Me neither.

What to write about this week? So much has happened, but most of it I either don't understand or haven't had the time to process, as my life is entirely taken up by marking and marking-related administration.

Amongst the things I'm glad I can't concentrate on are:
– The European elections. An utter disaster made worse by the British electoral system. At least Northern Ireland uses a proper system of proportional representation. The last 20 years has been an object lesson in how the British constitution – and its political class – are about as useful as the proverbial confectionery tea-receptacle whenever anything complicated happens. They deserve everything that's coming to them: it's just a shame that the suffering will be shared far and wide. My suggestion is that everyone who voted for Brexit be moved to the Isle of Man and given whatever political and trading arrangements they want. If after 10 years life there is paradise, we'll all adopt it. If not, we'll airlift out any survivors and carve Nigel Farage's, May's and Corbyn's faces on the cliffs of Dover as a stark warning to anyone who entertains passingly sympathetic thoughts about Britain or thinks it might be a nice place to live.

– The Augar review of HE and FE funding and provision. Currently being hailed by journalists with short attention spans as a bold plan to reduce tuition fees while boosting university incomes. Actually a plan to make them pay a lot more over a longer period while reducing funding to universities, closing courses that don't suit Oxbridge arts' graduate ministers' idea of what the proles should be doing, and leading to the closure of the kind of universities that their kids won't be going to. Like mine. Not many countries have ever decided that future prosperity and happiness requires less education, but Britain's proudly joining 1970s Cambodia and the US, which is seeing its 8th year of university-entrant decline.

– Of interest only to my fellow academics, and something of a repeat, I'm also not understanding the way senior HEI executives define 'leadership'. My faculty is being abolished and my Dean has chosen to start a 'fresh chapter' in his life, after being subject to a vote of no confidence and a mysterious departure on 'extended leave'. No doubt the non-disclosure agreements are watertight and fully compliant with the Nolan principles of public standards, so I won't speculate on the reasons for all this, but I will just point out that the people who set up the structures now being abolished, and who chose their senior management, are conspicuously silent. 'Leadership' seems to be about taking credit when there's a press release to be sent out, not taking responsibility when things go wrong.

I'm well aware that university managements think of their staff as sanctimonious armchair revolutionaries who in fact operate solely to protect their vested interests, while university staff tend to picture vice-chancellors as people who occasionally pop in between first-class jaunts to dictatorships solely to negotiate their own pay rises and move everyone onto zero-hours contracts – and I'm not saying either position is entirely untrue – but the pernicious notion of 'leadership' has become a sick joke: HEI executives have absolved themselves of almost all responsibility while reaping huge rewards. No doubt I shall return to this subject like a dog to its own vomit, until the day I retire.

– The Conservative Party leadership election. It takes a special kind of solipsism to decide that a national crisis is the perfect time to overthrow an individual for failing to solve the Kobayashi Maru test.



Theresa May's awful personal and political characteristics aren't what has caused the Brexit negotiations' failures: it's an unwindable situation. Watching the denizens of various disgusting think tanks slither from under their rocks to announce that they alone can cut the Gordian knot is a sickening experience. If there's one thing I tell my students, it's that everything is more complicated than it looks, and that's what makes thinking fun. It's frankly unhelpful for the political class to wander round pretending that there's a simple solution to everything: 'Brexit means Brexit', 'Just leave', 'WTO terms', 'delivering what the people voted for' and so on. The referendum proved that you only get stupid answers if you get stupid questions. Now we're faced with a tiny, unrepresentative group of party members electing whichever slick bullshitter most closely aligns with their prejudices: 'Boris' with his hair and his lies, 'The Saj' with his fourth-hand Ayn Randisms, Dominic Raab with his Reddit-acquired distillation of Friedrich Hayek's wet dreams, Kit Malthouse (which I previously thought was PG Wodehouse's euphemism for a gentleman of hefty stature), Andrea Leadsom's manifesto for hedge-fund bros, Jeremy Hunt's millionaire, private-school interpretation of Samuel Smiles and even Rory Stewart's Toynbee Hall do-gooder Etonian gap-year Victorian muscular Christianity shtick. He reminds me of the furrowed-brow centurion in The Life of Brian who hands out the crucifixes but finds it all a bit awkward.



I know there are other candidates but they've blurred into one Oxford Junior Common Room 1985 election hustings and frankly I'd rather write another module specification template than think about them any more.

Anyway, it's not all work. I can't concentrate on anything particularly challenging when I'm marking, but I've managed to read a few books this week. I enjoyed Chris Beckett's Dark Eden, which uses the framework of an inbred community descended from marooned astronauts to examine the conditions from which war, toxic patriarchy and religion emerge – it's a very satisfying novel of ideas and written in the style of Hoban's Riddley Walker and Self's The Book of Dave. I've ordered the sequels. After a very entertaining presentation by Daryl Leeworthy at AWWE19, I bought Kingsley Amis's That Uncertain Feeling - another comic novel about male inadequacy in the face of female sexuality, with added barbed comments about Welsh culture. Some funny lines, but too programmatic and incapable of empathy for entire swathes of society. Rachael Kelly's big robotics/environmental collapse/noir-SF novel Edge of Heaven was very enjoyable: basically Bladerunner from the replicant's perspective. Finally I read a collection of SF short stories interspersed with commentary from scientists who'd hosted the writers, When It Changed (named after a Joanna Russ short story): some of the stories are good, some aren't, and I enjoyed detecting which scientists thought their authors understood the field.

This weekend's reading is Zadie Smith's Swing Time and Alison Plowden's In A Free Republic: Life in Cromwell's England. Both of them have been on my shelves for ages and I can't remember why I haven't already finished them. Plowden's take on the Commonwealth is more conservative than most of the histories I've enjoyed (such as Christopher Hill's work) but taking in other perspectives is certainly no bad thing. For the record, my view is: Revolution: much needed; Charles I's execution: fine; Cromwell: rapidly became a reactionary defender of the landed interest; murder of Catholics and Irish: psychopathic; suppression of the Diggers and Levellers: unacceptable; Protectorate: last gasp of an exhausted regime with no ideas beyond holding on to power; Restoration: defeat. Overall: a missed opportunity and reminiscent of Ireland 1916,  Iran in the 1970s and Egypt recently: progressive forces harnessed to overthrow illegitimate regimes, then murderously suppressed to ensure the domination of elites.

Finally, on the subject of books, I've just paid £84.99 for the CUP A History of 1930s British Literature. Each individual chapter is informative and interesting. I just can't help thinking, though, that if you're going to use the word 'British', you should probably mention that a) British literature of the 1930s included work in Welsh and Scots Gaelic and b) featured quite a lot of work in English from Wales and Scotland. (Northern Ireland isn't in Britain, so we'll have that argument another day). Ironically enough, there are more references in the index to 'xenophobia' than there are to Wales or Scotland. Lewis Jones and Lewis Grassic Gibbon are mentioned briefly by Nick Hubble; a chapter on 'Beyond Englishness: the Regional and Rural Novel' talks about some interesting texts but rather relegates two cultures to 'Other', while even Dylan Thomas gets one mention. Neither Gwyn Thomas; no Richard Llewellyn despite the enormous success of his neo-nazi romance How Green Was My Valley, no room at all for whole swathes of prominent and/or popular authors from 'the regions' outside England. It's not the fault of the chapter authors: it's an editorial failure. By contrast, I've just spent a similar amount of doubloons on Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's Writing the General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics, a much slimmer volume which managed to include chapters on Scottish modernism and working-class Welsh modernisms.

Enjoy your weekend.