Death of an historian

History is our collective memory, the product of research, analysis and debate. Just sometimes it can be a personal memory too, encapsulating the sense of a lost world. One historian who managed to cross both spheres was William Woodruff, who has died aged 92. Though well published in a long academic career, he found popular acclaim late in life with his memoir of growing up in working class Blackburn, The Road to Nab End.

So how did someone who left school at 13 end up at Harvard? The answer is Adult Education and, specifically, the WEA. As its legacy is being so casually discarded today, it is apt to reflect on Woodruff's achievement and remember the person who was his early mentor, "his grandmother Bridget, who loved books and encouraged him to do the same".

"She was very talented, and look where it got her," he would say. "She ended up in the Blackburn workhouse."

We must never take our privileges for granted, nor forget the wasted talent of those who were never able to fulfil it. It's time to fight back.

Empty seats

It was the Rugby League National League Grand Finals day today, held this year at Warrington. I was there, as always.

Last year I wrote,

A crowd of nearly 21,000, bigger than those at three Premiership football matches, turned up to watch a triple header of lower division Rugby League. The National League finals is now one of the great days out that the RFL do really well.

So why are the Rugby Football League trying to kill it? This is the last year of automatic promotion and relegation with a franchise system due to come in for next season. Instead of prowess on the field, the key to entry to Super League will be lobbying off it. Will grounds be filled to watch two teams play for little reward? I doubt it.

This year, a crowd of just over 7,000 turned up to leave the smaller stadium half-empty. It is still a great day out and this time we saw three close contests and the Division One final between Salford and Celtic Crusaders was a thriller. Salford, to my chagrin, equalised with a last-second penalty to make the score 18-18 and take us to extra time where their superior fitness told.

Was I right? In one sense the comparison is unfair. Salford and Celtic Crusaders have both been granted Super League franchises though neither are well-supported. If Salford fans are relatively small in number, the Crusaders' fan base is tiny and though I really wish Welsh Rugby League well, I have to wonder if their elevation has come a few years early, like Gateshead and Paris before them.

The big test will be next year when the favourites to contest the final will be teams with much larger support, Leigh, Widnes and Halifax spring to mind. However, this year's crowd shows that there is a lot of work to do to re-establish the National League in the public's imagination.

Anthem

I would like to dedicate this song to a number of special people; Gillian McKeith, the holistic nutritionist, Health Secretary Alan Johnson, journalist India Knight, and all the many others who have spent so much of their time and energy selflessly working to rescue me and those like me from the terrible fate that is our lot.



Hat tip Paulie

A sense of proportion

It has been a week of hyperbole.  Earlier on, Marcel Berlins decided that my blogging habit might be a force for evil. 

It is possible that we will find out, in five or 10 or 20 years, that, in the internet, we have created a monster we cannot tame, whose capacity for doing harm exceeds any good it once brought.

Berlins ruminated on the possible need for "controls on entry" for the Internet. (Is there no end to this ID card fetish?)

His main anxiety seemed to be about the web being a focus for conspiracy theory and he picked out the MMR scare as a prime example.  Now, I rather think that the opposite is true. This was started in the mainstream press, not the blogosphere, and excellent, medical blogs, such as Black Triangle, have played their part in countering the scare mongers.  

For every website proposing nonsense there is another promoting truth.  It is now easier to access authoritative scientific material and debate than ever before. Websites such as Real Climate have become important resources for both professional and lay readers.  Sanity and clear, rational thought is dispensed through wonderful sites like Butterflies and Wheels.  It is just as easy to argue that one of the main functions of the net is to provide an accessible platform for debunking crackpot theories as it is to fret that it is a method of their propagation.

Then, trailing clouds of clichés, Sunny Hundal appears with the proposal that blogging is going to save the left (and the world no doubt). Bloggers are central:

...we need to campaign to further a liberal-left set of ideas that chime with what Britain wants and where we want to go.

Phew!  I bet no one had thought of that before.  Praise be to bloggers.

It doesn't take long before the still, small voice of sanity is heard. Paulie crops up with a pertinent critique based on his insistent advocacy of representative democracy.  He brings us all back down to earth.  

We are having a conversation.  That's all.  Not that it is unimportant. At its best, blogging can provide "a good, high-quality conversation" for others to eavesdrop on, friends and strangers, from all over the world, and, at times, the debate can be heard by the weak and the powerful alike and who knows what influence it may eventually have?

In the meantime, as the advertising slogan would have it, it's good to talk.

Fighting back

A new organisation has been formed declaring, "we believe that affordable access to the life changing opportunities provided by education is the hallmark of a civilised society". The website is here.

Why is it needed? Read this from Peter Kingston,

The auguries for England's devastated adult education service are grim. Few have any hope that the government's response to its consultation on informal adult learning will include plans for restoring the 1.5m evening class places that were lost over two years as a direct result of Labour policies.

...But having underspent on its controversial Train to Gain programme for the second year in a row, did the department plough the surplus cash back into some other segment of FE — adult education, say? No, it shoved it across into the higher education budget.

Sceptics of the government's creed that employer demand should be the prime factor in spending public money for adult FE say that this year's £200m Train to Gain shows pretty conclusively that even when free cash for training is piled in a trough in front of it, industry has little appetite.

"The real adult skills crisis is the impact that government policy is having on wider adult learning," says Professor Ewart Keep from the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.

"As more and more of the adult learning budget is diverted into Train to Gain, often to pay for the accreditation of skills the workers already have, the overall number of adult learners falls. As a result, we are in danger of moving further away from any meaningful notion of lifelong learning."

The situation in University Adult Education is also critical, we haven't seen the cash. A national adult education service, controlled and run locally, something built up over more than a century by dedicated hard work and the hope for a better future, is being decimated. It is a national scandal.

Thoughts on totalitarianism

Harry Barnes has opened himself up to a bloggertarian attack with the suggestions in his Normblog profile that the UN should, in effect, be the vehicle for a new, more extensive, Bretton Woods agreement and that most private transport should be replaced by public transport. Peter Risdon of Freeborn John is one of those who commented that these suggestions conflicted with Harry's determined anti-totalitarianism. In comments on Harry's response, I argued that Risdon's definition of totalitarianism was so wide as to be a catch-all rather than a useful tool of analysis. He replied with the following,

... Harry's first comments are totalitarian in the broad, generally understood and used meaning of the word and may not accord with other more contrived definitions.

His comments are particularly unlikely to accord with those definitions of totalitarianism contrived by some on the left to acquit the left of the charge of totalitarianism.

This is so off beam that I felt that I wanted to post more here. One of the most egregious errors in political debate is the use of terms outside their specific meanings. For example, I tend to use the word 'fascist' to mean anyone who disagrees with me. It is a bad habit. It turns important concepts into slogans, whilst imprecision allows people to slip between different meanings of the same term to confuse and obfuscate.

There is a huge literature on the subject of totalitarianism, but the term was popularised in the post-war period by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski (later President Carter's National Security Advisor) in their book, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, first published in 1956. Far from being "contrived by some on the left to acquit the left of the charge of totalitarianism" the book was denounced by many on the left as a Cold War device to equate Soviet Communism with Fascism. However, though part of their analysis is specific to their times, I think that the main thrust of their argument holds up pretty well and only a few old tankies would now deny the horrors of Stalinism.

Friedrich and Brzezinski put forward a thesis that saw totalitarianism as consisting of a number of interlocking features,

The basic features or traits that we suggest as generally recognized to be common to totalitarian dictatorships are six in number. The "syndrome", or pattern of interrelated traits, of the totalitarian dictatorship consists of an ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly and a centrally directed economy. Of these, the last two are also found in constitutional systems ... These six basic features ... form a cluster of traits, intertwined and mutually supporting each other, as is usual in "organic" systems. They should therefore not be considered in isolation or made the focal point of comparisons ... (my emphasis)

Considering them in isolation is precisely what Harry's critics are doing. They are taking two proposals, with which they disagree, and labelling them as 'totalitarian' on the basis that they could fit into a general definition of totalitarianism as, for example, "modern regimes in which the state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private behavior." Even with this generalisation, the only way they can paint Harry as a totalitarian is to ignore all the other areas that he doesn't want to regulate!

In fact, as a democratic socialist, all Harry is arguing for is the use of collective means to deliver universal, individual freedoms, in this case the right to free and unhindered travel. Libertarians can coherently say that they disagree with the means, they can follow Hayek in expressing their concern that this may be a 'road to serfdom', however, it is manifestly not the case that this proposal is, in itself, totalitarian or in contradiction with Harry's anti-totalitarian sentiments.

The world has changed since 1956, but totalitarianism is still with us. Today the description is often used to describe jihadi Islamism, in my view correctly. This does suggest that Friedrich and Brzezinski overemphasised the institutional features of totalitarianism and its link with modern mass societies. Islamism certainly has an all-encompassing ideology and would arm itself with all the repressive powers of the modern state. However, it does not have a leadership principle, nor is there a mass single party. Its organisation is diffuse and self-sustaining. This brings me back to my undergraduate days and the start of my long engagement with the history of political thought.

I have had many fine teachers in my time, but I owe most to Alex Shtromas, a libertarian. He was terrifying in tutorials and charismatic in lectures. Though our politics were different, I learnt so much from him and his influence has been profound. Totalitarianism was one of his main topics and he brought more to the debate than the astonishing depth of his scholarship. He spoke with immense moral authority as a refugee from Stalinism and as a Holocaust survivor. His line was that totalitarianism is not exclusively modern, it is a phenomenon that has arisen throughout history at times of revolutionary upheaval, including in Calvin's Geneva and Mediaeval Millenarianist movements. The key to it was the belief in an ideology that claimed to be "in possession of absolute and/or finite truth and wisdom". This was not just dangerous in itself, but, wedded to state power, could be an instrument of mass murder. He would have had no problem identifying jihadi Islamism. All of which makes Harry's advocacy of public transport seem just a tad insignificant in the totalitarian stakes.

Sometimes I wonder about the exaggerated nature of contemporary political debate, inaccurate epithets abound. Some, though by no means all, libertarians also strike me as having a monist absolutism that makes me uncomfortable. They have a very different approach from Alex's eclecticism. I certainly have never been able to see the Welfare State as the moral equivalent of the gulag. Surely it is time for a sense of proportion here, Peter and Harry are arguing over transport policy in a democratic society, not the imposition of a new reign of terror. Totalitarianism should be no part of it, even as invective.

Sunday night cat blogging

Thanks to Angela

Passing time

Apologies for light posting. My return to work was accompanied by one of those nasty head colds that make your brain feel like overcooked porridge.

Another year ticked over yesterday and so today, with the sun drying out my sinuses, we headed for posh Cheshire by slipping over the Manchester Ship Canal via the little toll bridge (12p one way).

Cheshire is full of 'country inns' that offer 'fine dining' not pubs with food. Grim. We walked out of one at the sight of pretentious customers and the overzealous exercise of portion control on a stock menu, got lost and ended up seeing an unpromising pub tacked on to a garage.

We were about to reject it, then I spotted the narrow boat. Right on the canal, it served brilliant beer and vast slabs of roast meat with fresh vegetables for not a lot. Brilliant.

So I'm refreshed and ready for the fray, if older and heavier, so you may find something vaguely worth reading here in the next few days. Then again...

Back to work (2)

Idea shamelessly nicked from a conversation between Mike and Jim D and yes I know Peggy Lee did it better.

A personal note

Today was my first day back at work after a long absence through ill health. It is an odd, unsettling feeling to step back into a familiar that has become alien. The institutional issues remain, yet feel less urgent, more trivial than they did. The purpose of our organisation, adult education, never seemed more vital.

This is a persistent paradox, the purest of aims and ideals have to be delivered by institutions, which are often vehicles for less elevated human concerns. It is a theme explored in Ursula Le Guin's science fiction novel, The Dispossessed. The novel is subtitled, An Ambiguous Utopia. I could settle for that. If the utopia is worth having, I can live with the ambiguity. Pessimists, cynics - away with them. Let's continue to dream.

Menacing machines

I have an electronic weather station that tells the time, temperature, humidity and predicts the weather. It can be set to speak in one of those disembodied electronic voices and for some reason I have left it on. At midday everyday it cheerfully reads out the details.

This week, low, grey clouds have scuttled over Hull. Every so often the constant drizzle has been interrupted by lashing rain, showing that the roof leak that brought a corner of my bedroom ceiling down is back again. It is unutterably depressing. Then, at 12 o'clock, this cheery, synthesised, mid-Atlantic voice tells me that the weather forecast is - sunny! What is up with it? Is it trying to console me with false hope? Is it cruelly taunting me? Did I get the satirical model by mistake?

There are plenty of machines that nag you, my car shouts at me if I leave the lights on for instance, now I have one that is spreading misinformation and false optimism. They are taking over I tell you. We are doomed.

Don't look back

I have just watched a delightful film on DVD, Πολίτικη Κουζίνα, mistranslated into English as A Touch of Spice. The very good Wikipedia entry gets the title right.

The original Greek title is Πολίτικη Κουζίνα (Politiki Kouzina) which means Cuisine of the City and refers to the Cuisine of Constantinople - Cuisine tis Polis (now Istanbul). However, in the film's promotional material, the word Politiki of the title is depicted in capital letters, therefore allowing an alternative reading of the title, as Πολιτική Κουζίνα (Politiki Kouzina) which means Political Cuisine signifying the important role that politics played in the lives of the main characters.

It is a romance; a love story of the bond between grandfather and grandson, of the memory of a childhood sweetheart and of the complex relationship between Greece and Turkey. All are explored using, surprisingly, the metaphors of cooking and, more obliquely, of astrophysics. However, one theme is constant, the lingering pain of exile.

The film is in Greek, Turkish and English and a sundry thought struck me. It is speculative, but as my own struggles with the Greek language make me curse our monolingual culture, I wondered whether our neglect of other languages could arise from the fact that, though we are well travelled, the English have generally encountered other peoples as hosts or conquerors, rarely as supplicants. Even our tourists arrive in triumph. It is our good fortune and our loss.

The ending offers hope. The command to Orpheus was not to look back or he would lose his love. Fanis, the main character, issues the same warning to his old lost love with a different meaning. "We look back and that image remains as a promise". Sternly facing straight ahead defends against pain, but bars the doors to joy. A child turns round and smiles.

Pure class

Yesterday in the Guardian, Polly Toynbee wrote,

The right spits venom at talk of class, except to sneer at middle-class leftists, but avoids hard facts: a working-class child is 15 times less likely to move upwards than a middle-class child is to stay put. This is no classless society, but a society whose politics conspire to deny it.

Right on cue,

Cambridge today will condemn attempts to force elite universities to recruit more pupils from state schools and disadvantaged backgrounds.

In a robust attack on government “meddling”, Alison Richard, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, will say that universities are not “engines for promoting social justice”.

If they are not to embrace social justice, does that mean they prefer social injustice, or are they just indifferent to the fate of their country? I have no doubt that elite universities recruit some highly able students, but they also have the Hooray Henries for whom the social ambience is more important than academic achievement. Even if we started punting on the Humber, they wouldn't come to Hull. Educational inequality and achievement are not the only issues that matter to widening participation, this culture also excludes; the casual acceptance of privilege does not come naturally to those who have none.

Of course, the fact that elite universities recruit disproportionate numbers of students from public schools is purely down to the fact that there are public schools for them to recruit from. Though 'top' universities remain bastions of privilege, they are at the apex of a system of inequality, and in some ways I have a little sympathy with their resentment at the tokenism implicit in the actions of a government that is so unwilling to even talk about equality, let alone develop an egalitarian model of political economy. It is hard to see that getting a few more middle class kids from state schools into Oxbridge is going to change the world. However, any sympathy dissolves when I see their resistance to self-examination and determination to hide behind a myth of meritocracy, a pretence at classlessness and a belief that education is somehow socially neutral.

My work over the last twenty-five years has brought me into contact with many of those who had been initially excluded; fantastically talented, hard working, wonderful students. Good people all and some are still good friends. By holding fast to their elitist values, Universities are excluding the best for the sake of the mediocre. They don't know what they are missing. Mind you, some of the students I have known would shake them up a bit. And boy do they need it.

Holy evolution

Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain
Darwinic pilgrims claim the image fills them with an overwhelming feeling of logic.

The Onion has the full story.

Via The New Humanist

Troofers

Paul Stott has linked to a paper he gave at a recent Anarchist Studies Network Conference. Stott is a Class War veteran and posts on the 'truth' movement at 9/11 Cult Watch and its associated blog.

The paper is worth a look and focuses on the development of 9/11 conspiracy theories in the Muslim world, arguing that the link between Arab conspiracy theorists and those in the West is anti-Semitism, which he sees as central to the whole movement.

Yet the problem of anti-semitism within the UK 9/11 ‘truth’ movement cannot be seen as a few isolated individuals joining a web forum, instead anti-semitism can be found in the truth movement from the top down.

Stott sees the far right as the main vehicle for anti-Semitism and, as a result, he reckons that 9/11 conspiracy theory is not just nonsense, but dangerous, fascist nonsense. As he points out, despite the rise in hostility to Muslims following the attack on the Twin Towers, "In 2006, Greater Manchester Police figures suggested Jews are nearly six-times more likely to be victims of faith-hate based crime than Muslims."

In emphasising links to the far right, I think that he understates the strength of left anti-Semitism. There has been much focus on contemporary left anti-Zionism as a vehicle for anti-Semitic discourses recently, but this is a far older tradition in the left and I have have come across casual and deeply unpleasant anti-Jewish racism in 19th Century Anarchist material. Arguably, this is more important than covert fascism for explaining the appeal of this nonsense, especially when allied to an unthinking anti-Americanism. Anarchism today is not exempt either as Contested Terrain points out in this excellent post. This makes Stott's intervention all the more welcome.

There is one other factor too, which should never be underestimated in the appeal of these ideas. Imaginative fictions are so much more attractive than banal reality, certainly to those with messianic tendencies, but even to ex-Labour Cabinet ministers as well. Whatever, this type of conspiracy thinking is delusional and dangerous and gets in the way of a proper understanding of the world based on truth, scholarship and reason.

Saying goodbye

I was at Hilton Park this afternoon for Leigh's last Rugby League match there before moving to a new stadium. They lost an exciting play-off game with Whitehaven to a late try just when extra time seemed likely.

It is always a sentimental occasion when a ground closes. They are places holding many memories, but, let's face it, Hilton Park is now a crumbling dump. It also became hostile and unpleasant to visit for a while when the club went through hard times until the new board got hold of the club and rebuilt it. My favourite memory is of Swinton's unexpected Second Division Premiership semi-final win in 1989. All the Leigh fans shook our hands to congratulate us and offered to sell us their tickets for the final! The Leigh club were also great to Swinton when we found ourselves homeless and allowed us to play a few home games there. So good luck to them for a fine future, even if the powers-that-be have cast a shadow over their future prospects by abolishing automatic promotion.

It made me think of many of the atmospheric but basically awful grounds that have disappeared in recent years, all to be replaced with new, beautifully appointed stadia. Traditionalists moan about a lack of atmosphere nowadays, but my memories of the old grounds are not just of poor facilities and stinking toilets, but the fact that I often couldn't see a bloody thing. They all seemed to have shallow terracing, where my view would be ruined by the inevitable late arrival of a giant who would plonk himself in front of me.

However, for Swinton, the closure of our historic stadium, Station Road, in 1992 was a tragedy. The fans were not given the opportunity to commemorate its loss as the sale was not announced until after the deal had been done and the season was over. That, and an ill-fated move to Bury FC, ripped the heart out of the club and a precipitate decline followed. There was no shiny new stadium for us, just promises that remained unfulfilled. Last year hopes were raised again, but now the air is thick with rumours of a move to Darwen in Lancashire. This would be the final blow for many fans.

A whole range of famous grounds have gone in recent years, Wigan's Central Park, Huddersfield's Fartown, Warrington's Wilderspool, Hull FC's Boulevard, are just some, with others to follow. More and more matches are now played at excellent venues. Those hankering after the good old days can now watch the celebrated documentary from 1980, Another Bloody Sunday, following Doncaster's attempt to avoid losing every game of the season, on You Tube. The opening footage is of their match against Swinton. Doncaster's old ground, the aptly named Tattersfield, is long gone. Here is the first part, it might just change their minds.



Incidentally, after many moves and crises, Doncaster now play here.

Maybe there is hope for Swinton after all. Maybe ...

Poetry corner

Comment of the week came from another of those obscure, self-appointed guardians of moral rectitude, The Campaign for Real Education. Radio 4 invited them to comment on the row about the dropping of a poem by Carol Ann Duffy from a GCSE syllabus because it deals with knife crime. In reply to the obvious point that there is also quite a bit of knife crime in Shakespeare, the real education chap agreed that Bill the Bard could stay - part of our national heritage you know - but then said that there were "uplifting", "modern" poets that could be studied - like Wordsworth, with his one about daffodils, and Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. Where do they get them from?

Happiness

Last night I was at a wedding reception for a civil partnership. It was a lovely occasion. Two happy people and two proud families pushed the boat out to host a lavish party. Contrast this simple affirmation of mutual love with the hatred exuded by the immoral moralists of the traditionalist right and you can see where morality really lies. And, once more, it was another reminder to those 'anti-imperialists' not to romanticise movements and countries that would make such human happiness a criminal offence.

History

Nicked from Snoopy hat doffed to Will

A Greek triumph

Everyone who reads this blog knows of my affection for Greece. Now I can reveal the latest triumph for the nation, this time in an international literary competition. They have not just won the Bookseller Magazine's Diagram Prize, but the Diagram of Diagrams, awarded for er ... the strangest book title for the last 30 years.

Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers, published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain, narrowly beat People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It to the award.

There is a full report here, and check out the picture. Oh to be wandering through that olive grove ...