Euro song crisis

Incisive comment from Montenegro

A winner, surely.

Arts news

From the Guardian (nearly):

The discrete pastel shades and the almost childlike representational style of these watercolours depict the gentle, flowery side of that well-known dog lover and artist Adolph Hitler.

Coming next; Pol Pot's bedtime stories for children, Joseph Stalin's early recordings of Gregorian plainsong, and lifestyle coach and agony uncle Tomás de Torquemada discusses his editorship of the magazine True Confessions.

All in it together

Once again the spotlight is on Greece.  Some of the coverage is excellent - up to a point. That point is when they stop at the Greek borders and forget this is a pan-European problem.

Let's face it. There is a lot wrong with the Greek state. Anyone who has had any dealings with their fabled bureaucracy will know the intense irritation, the queues, the inefficient systems and the general default level of unhelpfulness. They will also appreciate the kindness and frustration of the other Greeks who help you deal with it. It needs reform. The Greek people want it. There are also a number of, often severe, problems with the Greek domestic economy. But if this was solely a Greek crisis we would not be talking about Spain, Ireland, Portugal or Italy.

Commentators also point with some bafflement at the apparent contradiction of Greek public opinion wishing to stay in the Euro whilst rejecting the bailout terms. There is no contradiction here if you support the European Union yet think that the economic policies are, at best, counter-productive or, at worst, downright crazy. Why should there only be one model of political economy required for Euro membership - in perpetuity? Seen this way, the election results are perfectly coherent. They acknowledge the importance of Europe to Greece, they express support for the reform of the state, but they also display horror at a policy that is sucking demand out of the economy at an alarming rate, closing viable small businesses and collapsing living standards. Greece needs reform, but then so does the EU, especially when it comes to their ideological certainties about the macroeconomic policy of the Eurozone. It is that policy that is being rejected everywhere, not the European Union itself.

And not only is this crisis affecting all of Europe, so the economic policy being followed is not made domestically. It is decided elsewhere and being imposed on many other countries with the same political and economic results. It is a uniform pan-European policy.

The mainstream parties of the right and left are the ones responsible for implementation, so can anyone be in the slightest bit surprised that their support has collapsed? Do they really think that people will 'return to their senses' after their protest vote and fall in line behind austerity? If so, they don't get it. I cannot remember a time when politicians have been as remote from the lives of their electors and as cocooned against the world they claim to represent. This complacency has not yet been shaken, protected as it is by phalanxes of platitudes, but I hope that there are a few nervous glances being turned towards the world outside their double glazing and wrought iron gates.

By way of illustration, there is a good piece by Andrea Teti in Open Democracy about the Italian regional elections.

... the greatest surprise of all has been the performance of the MoVimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement, or M5S) led by figurehead Beppe Grillo, a political satirist and stand-up comedian. Polling at just above 5% a month before the elections, voters propelled it to a 15% national average, electing its first mayors, and even overtaking Berlusconi’s PDL in important heartland cities like Verona.

... The message that seems to emanate from all these polls is a resounding mistrust in and repudiation of ruling politicians, their methods, and their policies – austerity first and foremost. Traditional parties should beware the costs of ignoring it.

And before we disparage those who call for the reform of EMU as extremists, it is worth considering his conclusion.

The disappearance of the ‘old left’ over the past two decades has been the subject of extensive debates. The disappearance of traditional liberalism and of a moderately progressive agenda – one of the hallmarks of post-World War II European politics – has been less frequently noted.

This is a pan-EU crisis, a perfect storm consisting of domestic weaknesses, the fallout from the credit crunch and the flaws in European Monetary Union. Domestic change can achieve little unless both the banking sector and EMU are reformed as well. And that requires an intellectual shift, one that is being articulated by these 'far left' groups espousing the political economy of - er, Harold Macmillan.

Sadism

From an excellent chronological account of the disastrous management of the Greek debt crisis in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Papandreou says that when he asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for gentler conditions in 2010, she replied that the aid program had to hurt. "We want to make sure nobody else will want this," Ms. Merkel told him.

Apocalypse now

In response to the political impasse in Greece, Angela Merkel has issued a statement saying that unless Greece sticks to the terms of its 'bail out' darkness will fall across the earth, famine will stalk the land and vicious creatures, half-human and half-wolf, will roam the streets baying for blood. Mothers will eat their own babies, the ground will open and swallow whole cities whilst the Euro will be no more. A leading member of the Bundestag also warns that the tooth fairy will no longer visit Greek children.

In the meantime, Paul Mason talks some sense:

So we are back to the same problem that has dogged Greece. It cannot stay in the Euro without abiding by the rules. And the rules, as currently designed, will force the economy into a downward spiral and destroy social cohesion. Unless the EU/IMF take some kind of initiative that allows some form of viable coalition to emerge to implement some kind of "Plan B" you will sooner-or-later have a debtor-led default on your hands and most likely a prolonged social conflict.

Elections

They were hardly a surprise, but no wonder the powers that be preferred unelected technocrats. That pesky electorate just can't be trusted. And we have the Irish referendum still to come.

Paul Krugman, amongst many others, gets it.

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too.
And it’s about time. Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. 

Angela Merkel is more resistant to it.

Jeffrey Sachs gets something else.

French and Greek voters have rejected Europe’s current macroeconomic framework.  The headlines cry that voters demand growth rather than austerity.  Yet growth is not a policy but an outcome.  A vote rejecting the incumbents does not define the policy alternatives.

And this is where Aditya Chakrabortty's complaint about the disengagement of academics from policy comes in. And I would add another. Even where there is engagement, with some notable exceptions, much of the writing is incomprehensible to non-specialists. Absence combined with poor communication has created a double vacuum, one that is exploited by crude populism, xenophobia or a terrible uncertainty. Bad times can lead to bad choices - and just under 7% of Greek voters made the worst one possible. Golden Dawn are often referred to as neo-Nazis. There is nothing neo about them at all.

Maria Margaronis sums it up well:

The message of Sunday's election in Greece is clear: the Greeks have said no to more of the cuts and austerity measures that have devastated the country, pushing unemployment above 20%, shattering the healthcare system, tearing families apart and leading some to suicide. It was above all a vote of rage against the two major parties, Pasok and New Democracy, which between them ran the economy into the ground, signed up to a disastrous austerity programme in exchange for dead-end bailouts from the EU and IMF, and then allowed the blows to fall on the most vulnerable.

The medium, though, is more confused and troubling. 

Is austerity now dead? Or will the new French boy be tempted into a compromise by the German head girl? Can the Euro survive? Each episode promises to be a cliffhanger. And just how high is that cliff?

It seems that the time is approaching when the contradictions inherent in a flawed monetary union and the wrong-headed policy adopted to deal with the resultant problems will have to be faced and resolved. An interesting few months are in store.

Yet in the midst of all the discussion of macroeconomic policy following the election of Hollande, which I welcome, something momentous has been missed. The internationalism of the anti-totalitarian left has been abandoned to the accompaniment of silence. Amongst Hollande's election pledges is an early withdrawal from Afghanistan. The people of Greece may now have a moment of hope, for Afghans there is only the prospect of another long, dark night of suffering.

Lost property

Scientific understanding - lost
Grip on reality - lost
Integrity - lost
Moral compass - lost
Credibility - lost
Marbles - lost
Mind - lost

If found, please return to the Heartland Institute.

On the one hand ...

... there is this from Costas Douzinas:

But the tectonic plates of society and politics are shifting. The many thousands who filled Syntagma and other squares last year were a leaderless movement without party or common ideology. Seasoned trade unionists and militants acted alongside first-time dissidents and protesters to change politics. They now have the chance to supplement their version of direct democracy and social solidarity with parliamentary representation. The election on Sunday could see not only the collapse of the political elite but also a redrawing of the political map, with the left replacing Pasok.

Post-civil war Greece exiled, imprisoned and persecuted the left, confining its parties to symbolic and ineffective opposition. This period is now coming to an end. A new hegemonic bloc combining the defence of life, democracy and independence is bringing together people who historically found themselves on opposing sides.

But on the other, here is Kostis Karpozilos:

These tendencies reveal deep transformations of Greek society, including the shift of the public agenda to the conservative Right. In contrast with what many believe, Greece is not facing the prospect of imminent social revolution from the left. To the contrary, we have seen a constant and often subtle shift toward conservative solutions. A few weeks ago the coalition government announced a plan for camps where thousands of undocumented immigrants would be confined; this measure appeared as the sole solution to a controversial social issue, and was met with widespread applause. The two ruling parties, PASOK and New Democracy, constantly target the social state, or what is left of it, and demonize central values of the post-junta democracy. They both attack the “extreme” Left, calling it “dangerous” and threatening to the stability of the state, in rhetoric that echoes a time when political activity was criminalized.

The recent strengthening of the fragmented Greek Left appears more fragile in this light. Even though it is anticipated that the various radical left parties will exceed 20 percent of the popular vote, their temporary success cannot disguise their inherent vulnerability: the lack of a persuasive alternative program. They have been unable to transform their anti-austerity slogans into a coherent plan for the “day after.”

Wishful thinking?  Undue pessimism? Or just the contradictions and uncertainties thrown up by the politics of austerity?

News from the sewer

It was back in 2007 that I attended a conference in Hull addressed by Johan Galtung and wrote a highly critical (and over long) post on his dreadful talk. I thought the line he was trotting out was the usual apologist and relativist tosh, elaborated without thought or intellectual rigour.

It wasn't obscene though. This is.

Read for yourself, I can't bear to post extracts, it comes from a Norwegian magazine, The Humanist.

The editor's comments say it all.

Since Galtung now is using thinly disguised Nazi propaganda as the source material, it is perhaps not surprising that he also defends The Protocols of the Elders of Zion ... In the previous issue of the Humanist John Faerseth accused Johan Galtung to play with fire. With this article, Galtung has become the arsonist.

Galtung is one of the founders of the discipline of peace research. If this is where it leads us, it has gone badly wrong.

May Day special

Stephen King has a rant about tax and the rich in the USA.

I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes ...

And, taking on the cult of the admiration of wealth, he doesn't seem to like them much either:

...most rich people are as boring as old, dead dog shit.

 (Dead dog shit? Never come across any that was alive myself, never mind, I get the drift).

Aside from restating the social democratic case, the best part of the piece is his implication that the construction of economic theories on the basis of the pathologies and delusions of the dysfunctional rich might not be that wise.

Tragedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stoutism

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

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

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

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

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

Back again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1901

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

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

Ιστορία

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

Thanks to Kev

Nostalgia

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

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

Easter parade

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

Exciting times.

Spring

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

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

Obedience and its discontents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Greece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

And finally ...

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

Today is ...

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

Lest we forget

"Bradford Spring"? A sick joke.

Two nice places

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch his video report here.

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

Three on Greece

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

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

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

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

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

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

All three are worth reading in full.

Choosing to learn

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

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

His tortuous argument concludes with this decidedly strange statement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anarchy

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

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

Elisée Reclus (1894)

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

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

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

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

Cat blogging

If in doubt, fall back on cats.

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

Full fat blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheffield spring

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

A tribute

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

For good or ill?

Norm has put up a link to a review of a new book on William Wilberforce and has commented on Wilberforce's evangelical Christianity, pointing out that:

He doesn't sound like providing much evidence for the proposition that the effects of religion are thoroughly bad. I wonder if there might be something wrong with that proposition.

I have written before that I agree with Norm that there is sufficient empirical evidence to question any notion that religion is necessarily a force for evil, however, Wilberforce is a great example of the double-edged-sword of high minded religiosity.  On the one hand we have his leadership of the campaign against the slave trade, for which he is rightly famous, even if he was no enemy of wage slavery at home. On the other, we have his role in founding, in 1802, one of the nastiest organisations of the early nineteenth century, one that was a direct emanation of his evangelical beliefs, The Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV).

Wilberforce had previously spoken in favour of legislation against adultery, which he saw as being "of much more importance than any question about peace and war" and was the prime mover behind George III issuing a proclamation against vice in 1787, becoming vice-president of the resulting, and wholly ineffective, Proclamation Society. The SSV was more active and was known mainly for its network of spies reporting people for trading on Sundays (as well as a corruption scandal), leading to a string of prosecutions of shopkeepers and publicans. The Society's activists also targeted the book trade, looking for salacious popular literature. The aim was to remove the temptations open to the working class to use their one free day for pleasure instead of religious observance.

I think that the most pernicious activity of the Society was its determination to suppress free speech and freedom of thought in religion. As a result of its actions, the radical secularist, Richard Carlile, ended up spending a total of nine years in prison. In 1819, after being attacked by the SSV, Carlile was convicted of the crime of blasphemy for re-publishing Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. He was sentenced to three years, extended to six, as he could not pay the additional fine of £1,500. He was not alone, others were prosecuted, including eight of his shop-workers.

So we are left with a far more complex picture of the legacy of Wilberforce's Christianity. His religious beliefs led him both to oppose slavery and to directly champion deeply illiberal and oppressive causes. It was as if Martin Luther King and Rick Santorum were the same person. And this is the problem for any historian not willing to embrace ambiguity. Whilst religion has been a cause of discord, violence and mass murder, it has inspired acts of courage and virtue. I suppose much depends on whether the religious pick out from the morass of conflicting doctrines the morals that compel acts of justice and compassion, or whether they cleave to identity politics and self-righteousness, seeing religion to be a dogma to be imposed on others. The problem with Wilberforce is that he did both.

UPDATE:

See the comments section below. The author of Wilberforce: Family and Friends, Anne Stott, has pointed out that Wilberforce was not the founder of the SSV. She has suggested the following as the most authoritative source on the founding of the Society:
M. D. J. Roberts, 'The Society for the Suppression of Vice and its Early Critics, 1802-1812', Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 159-76.

Corruption

More on Greece. One long-running scandal is coming to an end. A settlement is in sight after the exposure of bribery to gain contracts by a company based in a nation whose head of state has just been forced to resign due to corruption. Yes, we are talking about Germany.

The company is Siemens and its actions in Greece are said the have cost the country some €2 billion. For a brief summary see here and here. A proposed settlement has been reported though not finalised.

Kathimerini daily said the accord would include cash, a pledge to invest in crisis-hit Greece, a settlement of unpaid Greek bills worth 80 million euros and the provision of technology know-how.

As the current Greek crisis unfolds, there is a dominant narrative that is based on a morality play of sin and virtue. The Greeks play the role of the profligate Mediterranean sinners whilst the Germans are thrifty, industrious models of virtue. Human relations are not like this, neither are economic systems. Moralistic, and frankly racist, discourses do nothing to help the people of any beleaguered nation. The Siemens crisis opens a small crack in the edifice and gives us a glimpse of a less simplistic world. It may not be that significant in the context of the crisis, but, after the battering the reputation of Greece has taken, Greeks can be forgiven for wallowing in a sentiment with a fine German name - schadenfreude.

If ...

... Britain were Greece

Kalo mina.

Ranting the night away

Peter Morici explaining why William Hague was talking "crap" about Greece.



Whilst the Cheshire Cat has a good old go at much greater length here.

Thanks to Harry Barnes for the sound clip

Science and anti-science

As part of my current research I have been reading about the popular working class campaign against compulsory vaccination for smallpox in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today we would see it as a moral panic of the kind stirred up over MMR. It would be easy to see the campaign as little more than an historical curiosity and a reflection of popular ignorance, especially given the successful eradication of this fatal and disfiguring disease. But we have to beware of anachronism; in the nineteenth century there were rational grounds for opposition. True there were propagandistic scare stories and the tendency of campaigners to claim that most infant mortality was down to vaccination. However, the practice of vaccination was different, consisting of the insertion of lymph in a wound created with a lancet and using arm-to-arm vaccination, both of which had the potential for cross infection and carried risks in their own right. With no understanding of the working of the immune system, the procedure was based on observation rather than explanation, it was open to objection and criticism in the light the of common, though wrong, medical assumptions of the day.

But this was not all. There were political reasons for resistance as well. This was mainly due to opposition to compulsion. Libertarian sentiment was strong in Victorian Britain, the state was mistrusted as a hostile instrument class rule, the accumulation of fines for non compliance was crippling and the campaign eventually wrung a conscientious objection provision out of the government that began to defuse the opposition. If the campaign was to show one thing, it was that co-option rather than compulsion was necessary for an effective public health policy.

The other main reason for opposition was a distrust of the medical profession as a vested interest that gained financially from the state enforcement of vaccination. Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to the medical profession were profoundly suspicious. Not only were doctors seen as the partners of an oppressive state, they were thought to be malevolent practitioners of dubious remedies and gruesome practices. Popular preference was for folk medicine and quack cures, again not as irrational a choice given the state of medical knowledge of the time, though still ineffective. Reading on, I was struck by how this attitude has persisted, even today when medical knowledge has been transformed. And this same Victorian sentiment is at the heart of a modern, and politically potent, anti-science movement that is growing, paradoxically, at a time when scientific knowledge is securely empirically grounded after more than a century of research and technological progress.

At the heart of anti-science is distrust, particularly of experts (the word is frequently enclosed within scare quotes), with all the the nineteenth century prejudices manifesting themselves. History is repeating itself as farce, certainly, but one tinged with tragedy.

Though this sentiment has persisted in relatively harmless, if exasperating, ways with New Age lunacies and those depressing promoters of 'ancient wisdoms' on the fringes of the Green movement, it is now being used with increasing success by wealthy and powerful interests. It is one of the extraordinary phenomena of our times that people who become multi-millionaires by selling bogus 'therapies' that are not only completely ineffective, but can also be positively dangerous, are more trusted by some than the modern medical profession. As this superb report makes clear, pseudo-science, like HIV denial, kills.

The same happens with climate change denial where the result of sixty years of careful scientific research is being challenged by an elaborate fiction. As is well documented, even more so since the story about leaked documents from the Heartlands Institute broke, this fiction is being maintained by lavish funding from major corporations. This is not surprising. What is frankly astonishing is that they are getting away with pretending that modestly paid academics are the vested interest that have to be challenged, not big business. This campaign is so successful that climate scientists now regularly receive hate mail, personal threats and attacks on their professional standing. Fear is seeping in and, unless this is vigorously challenged, may begin to close down free discussion.

At the same time, religious fundamentalism is not content with its increasingly violent culture wars and profession of offence, it is following the same tactics as the climate deniers to spread doubt about evolution. Creationism is on the march and trying to gain a place within school curricula, though thankfully the resistance to this is strong.

Part of the problem is that anti-science has appropriated the language of radicals. Yet, this time, whilst portraying themselves as courageous iconoclasts speaking truth to power in a determined attempt to advance human knowledge, we have wealthy and powerful interests speaking lies to an increasingly bewildered truth in pursuit of their own profits. This is not popular resistance, it is the manipulation of sentiment by wealthy, powerful and power seeking interests. Posing as sceptics, they seek to replace the open debate of science with dogma. They speak with an authoritarian voice.

Of course they know what they are doing, this is a highly professional campaign. In a world built on the division of labour, the main thing that binds us together is trust, trust in the expertise of others. The exercise that is being carried out by anti-science is an attempt to transfer trust from one group of people to another in the pursuit of profit and power.

The quack healer, the climate change denier, the creationist are all like the cowboy builder who comes round to your house, sucks air between his teeth and then shakes his head sadly whilst criticising everyone else for not knowing what they were doing. Flattering you for your wisdom in finding him, he gives you a lower quote though always seems to find a way to say that because of unforeseen difficulties it will cost a little bit more than he first thought. Of course he will be found out when the work begins to fall apart, but by then he has your money. And when you try and chase him up, he can't be found. Although your trust has gone, so has he.

This coalition exploits our fears, promotes doubt where there is none and pretends to champion the ordinary person against 'the system' that, in reality, is not their enemy. It works by undermining trust and promoting ignorance. A sentiment that was the reflection of popular concerns in the nineteenth century has been transformed in the twenty-first into an instrument to persuade people to support causes that will enrich others at their expense.

So aids patients die, thinking that they have done something clever by coming off their medication, global warming continues, whilst climate scientists are harried by obsessives, and reason dies a little until we have to face reality. And genuine alternatives, the ones that we need so desperately, are sidelined as Victorian fears, rational enough in their day, are resurrected as profitable wishful thinking in a world that needs truth. We should not abandon genuine scepticism or questioning, after all that is the cornerstone of science itself, but there are times that we need to remember that 'experts' are called experts simply because they are.

Attitude

A great, angry piece by Suzanne Moore picks up on the assumptions about work and unemployment being promoted by the insufferably earnest Ian Duncan Smith (aka IDS - or in a moment of supreme lunacy when he was briefly a disastrous leader of the Conservative Party, "the quiet man").

...right now we have an elite telling lazy scroungers to buck up. Yes, clean toilets, pick cabbages, move towns, sit in call-centre barns, smile enough to make Mary Portas types think you care. In short, deliver the service, that those who have never served, demand. Know your place.

I guess IDS knew his place at Sandhurst just as I once knew mine. Until I realised that most menial work leads to more menial work. The idea that this is the stepping stone is as much of a fantasy as The X Factor. The stepping stone is education. That's what makes you free, not work.

In each previous period of large-scale unemployment we saw a rapid growth in enrolment in adult education. Now, the service is decimated and, probably due to the contradictions and confusions in the new funding regime for higher education, there is a sharp decline in applications to universities from mature students. Without an opportunity for second (or even third, fourth or fifth) chance education, what hope is there other than a life drifting from crap job to crap job?

Adult education was, amongst so many other things, an engine for social mobility and, if you are into supply-side economics, by helping to produce a skilled, critical and articulate workforce could be seen as a driver of economic growth. But here is the problem. Articulate? Critical? In a managerialist workplace? Oh no we can't be having that. Much better to send them to that nice multi-millionaire who has been stuffed with large wads of government cash for ... well not a lot it now seems. She gives them what they really need; servility training. After all, servility is the new assertiveness.

Beauty

I love my Kindle, but somehow Amazon's web site just doesn't have the same appeal as these - twenty of the most beautiful bookshops in the world.

Ancient

Modern

And Greek

One reason why the book will always be with us.

Thanks to Mieke

Sexy music

Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy was a fitting climax to Friday's BBC Philharmonic concert. It's finale, an orgasmic orchestral crescendo, accompanied by the the thundering of the Bridgewater Hall's organ, left one emotionally spent.

This is especially so as it followed the languorous sensuality of Claude Debussy's Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un Faune, based on Mallarmé's erotic and savage poem*.

Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning
Save from my flute, no waters murmuring

I adore you, wrath of virgins - fierce delight
Of the sacred burden's writhing naked flight
From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash
With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh

The concert was recorded and will be broadcast on Radio 3. There is no date yet; listen out for it. The earth might move for you too.

*Click on page 38 for the full English translation next to the original French text.

Making sense

It has taken me a long time to get around to mentioning this intriguing blog post by the anarchist anthropologist and activist, David Graeber.  Though there is much more of interest packed in a short piece, his main purpose, apart from plugging his new book, is to discuss "how to write a book that would still be scholarly, but not academic", one that addresses big questions for a wider audience. Having suffered frustration and tedium whilst wincing at the pain inflicted on the English language by academic writing, I am in full sympathy with him. But he also manages to pinpoint what can go wrong with much that it is produced for a wider readership.

At least in the English-speaking world, there have been two dominant approaches taken by scholars trying to reach a broader audience. One might be deemed the Pop Mode ... In Pop Mode, one affects an accessible and breezy style, much easier to understand than ordinary academic prose, but, rather than seriously challenging one’s audiences’ assumptions, essentially provides them with reasons they never would have thought of to continue to believe what they already assume to be true... The alternative is the exact opposite. I’ll dub it the Delphic or Oracular mode ... Here the aim is usually to challenge as many common-sense assumptions as possible, but also, to do it in a style even more obscure than ordinary academic writing—so obscure, in fact, that its very obscurity generates a kind of charismatic authority, as devotees spend untold hours of their lives arguing with one another about what their favorite Great Thinker might have actually been on about.

Instead, Graeber tried to tackle the problem by writing something accessible that did challenge assumptions and by doing so he identified three good tips for any aspiring writer: "be an even more conscientious scholar, don’t waste time arguing with other academics unless there’s a reason to, and entertaining digressions are okay, especially, if clearly marked as such".

But it was this line that really caught my attention:

Good scholarship is more appreciated by popular audiences than academic ones. This is a bit scandalous but I have found it to be true.

All this brought me back to my days in adult education. The style of writing that he describes is precisely the way we tried to teach. Though we aimed to be accessible, however difficult the subject matter (in the humanities and social sciences anyway) the first and most important thing we always had to remember was that we must never patronise our students. They want the real thing, not some watered down content delivered in childish tones. They would not let you get away with second-rate tosh. What this means is that your material has to be academically impeccable, well organised so that it is presented logically and, most importantly, explained and discussed in such a way as to make it intelligible to everyone. Clarity of explanation is the key to demystification; popularisation is not dumbing down.

When I worked at Hull University's Centre for Lifelong Learning, we had a corny slogan using the Centre's acronym; CLL - Changing Learners Lives. It was rather effective as a marketing tool because it told the truth. Good adult education is subversive in the broadest sense of the word. This is because it questions conventional wisdom and actually that was half the fun of it. So yes we challenged too.

As for anecdotes, well I often though that there was a narrow dividing line between my teaching style and stand-up. Funny stories have been the mainstay of many of my classes. I used to justify this by saying, "if they laugh, they learn". I have a horrible feeling that the real reason may have been less about altruism and more to do with the pleasures of performing.

So Graeber has given me some personal affirmation, right at the moment when I face the scary task of turning my doctoral research into something that people might actually want to read and even pay for. What's more, the commonality of our approaches could point to a more subversive notion; conventional academia itself may act as a barrier to popular education, one that us adult educators kept trying to breach. Seen by this light, widening participation is not a question of admissions procedures or, using the patronising phrase that always grated, of 'raising aspirations', it is about the culture of the academy and its inability to communicate beyond the walls of its closed world. Adult education is in sad retreat, we are a beaten and much diminished bunch. But we will return. The demand is always there and it keeps re-emerging, sometimes in the least expected circumstances. And if it challenges, makes people think, can speak in ways that can reach out beyond the selective demands of the modern diploma factory and, yes, even make people laugh, it will succeed in transforming the lives of future generations.

It's official

I have a book contract.

Now to write it

Greece

... what's really at stake here is not Greece's identity but Europe's. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.

Maria Margaronis

Clarity

This piece by Colin Shindler about the fluctuating historic relationship between the left and Israel is well worth reading. The conclusion is superb, comparing contemporary leftist positions with the one taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, even if I wish that Sartre's Arab sympathies had been formed as much by the Palestinian experience as they were by Algeria.

Jean-Paul Sartre bypassed the psychological maelstrom. He remembered the round-up of Parisian Jews in 1942 and their deportation to the east. For that reason, he was pro-Israel. He also remembered the struggle of Algeria's FLN against the French colons. For that reason, he was pro-Arab. This double legacy, he argued, meant that the responsibility of the left was to create space for dialogue and to facilitate negotiations between the two sides.

Sartre’s plea has been forgotten, to be replaced by an ideological checklist to determine which sort of Israeli a pro-Palestinian leftist can speak to. Talk not to your opponents, only to your fellow-travellers. It is an impoverishing regression. 

Impoverished. A perfect summation of the repetitive sterility of most left commentary on Israel/Palestine.

Academia

So much to answer for.

The world turned upside down

For good left-wing views on current affairs there is only one place. Er ... The Daily Telegraph??

First, some trenchant opposition to neoliberalism that the mainstream left is signally failing to articulate, especially when commenting on Cameron's stance in the EU.

Very quickly: some of you will have seen that Greece’s tax revenue from VAT collapsed by 18.7pc in January from a year earlier.
Nobody can seriously blame tax evasion for this. It has happened because 60,000 small firms and family businesses have gone bankrupt since the summer.
The VAT rate for food and drink rose from 13pc to 23pc in September to comply with EU-IMF Troika demands. The revenue effect has been overwhelmed by the contraction of the economy.
Overall tax receipts fell 7pc year-on-year.
This is a damning indictment of the EU-imposed strategy. Greece is chasing its tail. The budget deficit is stuck near 8pc to 9pc of GDP because the economic base is shrinking so fast.

Secondly, a forensic dissection and comprehensive demolition of the latest drivel from Seumas Milne on Syria.

But Milne’s suffocating “anti-imperialist” worldview leads to a deeply unpleasant moral equivalence between a reluctantly militarising opposition and unyielding regime. This leads to some absurd conclusions. Such as the idea that poor, misunderstood Russia is simply protecting itself from Western depredations. “Russian officials have privately assured opposition leaders that the quarrel is with the US, not them,” Milne tells us. That’s a relief, then. Those being slaughtered in Homs don't know how lucky they are.

Supporting revolutions, opposing neoliberalism; that's the Telegraph for you. Really.

A new low

Russia vetoes the UN resolution condemning Syria. At the same time it is arming Assad and mounting its own dodgy mission to the regime, whilst there is no let up in the shelling of Homs. As anti-Putin protests continue at home after accusations of widespread electoral fraud, the St Petersburg parliament is trying to pass a law "that will make it illegal for any person to write a book, publish an article or speak in public about being gay, lesbian, bi or transgender". 

Every dedicated Guardian reader will know what is coming next. Yes, you got it. An article from Vladimir Putin about building Russian democracy.

Society went through a difficult process of development. And this enabled us all, working together, to drag the country out of the mire, to revive the state, and restore the sovereignty of the people, which is the basis of true democracy.

 Good grief.

Comment here from 1898.

Priestley thoughts

It may be a bit corny and the favourite of every regional rep and local amateur dramatic society, but I had never seen J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls until last night. As it was touring, I though I had to go.

The play is a bit didactic, though the socialist subversion of the whodunnit genre is clever and is carried along by the gripping quality of Priestley's writing. The National Theatre's revival, with its inventive set and effects, is terrific. It enhanced rather than imposed on the original. It was a stark and atmospheric evocation of the whole theme of class conflict.

What the play hangs on is that, even when confronted with the full evidence of the human cost of their exploitation, the bourgeoisie will invent reasons to ignore it, find nice little justifications to continue enjoying their privileged, destructive lives and hide from the looming consequences of war and revolution. And, of course, by doing so, they seal their own fate.

And here also hangs the irony. The première of the play was held in Moscow in 1945; in the charnel house of Stalinism at its height. And here too is the evidence of how some of the left intelligentsia, motivated by anger at injustices at home, blocked their ears and averted their eyes from the purges, the camps, the torture chambers, the brutal exploitation of the Russian working class in their own name and the gathering clouds of a new wave of anti-Semitism, aimed at "rootless cosmopolitans". They too found reasons why they could ignore it, continue with their earnest activism and not face the realities of a world they idolised.

None of this detracts from the quality of the play, nor of its analysis that the comforts of bourgeois existence rested on economic and personal exploitation, coupled with a callous disregard for workers, all informed by an individualist philosophy that masked their own class collaboration. Instead it points to an ongoing human and political dilemma, a capacity for self-delusion and an ability to avoid inconvenient truths and their possible consequences.

And as I write this on my Apple Mac computer, I can click on a tab that brings up an article describing the real lives of the real people who made it in China and swiftly pass over to the next web page, the Apple Store, where I will consider purchasing my next shining new toy.