Party time

It was the village's panegyri last night.  There was music and  dancing at the front, taking place against a background hum of inattentive chatter. Later in the evening a hot wind blew, warming an already sweltering night and stirring the sea to join in the general hubbub. I staggered home around three in the morning and as the music faded the wind grew stronger, whistling through the trees around my house, creating a different soundscape.

Bleary-eyed I opened the shutters this morning and the wind had turned round to come from the north taking the heatwave with it. The weather is now gorgeous and though the cat stole my breakfast and spilt coffee all over my keyboard when I chased it off, nothing can really spoil the day.

And all the while, the reportage that I have seen in the UK media suggests that I am in a war zone. Tourist numbers have declined sharply, yet Greek life continues and anyone considering a holiday should not be put off. This is still a lovely country and it needs your money more than ever.

But that doesn't mean that the crisis is not real enough and, of course, it is being felt much more sharply in Athens than in rural Pelion. Today, the IMF announced that both the Spanish and Greek deficits were higher than forecast.  Well, who would have guessed that inducing a recession would reduce income and raise social security costs? What a surprise. So the solution? Let's do more of the same, it might work this time. And if they won't do the wrong things by themselves, let's make sure that we do the wrong things for them, and do them even worse than they could have managed if left to their own devices. No country could have escaped the impact of the global banking disaster and Greece had many vulnerabilities that meant that it would certainly have faced an economic crisis in its wake. But it wouldn't be this one. Not one with 'made in the EU' stamped all over it.

Costas Lapavitsas thinks that we are nearing the endgame as the EU leadership seems intent on changing politics from being the art of the possible into the imposition of the impossible. But in the meantime, book your holiday and remember the message of these two inspirational posters from our local cultural association.

The unconsidered

It is John Maynard Keynes who is credited with saying, "even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist." I would add that much of what passes for technical economic diagnosis is underpinned by a whole set of social and moral assumptions as well.

At the moment one of these is that the mere possession of power confers wisdom. So moves to resolve the Euro crisis by creating ever greater integration is phrased in the language of passing control over to central authorities so that they, with a heavy sigh, can do it right. This makes much sense to people who assume that they must be correct in every way. Those of us who look on with increasing bewilderment at their actions have their doubts. Mind you, our protestations are met with disdain from those on the Olympian heights convinced of their own disinterested intellectual gifts. Good, virtuous European citizenship means respect for authority in their eyes. Meanwhile, the people who have to deal with the real impact of their policies, gaze upwards and mumble the word 'idiots'.

Their general contempt for the powerless is compounded by an ungenerous, pinched view of people's suffering. It is rooted in the old notion of the deserving and undeserving poor - a view held widely by the undeserving rich. Their wealth is, of course, entirely merited and the poverty of the poor is solely down to their failures. So they raise their eyes skywards, sugest that some may be redeemable, up to a point suitable for their station, if they pull their socks up and work as hard as the wealthy. But then reality creeps in for the un-deluded and points out that hard work, grindingly hard work, the sort that involves emptying the bed pans of the demented, caring for those whom others would rather forget, is often rewarded with poverty pay.

So, as one version or another of the latest conventional wisdom is endlessly ground out, it is nice to be shaken awake by reading something different. Near the end of David Graeber's intriguing book on debt there is this:

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction. 

Even though his perspective is viewed through the rosiest of rose tinted glasses, my heart lifts. Here the most unconsidered and stigmatised are given value - what a generous view of the world. It is a reminder of the closing words of George Eliot's Middlemarch.

... for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

 An uncomfortable thought for those who are certain of their own importance.

In a heatwave

Find a cool spot and ...

Following on

Nick Cohen's comment that I quoted in my previous post certainly got to George. It is one of those occasions when phrases written to impress upon the reader the urgent necessity to deal with the neglect and exploitation of a potentially 'lost generation' betray deeper social assumptions that take us beyond the words' intended meaning. Basically, there are two such assumptions at play here. They infect political life and public policy as much as our private lives. Although using the language of hard-headed rationality, they are, in reality, moral discourses. And both, in my view, are utterly wrong.

The first is that youth is not a stage in life, but is a virtue. Is it possible to have a party leader who is not under fifty and often scarcely over forty? The fresh-faced, telegenic figure is seen to be the epitome of political cool, a necessity for that elusive asset - electability. Although what I see when I look at the Camerons, Cleggs and Millibands is an almost frightening inexperience. And even if they are intelligent people, and they certainly must have a ruthless cunning, what is intelligence without experience?

The second is that dependency is a state of sin. I have touched on this before. The refrain of the elderly, 'I don't want to be a burden', is a cry of guilt from someone who worries for their children but craves their love and support. I have yet to see any empirical evidence for the much mythologised damage caused by 'dependency culture', but the appalling pain of neglect is evident everywhere.

Instead, I would argue that dependency is a state of virtue. We seek it out, longing for dependents to complete our lives. We form partnerships 'in sickness and in health', we tend gardens that would collapse into wildernesses without our constant care, we keep pets, feed and adopt stray animals, make strong friendships and feel sad when children leave home.

But what of independence? It is liberty, the essence of youth and a joyful escape from constraints. But that too is transitory as we build our own voluntary bonds and slip into dependence on others as others do with us. And that very mutuality makes us happy.

Youth and age, dependence and independence. They are the dialectic of life; unresolvable and inescapable. Our existence is bound by enigma and ambiguity, not brutal clarity. And the mark of a civilised society is one that values it all.

Divide and rule

I am writing seriously at the moment, so haven't as much time for blogging. But a bit of conventional wisdom seems to be cropping up recently that I have a vested interest in and I wanted to comment on it. Why? Well, despite being a young, vigorous buck in my own mind, the empirical reality is that I am not quite in the first flush of youth. And, actually, I have sort of retired.

This all began a little while ago. There was this argument floating around. It started as an attack on babyboomers and it was not without some validity. The notion was that the generation to which I belong had the best of everything, which is true - we were lucky, but when it came to their turn to pay for the next generation to have similar benefits they became parsimonious and demanded tax cuts instead. Now I am not too sure that it is entirely due to all of us being selfish, rather I might just suggest that a change in the elite consensus on how economies are managed could have had something to do with it. And maybe those super-rich enthusiasts for a bit of state-aided redistribution coming their way could take a bit of the flak as well. But never mind, if you have a few million people to blame instead, why not go for them?

Gradually, rather than being venerated for our wisdom and experience, we seem to be becoming the target of 'progressive' opinion. Robert Skidelsky is after retirement itself. Whilst, I may agree with this: 

... the rich and super-rich have raced ahead from everyone else; and there are 13 million households, or 21% of the population, who live below the officially designated poverty line. This group cannot reasonably be expected to trade income for leisure. They must first have more income.
How to bring about those more equal conditions of life needed to realise the promise of leisure for all is the main social challenge facing advanced capitalist countries. 

I am less sure about his view that part of the way to do this is

The abolition of the concept of retirement, with "special needs" to be attended to by a retirement agency. 

Now I have to admit bits of retirement are not easy, especially for someone like me who loved his job and retired earlier than he would have liked in circumstances that he would rather not have happened. But there are benefits, especially today as I can look out on a blisteringly hot day at my beautiful Greek garden that I had the sense to acquire when I was still earning. Now I can contemplate long, extended stays here. Yet this guy sees me chained to work forever, even if I am only working three-hour days (actually too short to do anything meaningful). Yes, state pensions and the idea of a retirement age only came in for the first time in 1908, but it was to replace the workhouse.

A couple of weeks ago in his Spectator blog post Nick Cohen also chipped in about how the Tories are targeting young people, including the horrible proposal to remove housing benefit from the under twenty-fives. Again, he makes a decent point well when he points out the fact that older people are more likely to vote and thus are a much more politically dangerous target to hit. (I would point out that older people actually have taken a number of hits, from pension mis-selling, changes to the way pensions are calculated, the rising retirement age etc., to the hidden ones like the death of non-accredited adult education, which was a lifeline to many of the retired). But then he makes a utilitarian point about the need to invest in the young.

I am sorry to be brutal, but there is no way of phrasing it delicately: the young are our future and the old are our burden. 

Hold on a second. There is a bit of natural justice to consider. Someone leaving school at eighteen has just spent the whole of their lives being "our burden", paid for by the old. The old have worked most of their lives, contributed in other ways, such as by being carers, and coughed up taxes for more than forty years. If we get a few perks to go with our sharply reduced incomes, I would like to point out that we have bloody paid for them! The young have so far paid nothing.

Obviously, youth unemployment is a problem and a far worse one in Greece and Spain. The young need a start and wouldn't it be good if they too could look forward to some liberty at the end of their working lives or even that people should continue to work if they want to? If the problem is about how we enable the young to become the contributors they desperately want to be in a contracting economy, then the problem is the contracting economy, not pensioners. One generation doesn't have to be supported at the expense of the other. Of course, eventually they are the same people. The old were once young and the young, if they are lucky, will be old. And, if I remember correctly, there is something else that differentiates people and their life chances at the moment that seems to be a bit more permanent and pertinent. What is it again? Oh yes; class.

Ethics

Charles, that is what we do - we go out and destroy other people's lives.

Harry Potter and the Ethics of News International

A manifesto

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

Misattributed all over the place it may be, including to Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein though probably coming from Rita Mae Brown in her book Sudden Death, but here is another example:

Moreover past experience includes no relevant case where budget cuts have actually generated increased economic activity. The IMF has studied 173 cases of budget cuts in individual countries and found that the consistent result is economic contraction. In the handful of cases in which fiscal consolidation was followed by growth, the main channels were a currency depreciation against a strong world market, not a current possibility. The lesson of the IMF’s study is clear - budget cuts retard recovery. And that is what is happening now - the countries with the biggest budget cuts have experienced the biggest falls in output.

From A Manifesto from Economic Sense.

Unreality check

This piece by Tom Clynes is a really good summary article on the current state of climate change denial. Much of it is familiar, the same story of the distribution of misinformation and denigration of good scientific research, substituting wishful thinking for reality. There is also something deeply unpleasant happening; the publication of climate scientists' email addresses on denialist sites and the resulting deluge of death threats and obscene hate mail that follows. Here is one example from Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist:

“When I get an e-mail that mentions my child and a guillotine,” Hayhoe says, “I sometimes want to pull a blanket over my head. The intent of all this is to discourage scientists. As a woman and a mother, I have to say that sometimes it does achieve its goal. There are many times when I wonder if it’s worth it.”

But what struck me most were two numbers. The first comes from the Steve Milloy who runs a denialist web site. He said, "There’s really only about 25 of us doing this". Yes, only twenty-five people are claiming that, at worst, there is a global conspiracy of tens of thousands of research scientists to falsify their findings or, at best, in one of the greatest outbreaks of mass incompetence the world has seen, that they are all wrong and have been so since serious research into the impact of greenhouse gas emissions began in the 1950s. The fact that these few have recruited so many supporters is enormous testament to their skills as lobbyists and publicists and to the extraordinary power of the internet when it comes to the dissemination of information (or of complete bollocks).
The second number raised my spirits though. 

This spring, four major universities released polls showing that a clear majority of American citizens now say that the world is warming and that the country should take action. Jon Krosnick, a professor of communications at Stanford University, conducted one of the polls. He found that 83 percent of Americans say they believe that the Earth has been warming. One significant factor, he suggests, is that Americans can finally see and feel climate change happening.

In other words, this band of twenty-five, despite their deep penetration of the Republican Party and their base in the Tea Party, are losing. And they are losing because however much reality is denied, it has a funny habit of winning out in the long run. Vociferous, noisy and abusive climate change denial may be, but it is on its last legs. The fear was that the 'skeptics', as some like to be known, were winning. And now there is confirmation that they are not. They are becoming marginal, inhabiting solely the dark corners of the internet and the recesses of the political right. 

Yet, once again, mainstream politics seems to be running behind this mass outbreak of sense. Leaders seem scared to take action, putting off dealing with the problem, hoping that everything will turn out for the best. The tragedy of this is that, instead of the dystopian primitivism conjured up by denialists, action on climate change should be leading us to the brink of a new industrial revolution, one based on different sources of energy. An era of low-carbon sustainable industry and prosperity beckons and instead the skeptics wish to keep us in a warming world with disturbing potential consequences.

Hat tip to Stephen 

Reality check

I can say with absolute confidence that Angela Merkel is not the most popular person in this neck of the woods. From the Greek perspective, EU policy seems to be more of a German diktat, and a hostile one at that. But in Germany this sentiment is is seen more as ingratitude. There is a huge gap in perceptions. So here are two pieces that argue that the German view is the one furthest from reality and that its actions are potentially as damaging to itself as they are to the countries of the periphery

First, Simon Tilford argues,

The current strategy for dealing with the eurozone crisis is largely a German one. But far from limiting the risks to Germany, it is maximising them. The German economy is not immune to the economic slump enveloping a growing swathe of Europe. One country after another will need bailing out, with Germany ultimately providing the back-stop. Much of this debt will not be repaid, leading to a dramatic rise in Germany's public indebtedness. Without a mutualisation of risk, the euro will collapse, with devastating implications for German exports (to EU and non-EU markets alike as a euro collapse would hit the global economy hard), the value of Germany's foreign investments, and the stability of its banking sector. These are just some of the direct economic costs; the political fall-out would be grave for Germany. Isolated and blamed for the collapse, it would be poorly placed to pursue its interests through whatever is left of the EU.

Whilst in the Financial Times Wolfgang Munchau speculates on the tactics that could be used by Mario Monti

The point is not so much to call Angela Merkel’s bluff, as some of my Italian and Spanish friends have been urging. She is not bluffing, despite the fact that a break-up of the eurozone would clearly be disastrous for Germany. Joschka Fischer, the former foreign minister, said recently that by allowing the eurozone to break up, Germany would for the third time in a century have inflicted utter devastation on Europe and on itself. 

Those who advocate the strategy of calling Germany’s bluff often assume a degree of rationality that is plainly absent. The Germans have developed a strange narrative of the crisis. Following the debate there, as I do regularly, has a parallel universe feel about it. There is, for example, a denial that the current account surpluses are even remotely a factor.

What both have in common is the sense that a resolution of the crisis will be impossible until German policy makers begin to understand the reality of their impact on the peripheral countries and, most importantly, of the growing risks that austerity poses to Germany itself.

More than a game

Germans cheering on Greece. Well, they do live there.

If you want to understand Greeks, he says, you only need to watch them when the bill comes at a taverna. "The Greeks will try to sneak in and pay for everyone, the Germans will try sneak out to avoid the bill."

And then there are Greeks cheering on Greece - in Germany.

"Like most Greeks who live here, I dream of some-day going back to Greece," he said. "But the crisis in my home country continues and it's becoming more difficult to find work there. I have to stay in Germany to survive." ... 

Like most Greeks in Germany, both [the two interviewees] will watch tonight's game in the firm believe [sic] that poetic justice will secure a Greek victory.

These are from a really nice piece about popular attitudes of expats in both countries and how they crystallise around a single football match. Overall, I think that this needs repeating often:

Sitting in a beachfront taverna, Ms Hilbrecht says things would have to get worse in Greece before she would move back to Germany. "Even in a crisis this is still a great place to live." 

 But then again, so does this; for those at the bottom of the pile, it is getting less and less true.

Boringly predictable

Greece supporters in Poland are having T-shirts specially printed ahead of Friday's quarter-final against Germany in Gdansk. The slogan: "It's time we kicked you out of the euro."

 Everyone will post this today - so I might as well join in.

Against elitism

Classical music is not elitist, it can be liberating. Watch this video on the Scottish version of the famed Venezuelan El Systema.

"Eighty percent of the children on Raploch are musicians"

Claims to fame.

One is and one isn't - from Croydon that is.

Economics

The remedy for too little spending is more spending. Everything else is commentary.

Samuel Brittan

The times we live in

What is the worst offence? Picking up a publicly funded £420,000 redundancy cheque after working for only sixteen months planning a programme of cuts, or naming them Change to Keep Succeeding?

Election day

Whoever wins ...

Elinor Ostrom

 Complexity is not the same as chaos

Having managed a complex programme of adult education, I would have loved to have beaten that sentiment into the minds of managers who looked only for neatness and a managerial structure of command, control and obedience. The words are those of Elinor Ostrom, Nobel laureate for economics in 2009, who died yesterday.

Her best known book is Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, which uses empirical research to examine how, given the right conditions, self-management of what she calls "common pool resources" by their users works better than either state or private ownership for conservation and effective management of those resources. The key to allowing this to happen is good reciprocal communication and trust - possibly the two elements most frequently lacking in modern managerialism.

Her work on complex systems, ecology and common property regimes, together with her stress on inter-disciplinarity, flexibility and diversity, has widespread applications and consequences. You can get a sense of her work through listening to her impressive Nobel lecture here. Whilst what follows is an eight-minute talk on sustainability.

There is also a fascinating personal interview with her here.

Parallels

We overstate historical parallels and certainly lapse into inappropriate analogies far too often (no, Merkel is not Hitler). History is not a mechanical process. Even when governments take similar courses of action they do so in different contexts, whilst people have learnt from experience and behave differently. However, sometimes the parallels can be unnerving.

In this piece Mark Mazower pursues two of the main themes of his historical writing, modern Greece and the fragility of European democracy. 

It is one of the achievements of the European Union's insistence on austerity at any cost that Greece's democratic stabilisation now seems jeopardised. Once democracy's guarantor, Europe itself has now become the chief source of pressure upon it ... Yet Greeks have not turned against Europe: on the contrary, public opinion remains deeply committed to membership of the union... Nor do the Greeks fail to recognise the need for a sweeping reform of the public finances. The reason for the implosion of the two-party system is simply because in the absence of any plausible scenario or package for growth to accompany Europe's endless cost-cutting demands, the country's suffering and social disintegration seem futile.

The refrain is familiar,  but Mazower's voice is a warning against complacency. And his conclusion is tentative.

It now falls to the Greeks in the most testing of circumstances to demonstrate the tenacity of their commitment to Europe. And it falls to the Germans to uphold Europe's commitment to democracy itself.

Reminders

First, something for all of those who think that knowledge is valuable only for its current utility.  From this nice book review on a new history of science:

But as we read of the tentative steps of the pioneers we are led to wonder again that science ever emerged in human culture. It had to run the gauntlet of practical men and women who jeered at the scientists' obsession with footling things – minuscule animals seen through the microscope, for instance. All of the knowledge that had sustained human society until that point – processing raw food into bread, cheese, beer and wine, tilling the ground, building cathedrals, sailing across the oceans – had been the work of skilled craftsmen, uninformed by any scientific principle whatsoever. 

Secondly, from the same review, a reminder of reality for those that tout the notion of 'ancient wisdom'.

As Ball puts it, the complaints of the naysayers can be summed up as: "small and distant things were small and distant precisely because they were not meant to concern us." So much for the plague bacillus that was wreaking havoc in London when the Royal Society was born, so much, ultimately, for DNA and the computer chip. What was meant to concern us, according to this view, was the scriptures and the received wisdom of the ages. Now the power of those small and distant trifles is everywhere apparent and the wisdom of the ancients stands revealed as a tissue of arbitrary fabrications.

And finally, for all my friends in the UK, a reminder that this is what summer looks like.

Honesty

This is one way of communicating:

Greece is speechless! Totally out of control  spokesman of Chrysis Avgi (Golden Dawn) and elected MP Ilias Kassidiaris punched Communist KKE MP Liana Kanelli while on live studio on ANT1 TV on Thursday morning. Just seconds earlier Kassidiaris had thrown water against SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou. The prosecutor asked the arrest of Golden Dawn MP for “dangerous physical damage”, while he is on the run.

How obliging of the neo-Nazis to be so open about who they are.

Then there is this rather nice talk about cognitive dissonance and critical thought. It appeals to me because throughout my teaching career I have been embarrassingly wrong on so many things, but I still think that I am brilliant.



And finally, another example of the media's remarkable ability to misrepresent research in order to get a good headline. This time it is about the supposed recommendation that safe drinking limits should be reduced to a quarter of a pint of beer daily. As one of the authors the report blogs, this is not what they said. But they did come up with the finding that even relatively small amounts alcohol do increase health risks. He is disarmingly honest:

On a personal note I am not pleased by the results of our research.  I was hoping that alcohol might have been better for my health.

As for me I am going to pour myself a large glass of wine and begin to rationalise about how it is exceedingly good for me.

Beauty

"Wherever you look, you see beauty." These were the words of the official presiding over the civil wedding ceremony as he welcomed the guests to South Pelion.

Earlier the cavalcade of cars had wound up the hill, horns blaring, to a spectacular backdrop of mountains and sea. After the ceremony everyone emerged into the town square, shaded by giant plane trees, the tables laid out for a night of eating and drinking. The band was already in place, the bouzouki player tuning up against the sound of Euro pop standards from the loudspeakers. Milling around the flower display, picking their seats, were friends and acquaintances. A happy day and, yes, he was right. All I could see was beauty.

Greece is a lovely country, though there is ugliness as well. Much of this is being intensified by the crisis and the self-defeating response of the 'Troika' of lenders, described, as quoted in this article, by  Yanis Varoufakis as "the biggest idiots in the history of economics."

Later in the evening, fuelled by wine and tsipouro, I strolled over to the museum dedicated to the work of the local artist Thanasis Fampas. It was closed, but the sculptures outside were floodlit and the lights were on inside. Fampas' work is gorgeous. The on-line gallery doesn't do it justice. The eyes of his subjects are often blank, instead they express themselves through their hands and the shape of their bodies. They hold and they caress whilst the pictures caress you. As I peered through the windows the official dashed up with the caretaker and to my surprise unlocked the doors and ushered me in for my own private tour. This is so Greek, a spontaneous outburst of pride and generosity. He told me how the museum was run and maintained by volunteers and that though he was retired with a pension he would often work twelve hour days for no pay, simply for the good of the community. Beauty everywhere.

Yet despite this simple truth, Greece still struggles against the lies of the wealthy with their narrative of the chilly, industrious north pitted against the indolence of the feckless south with its Mediterranean sun. But perhaps the most pervasive self-deception that the rich endlessly trot out is the idea that their privilege is solely the result of their own merit, their intelligence and their hard work. It's never good luck, the legacy of previous generations, nor do they credit the support of family, friends or the institutions that gave them their education. And heaven forbid that there is any debt of gratitude to the work of those they employ. This attitude breeds a meanness of spirit, which suggests that the poverty of others is the result of their moral failures and that the solution lies in being more like them. Any proposal for aid to relieve suffering brings a horrified cry of 'moral hazard' - the fear that any help will only encourage the poor to continue in their unproductive ways and, thus, if it is not to be withheld entirely, it certainly has to be accompanied by proper strictures and hedged with conditions.

This seems to be the attitude of the German government with its insistence on austerity. But let's look again at what was the basis for the post-war German economic miracle. Was it the result of some inherent Calvinist work ethic as they often suggest? Or might it just have been because of the Marshall Plan? German debts were written off and investment flooded the country. It was an extraordinary act; a compound of generosity and self-interest. Help was understood to be far more likely to promote reform and prevent a repetition than punishment. And what was the sin that was forgiven? Had they sat around in bierkellers wasting borrowed money on idle luxuries? Not quite, they had launched the most destructive war in human history and committed genocide. And if that can be forgotten, surely the Greek crime of joining the Euro and spending too much buying German goods on cheap credit is worthy of a more generous response than the punishment of austerity.

So we come back to beauty. And perhaps one of the most beautiful of human qualities is generosity. You meet it here a lot. And as a moral underpinning to public policy it leads people to think that the proper response to those who are struggling is help, not punishment. And if that approach to the economic crisis had been tried three years ago it is clear that we would not be in the mess that we are in today.

Sated

I am going back to Greece tomorrow and the only downer is being so far away from Rugby League land. Mind you, I have stocked up for weeks on live action over just three days. Swinton had an agonising last minute defeat against the league leaders Halifax in a thriller on Friday night and then it was the Magic weekend. Three games played on Saturday and another four on Sunday; every Super League team in action, one after the other at Manchester City's stadium.

It was one of those occasions that Rugby League manages so well. For all the sport's administrative failings it is never afraid to try new ideas. It had the lot; a festival atmosphere, helped by glorious Manchester sunshine, some great running rugby, a Wigan/Saints punch up and a stunning Hull derby, won by Rovers in the final minute, which left me filled with nostalgia for place.

And then there were the fans - noisy, often pissed, without any segregation or trouble and loads of families together. My prize went to the Hull KR hen night party all dressed in specially printed tee-shirts, bright red frilly tutus and not a lot else (apart from the bride who had a white veil as well). That was going to be one hell of a night on the town.

Events like this show how the game has progressed, but it couldn't have happened without some major changes for the better in recent years. Rugby League's move to becoming a summer sport was obviously critical, this wasn't something for a January weekend at Odsal. Then there are the new stadia and the incredible development in pitches so that seven games could be played in two days with very little wear to an excellent surface just after the football season has finished. I remember the seventies and eighties when you would have been lucky to find a single blade of grass left.

It was a great way to prepare for my departure to a Greek summer of sun, crisis and village gossip. If only they played Rugby League.

Small ads

Wanted:

Policies for resolving the Eurozone crisis that do not kill people.

Ups and downs

It isn't often that a shadow minister gets involved in Rugby League, but Andy Burnham, shadow Health Secretary and MP for Leigh, has called for the scrapping of the franchise system and the return of automatic promotion and relegation between the top two divisions.

There is a lot that Rugby League gets right, just read David Conn here, and after a high quality Monday night contest between Leeds and St Helens and with the prospect of two days at Manchester City's stadium watching seven Super League games this weekend, it seems churlish to suggest that the game is becoming uncompetitive. Yet this sense was compounded by seeing the first game in the State of Origin series from Australia and knowing that there was no chance of any British side matching that level of speed and intensity.

There are problems at both the top and the bottom. I love the play off system for the title, but qualification for the strongest clubs is hardly a struggle with the top eight teams involved. That is more than half the league; only six sides miss out.  Down at the bottom there is nothing to play for at all and there have been some scrappy low quality games between the strugglers.

For teams in the Championship the chance of a license comes round every three years and their playing strength matters a lot less than the organisation of the club off the pitch. Hardly surprising then that the attendances at recent Championship Grand Finals have dropped.

I think some credit has to be given to the Rugby Football League, they are dealing with real problems. There are clubs that would find it very hard to sustain a full-time, top division side. They don't have the stadia, finances or support. But then they are the ones that are less likely to win promotion, whilst the possibility of going up is a great incentive to improve and pull in financial backers and sponsorship. More important is the gulf between the semi-professional and the full-time game. This would be less of a worry if there was greater depth in playing strength in this country. It is slowly improving as the Super League academies begin to produce quality players, but we are not there yet. To go up and stay up doesn't mean the signing of a few new players, it means a wholesale team transplant.

Much too is made of the yo-yo syndrome, of promoted teams going straight down again. This would be more convincing if it actually happened. Only two promoted sides have been relegated the next season and of the current fourteen Super League sides, six are there because they won promotion. This points to promotion being more of a success than it is given credit for. And it isn't as if the new process of objective criteria and full scrutiny before awarding a franchise has been wholly successful. After all, in its first year of operation it gave us Celtic Crusaders who went bust twice, had a bunch of Australian players deported because they did not have the correct visas, relocated 130 miles to the north and then finally voluntarily relegated themselves two divisions amidst a welter of recriminations.

So yes, there have to be criteria for a club to go up, but perhaps we should go back to selecting the candidates for both promotion and relegation on the old fashioned basis of merit, primarily demonstrated by performances on the pitch.

Burnham has launched a petition, you can read and sign it here.

No access

This article saddened me.

A report out this week warns of a possible collapse in the numbers of mature students (those aged 21 or over when they start their course), who now make up nearly a third of the student body.

Compiled by the National Union of Students and the university thinktank Million+, which represents the views of universities with a high proportion of non-traditional students, the report, Never Too Late to Learn, urges the government to ensure that further and higher education funding changes do not deter mature student applications. 

Of course we should treat anything with the word "possible" in it as purely speculative, but the change in funding for Access courses does worry me.

For those of you who are unaware, Access courses were set up specifically for mature students without formal qualifications to provide an alternative entry route into university instead of A levels. They are, on the whole, brilliant. These days I can always spot the students who have done Access and not just by age, simply by the quality of their work. It is a far better preparation for undergraduate study than A level - and it shows.

I suppose I am biased. I was involved from the early years of Access and spent fifteen years coordinating and developing courses in both urban and rural settings, as well as being the external moderator for a number of other programmes. It was enormous fun and I am still in contact with many of the students who passed through. There was always something exciting about watching people develop and change, gaining confidence and skills as the year progressed. And some of the end of term piss-ups were legendary.

Yet there was always something odd going on. Although they were life changing and, especially in times of high unemployment, exactly what people needed to break the cycle of alternating between poor jobs and benefit, we continually had to battle authority. The main problem concerned people on benefit who were allowed to study and keep their benefits as long as they were part-time, available for work and studying under twenty-one hours. Then there was a change of attitude as benefits were hedged with a growing number of conditionalities and the pressure started to go on. Some offices interpreted the hours as including private study time and we had to argue with them. Then there was the new 'actively seeking work' test, which led to students being forced off their Access course (that lead to university) to do meaningless Restart sessions (that led nowhere). Over and over again I had to talk to staff in the benefits office to keep students on board. Some were difficult, most were sympathetic, but they too were coming under pressure.

Then came the great moment of hope. I was at a conference shortly before the 1997 general election. The then Labour spokesperson on further education made it clear that when Labour was elected it would abolish the "counter productive" ( I think she also called it stupid, but can't quite be sure) twenty-one hour rule that limited people studying when they were on benefit. I was impressed.

Labour duly won. And yes they changed the rule. They tightened it up and made it more restrictive. Claimants were now limited to sixteen hours of study. It was one of my early moments of disillusion.

It is something that I could never understand. We took people with little or no qualifications off the dole, got them into university and did it cheaply. And still we had to struggle with authority to to do something as worthwhile and so much in the national interest.

I lost touch eventually; by then I was working University Adult Education, where the hopes engendered by a Labour victory soon evaporated as well. And once again, funding changes have lead to the gradual demise of many fine departments as well as to my own premature retirement.

Trying to make sense of it all leaves me perplexed, though I think two attitudes that are very hard to shift are crucial. The first is that there is a range of prejudices about precisely who we should expect to be a student. Age plays a role. I have given up being irritated when higher education is being spoken of as being important for 'our young people'. Then again, so does class. For all the rhetoric about the inclusion of people from 'less well-off backgrounds', there is little incentive to make the profound institutional and cultural changes that are needed to make wider participation a reality.

But the most important one is that, despite all the grand proclamations we hear about change and novelty, there is a deep suspicion of unorthodoxy ingrained in our institutions. If it is different, it can't be as good. I mean people still talk of A levels as the 'gold standard'. An odd metaphor, though perhaps an apt one, as we abandoned it in 1931 because of the damage it was doing to the economy. The irony is lost on them.

And that is the problem. Adult education in general has always been the exception, the embarrassing relative who won't be quiet and just fit in with everyone else. Popular and populist, it is both voluntary and successful. And it really lets the side down by being innovative and creative. At its best it is the antithesis of orthodoxy and that will not do. That will not do at all.

Academic life

Dissidents at work here. Famous thinkers on the modern university.

The gem is Karl Marx's annual appraisal.

Thank god I have my pension.

Conflict unresolved

Nothing concentrates the mind as wonderfully as panic. According to this report even Mervyn King now admits that the Eurozone problem is not merely the fault of indigent and corrupt Mediterranean types, but is systemic. 

"What is so depressing about it is that this is a rerun of the debates in 2007/08 – these are not liquidity problems, they are solvency problems," King said. "Imbalances between countries in the euro area have created creditors and debtors and at some point the credit losses will need to be recognised and absorbed and shared around," he said.
"Until that is done, there will not be a resolution. That is why just kicking the can down the road is not an answer ..."

 Meanwhile, in Timothy Garton Ash's words, "Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble still preaches the gospel of Ordoliberalism as if it were revealed truth".  Berlin is still in denial.

The drama continues, but at the expense of people's lives and livelihoods. Whilst the Greek elections seem to offer a democratic challenge, real power lies elsewhere and could be used to punish Greece for its choice. And offering a stark choice, based on either rational self-interest or blackmail depending on where you stand, may be counter productive. As Keep Talking Greece comments:

If the EU keeps on putting in front of Greeks the dilemma ”Euro or Drachma” I am afraid at the end Greeks will vote for “Dignity”….

And then what?

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.