nearest thing to a straight two-party contest we have seen, to a Tory Party that polled fewer votes. The Conservatives then got the political benefit of the post-war boom. It was a critical turning point.

Actually, the current clamour for PR is nothing new. In 1917, the Speaker's Conference on Electoral Reform unanimously recommended the adoption of the Single Transferable Vote to accompany the enfranchisement of women and universal suffrage. Subsequent attempts at legislation then became tied up in a dispute about whether to adopt STV or the Alternative Vote and I have a sense that history may well be about to repeat itself. Eventually, during another period of three party politics and minority governments, a Bill to adopt the Alternative Vote was introduced by Labour, passed through Parliament, but fell with the government when MacDonald broke his own party by forming a coalition National Government with the Tories in 1931.

So why PR? Shuggy makes a perfectly reasonable point about its limitations when he says that proportional systems tend to result in a situation where "the guy who came third gets to decide who comes first". My only answer is to point out that this is a likely, but not a necessary, outcome of a proportional system, though it certainly would be the case in most elections. What concerns me is that there is, to my mind, an even bigger democratic problem with the current system and it isn't about disenfranchisement, wasted votes, or even fairness. It is all about the representation of collective interests.

OK, under PR the make up of a government is decided by deals with minority parties, but under the current system winning a majority in Parliament depends on gaining the votes of a very small group indeed, new and swing voters in marginal constituencies. No one else really matters. And what studies show is that these people tend to be affluent, apolitical, conservative with a small 'c' and very middle class. If you don't win their support you lose. To get their votes, parties pander to their self-interest. As for the working class and for the poor? Their votes don't matter, their abstentions don't matter and so, neither do they. The current system is a neat method of political exclusion.

And so the best the poor can expect is for something like New Labour that appeals to the prejudices of the Daily Mail, whilst surreptitiously throwing a few crumbs at the lower orders hoping that their new friends don't notice. Interestingly, the Tories got this wrong by being too overtly nasty. Labour understood this perfectly by offering, to use the repulsive Clintonite phrase, 'tough love'. These voters have their self-image to preserve and Cameron's strategy was solely about being cuddly enough to make it seem acceptable to vote Conservative.

PR offers a chance to break this dismal stranglehold. However, anyone thinking that it ushers in a new era or a revolutionary new politics is wrong. There is another battle to be fought, the one for democratic choice. A politics dominated by an intellectual neo-liberal hegemony will remain a choice between lesser evils, whatever system is used. And if you want to see the raw impact of neo-liberalism, even in prosperous Europe, look at Greece.

Reading list

The newspapers' coverage of the real crisis in Greece is far better than the endless speculation engendered by the general election result. Here are a few good links:

Larry Elliott explains simply why "This Greek bailout is not a recovery plan – it is an economic death spiral" and follows it up with a longer article here.

Joseph Stiglitz writes with urgency of the need to reform the Euro or, if that is not possible, "to admit failure and move on than to extract a high price in unemployment and human suffering in the name of a flawed economic model".

Helena Smith adds her knowledgeable personal take on the "Greek spirit of resistance".

Whilst Ruth Sunderland writes about the control of market speculators.

Spam

I have just got a spam email from someone in America wanting me to promote healthy eating.

OK, today I cooked my own pork scratchings. Delicious. I got the recipe in two parts here and here. It works.

Yum, yum.

τι να κάνουμε;

Which means, 'what can we do'? It is a stock phrase of resignation, usually delivered with a shrug or a wry smile. George Irvin thinks that the Greeks can do something though, something different.

In truth, Greece does have an alternative. Instead of submitting to the ferocious and pro-cyclical conditionality imposed by Germany and the IMF – cutting its budget deficit by 11% over three years in return for a €120bn (£104bn) loan – it could follow Argentina's example in 2001-02, and default on the bulk of its sovereign debt. This would mean abandoning the euro, introducing a "new drachma" and probably devaluing by 50% or more.

I think they should, I don't think they will.

Crime and punishment

Arriving back in the UK, the Greek financial crisis is fresh in my mind and entirely absent from the election campaign. It should not be. The consequences may well be profound for the whole European Union. Mind you, at the moment, you would be hard put to find any politicians prepared to admit that the economics situation is anything other than 'business as usual'.

Most of the press coverage of Greece has been irritating. The bedrock of commonplace analysis is an atavistic view of Greeks as picturesque foreigners in the grip of Mediterranean vices. The reality of corruption and the monstrous bureaucratic inefficiency of the state are undisputed, not least by the Greeks themselves who frequently despair of them. So too is the habit of tax avoidance. After all, the justifications go, why give money to the state when it will simply be stolen? The crisis is real and home-grown. But amidst all the talk of 'lavish' pensions, 'ghost workers' and state jobs for life, where is the coverage of the low wages, the rocketing cost of living, growing poverty, and of the endemic insecurity that provokes people to fight back in defence of their rights?

This lack of respect for Greece makes it easy to indulge in the language of austerity. The government is told to make ever deeper cuts, accept severe and 'painful' measures and make profound sacrifices in return for financial rescue, despite the importance of keeping Greece afloat to the whole European Union. Greeks are to be punished for their sins.

Surely something is missing from this discourse? What has happened to the concept of 'social Europe'? Where is there talk of investing in Greece? Where is the support for the ordinary people whose livelihoods and businesses will be devastated by these measures? Where is the help for the Greek government in reforming and restructuring the state? What about the search for ways to control the markets to prevent speculative attacks on countries? Why are we not talking of investment and reconstruction, avoiding rather than provoking recession and the creation of strong welfare states? Here, in a microcosm, is the crisis of European social democracy, a crisis that is reflected in our own election campaign.

In Britain too, the language is punitive. Calls for vengeance against those who brought us so low are commonplace and plastered on billboards across the country. Bankers? Good god no. Benefit 'cheats' are the villains of the day. (And for a depiction of reality read this excellent article by David Conn, breaking away from his usual beat of football finance).

My pre-election reading is a fine book about the politics of Gordon Brown by one of my old mates from Hull, Simon Lee. It is a little unnerving to read such a serious book by someone you have seen leaping around a football ground like a demented lunatic making gestures at Arsenal supporters, but it is an intelligent analysis for all that. Simon may not have the stylistic flair of the more celebrated Andrew Rawnsley, nor does he deal with any of the gossip about Brown's personality, instead he treats Brown as a substantial political figure, attracted to an insubstantial model of political economy.

Simon charts Brown's intellectual journey from supply-side socialism to supply-side liberalism and his attempt to implement it through a centralised, technocratic model of governance. This meant the acceptance of a neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. And when that orthodoxy failed, what then was there to replace it?

This is the nub of the lack of substance of much of the current election campaign, the absence of alternative political economies. This should be the historic role of the Labour Party. It was created and sustained to act as an advocate of democratic socialism or social democracy, the advancement of collective goals within a capitalist economy and liberal democratic polity. Instead, we have a neo-liberal consensus with differences at the margins between the competing parties. I am not naïve enough to suggest that those differences do not matter. They do, they are real and they will determine how I vote. However, without a choice between coherent and realistic alternative philosophies elections can be reduced to political beauty contests and in one of those, with its decidedly unattractive leadership, Labour is at a disadvantage.

Simon Lee depicts what he sees as the main flaws in the political economy and democratic practice of New Labour and sees them as the platform for the rise of a neo-Thatcherite Conservative Party. I don't think that any of us thought that the Labour Party could be outflanked by a party that is actually supposed to embody Liberalism; the Liberal Democrats. But then, by being unable to offer a social democratic alternative to neo-liberalism, Labour's position was open to challenge by anyone credible describing themselves as 'progressive'.

The one thing that the Liberal Democrat surge has done is to open debates about the nature of British democracy; it has done nothing to question the prevailing economic orthodoxy. This process should form the basis of Labour renewal. I was hoping for it as a consequence of the victory of 1997. Perhaps now it will be the result of the defeat of 2010.

A tale of two cultures

I left Pelion very early on Wednesday, getting the bus from Volos at five o'clock in the morning. There was a full moon looking down on a calm sea, giving the water an extraordinary luminescence. I travelled up the peninsula to Volos in Yeorgos's taxi. Two pine martens crossed the road, looking over their shoulders at the headlights of the Mercedes, reflecting the beam back from their eyes. And so I left behind a village culture, difficult and warm in equal measure. I abandoned the need to struggle with my appalling grasp of the Greek language and passed the hospital where my friend was mounting a spirited fightback against a sudden illness. It is a hard place to leave.

As the bus reached Athens the driver cursed his way through the appalling traffic and the courageous and foolhardy driving of those trying to beat it, before reaching the narrow streets where the bus station sits and from where the express airport bus departs. Then there was the tedium of air travel enlivened by excited conversations about the long delays due to the volcano and someone recounting the tale of a Yorkshire fair with an entertainment that featured a man with exploding testicles.

So it was back to Manchester, a host of everyday hassles and the sixties night in my local pub when the landlord's band plays. They enjoy every minute of it. They have been playing cover versions of sixties classics since around the sixties and the audience is made up of people mainly in their sixties. Ageing women jived over the Victorian tiles by the bar. It was lovely in its own way.

And so there I was - two very different, and flawed, cultures. I love them both and I was born into neither. One day I will have to choose and I know what the choice will be. For now, I have the pleasure of both, though I long to be back in Greece and will return shortly. I am a very lucky man.

The blame game

My mind wanders to trivial matters today as I prepare to return to the UK for a marking marathon.

Hull City's Premiership days are over and their finances are a compete mess. Dutch midfielder, George Boateng, has no doubt who is to blame.

George Boateng: Phil Brown to blame for Hull City's relegation

This sounds familiar. Ah yes, last year.

Brown is reason Hull stayed up, insists Boateng

Memory is obviously not his strong point.

Life and debt

It has been a difficult few days here in Greece with a very good friend of mine suddenly becoming ill and being taken to hospital for an operation. The treatment was excellent despite the desperate shortage of staff and the signs on the wall saying, 'the doctor who is treating you has not been paid for three months'. Such is the Greek financial crisis.

Today, with the IMF bailout being agreed, I read this endorsement of economic orthodoxy:

Over the weekend, French and German leaders turned the screws on Greece, insisting that the €45bn international bailout would not go ahead without further austerity measures to slash the country's ballooning budget deficit.

And I couldn't help thinking that a people are about to be sacrificed in order to save a currency.

Spot the difference

The amount paid in bonuses to City workers is forecast to rise to £6.8bn this year, up from £6bn in 2009, according to figures published today.

IMF officials have already signalled that the ruling socialists will have to toughen their budget-reduction policies with more cuts and increased tax revenue, in addition to the €4.8bn worth of painful austerity measures already taken this year... The average Greek has suffered a 30% drop in income since the measures were announced.

As the old music hall song goes:

It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor what gets the blame.
It's the rich what gets the pleasure.
Ain't it all a bleedin' shame?

Pluck

Us Brits know how to behave in a crisis. No panicking, just stern-faced resolution in the face of peril. The Dunkirk spirit sees us through. Faced with the prospect of extended stays in hotels in warm climates paid for by airlines or insurance companies we know what to do. No five-star Stalag can hold us, we use every means at our disposal to flock to Calais to queue for many hours to get on a ferry back to dear old Blighty. The BBC News web site has been posting videos of stiff-lipped heroes arriving in the Northern French port. The most intrepid got there after a four-day coach trip filled with derring-do from Malta. And now they are a short sea crossing away from those magical White Cliffs.

Meanwhile, Malta International Airport has announced that there were no flight cancellations today and 66 extra flights had been laid on to clear the backlog of passengers.

For no reason

Exile and return

Having a volcanic ash prolonged break has cut me off from a daily diet of election coverage. I only see it when I sneak a glimpse on the Internet. Lucky me, except when I do get back to Britain it will be like the awakening of Rip van Winkle. I went away with a vague awareness of the insignificant leader of a minority party called Nick Somebody-or-the-other, and will come back to headlines like this. Presumably this is all because of the curious introduction of the X Factor for party leaders, to my mind an anomaly for a parliamentary election in a representative democracy. It has certainly spawned some hysterical commentary.

The latest to go mad is Fay Weldon who combines a frisson of excitement at at the multi-lingual and "good looking" Clegg with a bleak dystopian picture of Britain under New Labour.

Common sense? Generosity? Forget it: "heathy (sic) and safety" rules. (It's the "lite" version now, but "health' and 'safety" are words that sound uncomfortable in the mouths of governments: Le Comité de Salut Public – guillotines, Sicherheitdienst – Gestapo, Staatssicherheit – Stasi).

Ah. Health and safety is the same as public execution and private torture then? Neither seem particularly safe or good for one's health to me. I gather it is nothing to do with this - or this - or even this?

Oh well, April 28th is the International Labour Organisation's World Day for Safety and Heath at Work. Perhaps it could be a point when campaigners could recover the term from tabloid tales and the scorn of the literati. But then again, such useful mythology is rarely discarded, even if the protection of real lives may be an election winner against the spectre of red tape.

So, on the whole, I am happy to be here, dozing in a Greek spring, and I can't help thinking to myself on occasions, "blow volcano, blow".

Did the earth move for you too?

The evil absurdity of theocracy is on full display again.

Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes

At the same time, its sinister side shows itself with more threats being made against the film maker Maziar Bahari, even though an international campaign led to his release from prison. His campaign on behalf of others continues here.

Citizen journalism

As I am caught up in a major international crisis I thought I would try this live blogging lark.

Check NATS web site - no change to cloud
Go and sit outside
Check web site again - air space still closed
Have lunch
Check airline web site - flight still operational
Pour glass of retsina
Check web site again - flight cancelled
Pour another glass of retsina
Reschedule flight
Sit outside again
Recheck NATS web site - no change to cloud
Go to taverna - drink a kilo of retsina
Check web site - air space closure extended
Pour glass of tsipouro
Check web site - no change
Go to bed ...

Cor. Exciting isn't it?

666

Holiday reading

It's a genre. Unable to turn my mind to anything significant when I am out here, I often dip into the sort of travel books that are all you seem to find about Greece. They are mostly the same. How I bought this amazing place, how difficult it was to do the repairs employing the colourful locals and my, oh so hilarious, silly mistakes, all enlivened with a faintly patronising view of Greek culture as a source of amusement. I know all the faults, and yet I still can't stop myself reading them.

This visit has been much more practical, learning how to use a chainsaw, amongst other things, and cooking. Yes, lots of cooking, plenty of eating and luxuriating in the one-and-a-half-litre plastic bottles of local Retsina for two Euros (and yes Mike it is nice - really, really nice). This turned my mind to the best thing that I have ever read about the Mediterranean diet; beautifully praised here, in yet another of those books, though one of the better ones.

Here I should make the distinction between the Mediterranean Diet, which is an invention of Californian hypochondriacs, and the Mediterranean diet, which keeps Mediterraneans alive into their nineties. The real Mediterranean diet consists of a cup of strong black coffee in the morning, a quarter of a pound of cheese and a couple of beers for elevenses, stews or a fry-up for lunch with eggs and chips and cheese, more meat and cheese at night and the odd cheese pie during the day when you feel peckish. Plenty of salad but also plenty of fried vegetables, a litre or so of wine, a few beers and a couple of ouzos along with whisky when you can get it. And don't forget a couple of packs of cigarettes a day.

No fags for me, though it's not too far off the mark, and the tsipouro is now about to slip down nicely.

Things to do

...instead of reading pointless election guff,

plant a tree,



cut firewood,



or just enjoy the cherry blossom whilst ignoring the crisis.



Then again, maybe the cat has the best idea.

Catching up

In some ways the Easter celebrations in Greece are a suitable metaphor for the Greek spring. In England, the new season seems to wake up with a smoker's cough and takes two or three cups of coffee to get going. Here, spring leaps out of bed with enthusiasm in an explosion of colour. The sun wakes up plants and wildlife. The air is filled with birdsong and the buzzing of insects, especially the bees from all the hives that are kept nearby. And the nightingales have arrived. Unlike the summer, when a hot sun means siesta, at this time of year it gets people going and the sounds of strimmers and chainsaws are everywhere, set to the backdrop of young men showing off on their motorbikes.

Easter has the same feel to it, it is the most important festival in Greece. The weekend starts with a doleful procession on Good Friday, whilst people fast in the local restuarants by eating vast quantities of luxurious and expensive seafood. Then, at midnight on Saturday, the resurrection is declared and firecrackers and thunderflashes are let off; I like the ones that are dropped down the drains, giving a loud, hollow clang. The fast is broken and the meat eating begins. Sunday is the time for whole roast lamb on the spit and noisy outdoor partying. With all that food the hangover is not prodigious, but the brain is vacant, especially as I found a litre plastic bottle of the local tsipouro desperate to be liberated from our host's kitchen.

For the last two days the weather cooled as if it had sympathy for everyone's need for a rest from over indulgence. The sun is still warm and the days bright and so, earlier today, it was perfect to walk up the old donkey path to the village of Lafkos, a steady climb with stunning views.















A profusion of wild flowers.


And the chapel by the spring half way up.















Despite being a night person, I will take the early morning exuberance of the Greek spring any day. It is the nearest you can get to perfection.

Easter greetings

After finding a shop that sold one and a half litre bottles of absolutely delicious Retsina for two Euros each, the resurrection was particularly gratifying tonight.

Catholic tastes

With the stream of revelations of abuse pouring out of the Catholic Church, this one from Brazil is my favourite so far, a little thought sprung to mind. The reason why Tory politician Ann Widdecombe converted to Catholicism from the Church of England was the Anglican Church's ordination of women priests. Good call Ann ...

Spring

Just gloating really.

Mentioning Greece

Why not? I am here. After a brush with a skilled pickpocket at the bus station in Athens and a visit to the cash point in Volos, I arrived back to a warm welcome from an old friend who will do anything for a bowl of condensed milk.

Maybe I will have some profound thoughts on the world sometime, but then again, maybe not.

Hull, hell and back again

Channel 4 News, the irritating daily showcase for Jon Snow's hideous socks, came from Hull on Monday night. The report was all about how the recession was being felt most amongst working class communities. I had no problem with the theme, it is something that should be hammered home, together with the destruction of manufacturing as a by-product of the bankers' folly. But why do they always choose Hull? It seems that it is an off-the-peg symbol of deprivation for lazy researchers.

I was there again last night, seeing old friends and drinking too much. A great place; lovely people (and Karen only mentioned her trip to Barcelona last year twice). I hate seeing it depicted as the epitome of misery. Yes it is a bit different, yes it is a working class city, and certainly it is not affluent. But what sums it up was a research project being undertaken by a colleague at the University a few years ago on enhancing social capital on Hull's estates. She gave up. Why? As she said, 'There is loads of social capital there. They help each other the whole time, look after each other's kids, support their extended families. It is built into their way of life. It's the East Riding suburbs where there is none. We need teams of volunteers from the estates to teach the people in the suburbs how to do it."

It was a lovely way of turning the question around. Of course the obvious point is that with money you have less need of self-help, however it does illustrate, even amongst the most well-meaning of people, the attitude of condescension to the poor and to cities like Hull. Still feeling the warmth of the welcome, I am more convinced than ever that Hull need celebrating, not denigrating. We should be investing in the city, not out of pity, but because it is a simple act of justice towards wonderful, resourceful people who do not deserve to be abandoned at times of economic hardship.

As far as I am concerned, I was lucky to have been able to live and work there for nearly fourteen years and particularly so in the friends I made. It is a great place, a smashing place to live and I shall remember with fondness the sound of the fog horns from the ships on the Humber, even as I sit on a sun kissed patio in Greece.

The reality of the surreal

That a people gets the government it deserves is an odious lie. At times of great difficulty simple people, who are not damaged by the «habit of giving orders» don't react in a dog eats dog way, they extend a helping hand. The further a person is away from power, the better he is.

This from an extraordinary piece on the absurdity, abuse of power and endemic corruption of the Russian state and economy, Kafka's Castle is Collapsing, by Andrei Loshak. It is worth reading in full.

The saying «We have been put on earth to make Kafka come true» has been well known since Soviet times. We have been so steeped in absurdity since childhood that we haven't even learnt to distinguish any of the rules that regulate it. We are on the other side of the looking glass but somehow manage to function, work out what moves to make and make careers for ourselves.

He continues ...

Corruption is irrational: its very existence is fatal for a state. This makes it an ideal accompaniment to the realm of the absurd, its operating system. You don't have to understand how it works, but it is has a very convenient function which any idiot can grasp. Press the button and you get a result.

The stories he tells, from Ikea's culture shock to murders in a supermarket, graphically illustrate this world. Yet, he is also certain of change,

I think that society has lost its fear: the people perceive the government's inability to keep control of itself as a sign of weakness. Such a state cannot have enough strength for repression. The animal nips of the enraged system have woken people from their hypnosis. Fear and apathy have been replaced by rage.

And, right on cue ...

Publicity

The best way to get free publicity for a book is to say something wildly unlikely about Hitler in it. The latest is Hitler's plans for cricket. Yes, cricket. He wanted a few changes though. He apparently found pads to be “unmanly and un-German”.

The book is called Unreliable Sources. Quite.

Via

Losing one's reason

Norm picks up on this article by Peter Scott, who argues that the real function of Higher Education is the enhancement of democracy. Norm doesn't demur, but he also mounts a defence of learning for its own sake (though without any "farting around"). I am with Norm on this (though I rather approve of farting around, which is why I am writing this blog post instead of getting on with my marking) and I also agree with Scott's general sentiments. However, I have always had my doubts about the education for democracy line.

Having worked with Scott on the Executive Committee of UALL (The Universities Association for Lifelong Learning), which he chaired, I have a lot of time for him. I also recognise where the argument is coming from. It is one of the long-standing justifications for university adult education. The trouble is that, to me, there always seemed something condescending about it. In the old extra-mural days it was all about non-accredited courses for the working classes (or teaching the lower orders the virtues of voting for nice people like us without giving them the qualifications that would enable them to take our jobs), today it is about citizenship in an agenda that is redolent of social control rather than self-determination. I may be unduly and unjustly cynical, but something baulks when I read a statement like this:

Higher education is no longer about elites but about citizens – because going to college is a quasi-compulsory precondition for full participation in our society, the gateway into Middle England.

Can you not participate without a degree? Are the sixty percent of people who do not go to university somehow unfitted for democracy? Is politics solely about that mythical beast, 'Middle England'? I know what he means and I am fully with his sentiments on the importance of opening up and expanding Higher Education, of seeing it as a right rather than a privilege. And I know, given his commitment, that includes adult education programmes as well as formal full-time degrees. It is just that us educators seem to end up in contortions and contradictions whenever we try to justify the existence of something that is a self-evident good.

There is a lovely little story in Patricia Storage's travelogue about Greece, Dinner with Persephone. She tries to open a bank account in Athens in a branch of an American bank. She gives her references to the bank clerk who takes them away to her supervisor.

When she returns, she says, "We open accounts in dollars under the following conditions: You must deposit at least fifty thousand dollars in the account. Or you must be of Greek descent. I am puzzled ... and ask the reason for these unexpected conditions. She says certainly, she will ask her supervisor, and after a conference with him she returns. "There is no reason", she says.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could give that response to agonising questions as to what higher education is for? It is self-evidently good, a natural human activity and people like to be able to do it. It obviously does serve purposes, but they are many and complex. Let's think about how to do it well, how to open it to as many people as possible, but not have to constantly justify why it is important that it is done. It is many years since Philosophical Radicals roamed the Earth, shouldn't it be time to give the need for utilitarian justifications a rest?

Economics

I would like to congratulate the people of considerable talent who have so selflessly and ably led higher education in this country for finally receiving the rewards to which I am sure that they think that they are fully entitled.

On another matter, Larry Elliott writes of the current Eurozone policy - "stabilisation through recession, imposing huge costs on working people" (not just confined to the Eurozone either).

Somewhat of a contrast methinks.

Fighting back

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

Bakunin 1872.

From Manchester to Manolis

Doomed

The future of libraries is still being debated - like this:

"... move with the times to stay part of the times"

"... the citizen-focused services I think should be on offer"

"Libraries can't go on being merely traditional"

"...if she's ever stuck for an idea on how to run libraries, she visits Tesco"

"It's about moving from a service-driven economy to one that is about experiential learning"

"... sleepwalking into the era of the iPhone, the ebook and the Xbox without a strategy"

Books? Reading? Oh dear. How traditional, how contemptibly, merely traditional. It is obvious. We need a strategy. Another bloody strategy.

Doomed.

Geography

Light posting here at the moment as I am doing some other work, apologies. However, this piece from Eurozine by Timothy Snyder caught my eye. His argument is that by concentrating on those symbolic centres of mass murder, Auschwitz and the Gulag, we distort our historical understanding of the central horrors of the Twentieth Century.

The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical centre of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia ...

The geographic, moral, and political centre of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s.

Given the politicisation of history, this matters (see also this earlier post of mine). Snyder comments:

Exaggerated Russian claims about numbers of deaths treat Belarus and Ukraine as Russia, and Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians as Russians: this amounts to an imperialism of martyrdom, implicitly claiming territory by explicitly claiming victims.

But what strikes me most of all is the numbers, the sheer scale of the savagery. "Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at (Treblinka, Bełzec, and Sobibor), about 780,863 at Treblinka alone". "In the guise of anti-partisan actions, the Germans killed perhaps three quarters of a million people, about 350,000 in Belarus alone". "It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-1933 ... By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died". "In an operation aimed at ethnic Poles who were Soviet citizens, for example, 111,091 people were shot. Of the 681,692 executions carried out for alleged political crimes in 1937 and 1938, the kulak operation and the national operations accounted for 633,955."

And this is as nothing compared to the intentions,

Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941-1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

These figures are seemingly incredible, beyond comprehension, yet Snyder also argues that there was a twisted rationality behind all these deaths, a perceived and sufficiently plausible economic motive for mass murder to enable such plans to be carried out. And so the article is also a warning:

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

An ethical commitment. It seems almost an impossibility against this backdrop. Yet even in the bleakest times, people cling to hope and resist in whatever way they can. The efforts of ordinary people to work, both together and as individuals, to preserve such an ethic in the face of organised mass murder and violent suppression is the other side of the historical coin. So this example - Unsung Heroes - from Afghanistan (via Terry Glavin) made especially heartening reading, a clear example of the type of independent, popular action celebrated by the late Colin Ward, without which we could never even dream of saying, 'never again'.

It was all about oil

Altrincham. I hadn't been there in thirty years, other than a couple of times when the ill-fated Trafford Borough Rugby League club played at the football ground. It is border country, where Manchester's suburbs meets posh Cheshire, not quite one or the other.

Many years ago, I used to live not far from there. I drove past old haunts; the dole office where I used to sign on is now a large wine store; the shopping streets surrounded by new supermarkets seemed a little more down at heel; the pub where the banjo band played every Friday night is, miraculously these days, still open. And all the memories of choices made, of chances taken and missed, of the events that led my young self to be who I am now, accompanied my steps to my holy grail. The market where I would find oil - olive oil - Greek olive oil. It always has to be Greek.

I had found the seller on the internet. I wasn't disappointed. The oil is beautiful stuff imported direct from a small grower in the Pelopponese, sold by an Englishman who has spent a long time in Greece and has fitted in far too well.

I love cooking Greek food, much of the flavour is down to the quality of the ingredients and the oil is essential. So what shall I make ...

Intimations of mortality

The death of Michael Foot has been announced. Yet another iconic figure from my youth has gone. There will be the usual guff about it also marking the death of the old left and a reprise of all the clichés about the 1983 Labour Manifesto and his dress sense. He wasn't a good leader of the Labour Party, though his job was absolutely impossible. He was from the Bevanite left, and was caught between Bennites and the determined political adventurism of some on the right, who split the party by forming the SDP. However, I always felt that he was a substantial and interesting figure and here are just three reasons why I think that he should be appreciated.

First, there is his peace activism. It is not quite as it would seem. Founder member of CND he may have been, but Foot was no pacifist. He started as an anti-appeaser, co author of The Guilty Men, and would support the Falklands War. His peace politics was rooted in anti-fascism.

Secondly, unlike many, I never found him a compelling speaker, but what a beautiful writer he was. He was a literate and literary politician. When you look at the tortured, banal and jargon-ridden vacuity of contemporary political discourse there is much to regret about his passing.

Finally, and this is personal, without Michael Foot's consistent advocacy, I may never have read his literary hero, William Hazlitt. Everyone should read Hazlitt.

Awesome

The BBC News web site posts new, true colour images of the Earth from NASA.

In the interests of balance, here is another view.

Pets on Earth

Who says that without religion there is no compassion nor any morality? Here atheists selflessly offer their service to the religious for only a modest fee, given the burden of responsibility involved.

You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved. But when the Rapture comes what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

We are a group of dedicated animal lovers, and atheists. Each Eternal Earth-Bound Pet representative is a confirmed atheist, and as such will still be here on Earth after you've received your reward. Our network of animal activists are committed to step in when you step up to Jesus.

Only $110 per rescue - a snip.

Ta Will