Wise words from history

I just had some postcards made up of this quote from the great Aneurin Bevan. I'm toying with sending one to Paul Uppal (who's pointlessly flapping his mouth again with a question about school refurbishment: the Tory Scum government has just cancelled the school building programme…):

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. 

The Daily Fail - again

The Daily Mail (remember, it supported Hitler, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists) play another blinder: it found an NHS doctor who earned £380,000 in a year, and it's horrified.

One small problem. This doctor didn't earn that much at all. When the NHS was founded in 1948, the doctors hated it, and so deals were struck. Aneurin Bevan said he'd persuaded them to accept the NHS by 'stuffing their mouths with gold'. The General Practitioners, you may be surprised to learn, aren't salaried NHS staff. Instead, they own their businesses, which they don't mention very often.

So - this £380,000 per year doctor doesn't 'earn' it at all. He receives it, and uses some of it to pay secretaries, rent, nurses, bills, etc. etc. I'm sure he isn't living on beans, but equally, he isn't taking home the same as a lawyer, to draw an appropriate parallel.

Now, how much does the editor of the Daily Mail get for pouring out a daily spume of racism, hatred and inaccuracy? Well, last year it was £1.6m: rather more than four of this doctor's sum and twice the BBC Director-General's salary. It's also over ten times the Prime Minister's pay. Has Dacre saved many lives recently?

Meanwhile, speculation is rife that The Observer might be closed, as the Guardian Media Group is losing lots of money. The Guardian bought the Observer a few years ago, and it looked like a decent fit, as the Observer was a decent liberal paper which had been treated appallingly by some very shady owners. It hasn't worked: although it looks very good, the Observer was drifted further and further to the right, while also becoming quite boring, with some exceptions such as Andrew Rawnsley. I hoped it would become a Sunday version of the Guardian under a different name, but that hasn't happened.

Sunday newspapers are difficult, especially now that Saturday ones are so huge. They used to be run completely separately from the weekdays, and had nice long deadlines so that substantial journalism could be conducted (the model was the Sunday Times and its Insight team before Murdoch ruined it) - now they're acres of fashion and navel-gazing. I'll miss the Observer because it's the best of a bad bunch, but not as much as I might.

President Strangelove, I presume?

Just back from a swim (good job I have flexible work hours). Despite possessing the hydrodynamic qualities of a brick with an eating disorder, I managed my 40 lengths of backstroke in 27 minutes, so I'm feeling triumphant. And sick.

I see that everybody's jumping up and down about Ahmedinejad's re-election (if such it is). Plenty of people are screaming that Iranians shouldn't vote for a man hellbent on nuclear weapons. Er… isn't that what the UK has done every four years since 1950? That the US electorate has done since 1945? Etc. etc. I happen to be a CND member - and all the NPT-compliant states have signed a treaty committing them to abolishing nuclear weapons. Just as I do absolutely nothing to help, so do the big states. Worse than that, we allow India, Pakistan (mmm, stable relations), Israel and several other states to have them without any commitment to abolishing them.

What steps have we taken to abolish them in our own countries? Well, Obama's actually talking about reductions, but that's about it. The UK is about to spend £20-30 billion we don't actually have, on replacing Trident. Apparently, the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people in a few minutes isn't quite enough. We need more, bigger, missile to deal with… er… those pesky guerillas in Afghanistan. No, that isn't right. There's a definite threat from, well, someone, which can only be dealt with by turning entire cities to molten glass, whole civilisations to rubble, sterilising huge chunks of the earth's surface. It's just that I can't think of one right now.

Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons? They're caught up in an insane race with Israel. The intellectual justification's very simple. It's all about having a huge, barely metaphorical penis. When Labour MPs and others objected to Britain pursuing a nuclear weapon in the 1940s, Aneurin Bevan, the British Foreign Secretary, clearly saw the ability to kill millions of people as a replacement for the British Empire, a justification for Britain remaining a powerful state rather than becoming a calm, civilised Scandinavian-style democracy: without nukes, he said, 'you will send a Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber'.

So there you have it. Without a nuclear weapon, Iran is another weird country holding the oil we all depend on. With it, they can negotiate on a slightly more equal footing. I know this is the politics of the madhouse, but we're all inmates…