The wanderer returns

Where have I been? Well, I gave a paper with my co-author at a conference in London on Rediscovering Class Consciousness in Contemporary Literature last week. It was held in the Senate House, University of London, that great Deco bulk on Malet St. While we talked books, an FBI thriller called Undercover was being filmed downstairs, which provided some amusing juxtapositions of scholars and gun-toting stars. I intended to sneak off to see the Terry Pratchett Archive in the library but the other presenters were too good to miss. Ian Haywood was the keynote speaker: one of the greats in the field. He spoke about the Beano chapter of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell's ur-proletarian novel and socialist touchstone. It was hard to imagine there's much more to say about it, but Haywood managed to do so, leading into a fascinating discussion of literary representations of leisure and sex on the beach in 20th century fiction.

I also enjoyed Phil O'Brien's discussion of Anthony Cartwright's Black Country masterpiece, The Afterglow - Cartwright's work is hugely under-rated. It turned out that Phil read it because I'd mentioned it to him at a Radical Studies Network conference a couple of years ago, so I'm quite proud of making a contribution. David Peace's work also heavily featured: a panel and another paper elsewhere on the schedule. I'm a huge Peace fan: I like his ambition and experiments with form, which deliberately disorient the reader to make her experience the cultural, social and political disorientation its subjects undergo. The conference focussed on his Red Riding quartet and GB84: the former cover late-70s Yorkshire and the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, while the latter is loosely about the Miners' Strike. Every time I read them again I think he was some kind of seer. Peace's Yorkshire is a failed state: rotten to the core. The State is a series of self-interested fiefdoms. Policing is utterly corrupt and largely the pursuit of personal gain or serving the sectional interests of the powerful. As the fish rots from the head, the hollowing out of morality, public duty and the organs of the state lead to total social degradation. The public realm becomes a place of strife, decayed and dangerous. Democracy is a remote and irrelevant concept in his novels: power is wielded against the people and the ideal of the public good is forgotten. I get the sense from history texts that this isn't far removed from reality, but the revelations of Jimmy Savile, the inquiries into Orgreave and other events suggest that Peace was spot on, and that the effects (and causes?) are still being felt.

My session also featured Mark Schmitt of Dortmund Technical University talking about work by Irvine Welsh, John King and Niall Griffiths. As Niall is a friend and colleague of mine, I enjoyed emailing him snippets – he was pleased to be the subject of a paper and that Mark understood him, which is more than I can claim: Niall thinks Wreckage is his weakest novel, whereas I think it's his best! Scotland was very much prominent: there was another piece on Irvine Welsh and Corey Gibson gave a fascinating and hilarious tour of the post-Referendum literary scene and the role of authors in the debate. Lisa and I did a comparison of representations of working-class lives in Welsh writing in English and Welsh: we feel that the English texts are pretty despondent, which manifests itself in recurrent images of zombies, haunting and memory, whereas the Welsh-language ones are – with some exceptions – more open to the complexities of class, culture and the everyday. Nobody else there had any Welsh so couldn't discuss some of the texts in depth, but there was a lively discussion afterwards.

After that, I went to a session on working-class lives on stage (about which I knew nothing, other than loving Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem), then the plenary session: the stand-out one was Kathleen Bell and Nicola Valentine's 'Reclaiming Class: a Complex Negotiation'. The day was hugely enjoyable: I bought a lot of books that I clearly should have read years ago, and it was good to be amongst scholars committed to keeping class alive as a topic when the dominant discourse is keen to stifle it. I don't see the neoliberal, techno-economy as a post-class one: further divides are opening up, but old ones are being reinforced. How could we understand the attempt by Google, Apple, Pixar and a host of other Silicon Valley companies to conspire together to keep salaries down other than by referring back to Marx? Those techs might be rich, pampered nerds but they're clearly part of the proletariat, however many gadgets they own.

Following the conference I headed off to Cardiff for a new experience: an international rugby match between Ireland and Canada. I always watch Ireland matches on TV, but rugby's not my favourite sport. However, it was a great occasion. The city was a sea of green, leavened by a few hundred Canadians, and everyone was in festive mood. I don't often get to Cardiff, so it was lovely to reacquaint myself with an unappreciated place. I paid the compulsory homage to Spiller's Records (bought albums by Gwenno Saunders and Meilir) and finally got hold of some laverbread. If you've never had it, get some. It's the best seaweed-based foodstuff there is. The match itself was thrilling – although Canada was bound to come off worst, they had two tries disallowed and played much better than the official gulf between them, and the score, suggested. Afterwards, we returned home the slow route through Abergavenny, Herefordshire and rural Shropshire, all deserted and breathtakingly beautiful. We stopped for dinner at the Stockton Cross Inn, a 16th-century country pub in Herefordshire. This plaque was attached to the back of the toilet door:

Since then, I've been fixated by our graduation ceremonies, which always thrill me because it's great to see my students grown up and going off, but I'll miss a lot of them an awful lot. We gave poet Jo Bell an honorary doctorate: her work is great and her speech was a model of encouragement and inspiration. 'Ask for help', she told them, 'but never for permission'. 

The other big stories of the week of course are Pig Gate and the VW story. You'll no doubt have followed Pig Gate, the claim by Lord Ashcroft that David Cameron had to insert his undercarriage into a dead pig's mouth as part of an Oxford society's initiation ritual. Such things do happen in rich, spoiled circles, though I think I'm safe in congratulating my own students in getting through a degree without once sexual molesting a dead animal to ingratiate themselves with their friends. It's a gruesome thing to do but basically the kind of inane things the children of the establishment indulge in to fool themselves that they're rebels, before they go off and run the country. Quite astoundingly pathetic, really. 

The real story behind this is the fragmentation of the Conservative Party. Ashcroft is quite clear that his motive in raising this claim is revenge: he gave the Tories £8m and was only offered a junior position in government. Both sides agree on one thing: ministerial jobs in this supposed democracy are for sale in return for party donations. What's in dispute is merely a matter of scale. Ashcroft called  the post he was offered 'declinable', whereas Cameron obviously thought it was OK. Ashcroft may have a point: Lord Nash acquired a seat in the house of Lords and a job in the education ministry, where he oversaw the privatisation of schools while simultaneously opening a load of 'free' schools of his own, having forked over less money than Ashcroft: as blatant a case of corruption as I can imagine. Ashcroft was, of course, domiciled in Belize for tax purposes for most of his political career.

Neither Cameron or Ashcroft (or Nash, or any of the others) seem to believe that democracy requires that government jobs should go to people who a) pay all their taxes according to both the spirit and the letter of the law, nor b) that jobs in a government should be subject to the approval of the electorate via the ballot box. Instead they become rewards for donations to the party, just as the Americans give Ambassadorships to big party donors rather than to professional diplomats. 

The other interesting aspect of the story is the role of the Mail. There have always been two wings of the Conservative Party: the hardline neoliberal economic conservatives and the social conservatives, essentially the City and the Country wings. One lot wants to privatise everything and doesn't care what you do with your genitals, while the other wants to go hunting and doesn't like the nouveau riche. There is of course some (uncomfortable) overlap: the PM wants to go hunting while selling our schools to the highest bidder, but there's a basic tension between conserving things and exposing them to the whims of the Market. 

The Mail is the voice of the middle-class Country wing of the Conservatives: its readers are largely urban but they are deeply suspicious of slick billionaires and money-men, hence that paper's hounding of the bankers over recent years, which may have surprised some people. The Mail doesn't like foreigners, gays, liberals, socialists, feminists, the Scots, Welsh-speakers, Eurpoeans and anyone else who thinks Britain could do with changing. It likes 1952. It distrusts Big Money for the same reasons I do: it sees them as a global elite of asset-strippers. It also suspects that David Cameron is a Tino: a Tory in Name Only. It hates his supposed social liberalism and thinks – bafflingly for me – that he's going to see Real Conservatism down the river. So it's got into bed with Lord Ashcroft, who is the very personification of City Conservatism: a man with billions acquired from dubiously labyrinthine business deals, multiple passports and a buffet approach to tax residence. There's also a deeper irony: while the Mail masquerades as the staunch defender of Country Conservatism and Englishness, it's owned by a man who claims to be French for tax purposes, via a series of shell companies located in some very distant islands. Much like Ashcroft, in fact. 

So what we have is a civil war in British conservatism, in which personal vendettas between Cameron and Ashcroft, and the Mail and Cameron, mask deeper and often contradictory struggles for the definition of conservatism. The pig-boffing is probably untrue and if true, probably unproveable, and has given millions (including me) a day of joy, but it's a distraction from the real arguments. 

The other big story is the one that almost nobody has noticed, which is a shame as it's far more important and instructive than the one about the Prime Minsterial Appendage and where it might or might not have been. The American authorities, acting on a tip-off from a European pressure group, has caught Volkswagen cheating on its cars' emissions. It fitted software that detected when emissions tests were being conducted, and altered the exhaust gases to conform to the legal limits. When the cars were out on the roads, they emitted forty times more NO2 than the law allowed. I'll type that again: forty times above the legal limit. 

In fact a lot of this deserves spelling out in italics and probably bold. One of the biggest corporations in the world took the deliberate decision to a) make cars that are FORTY times more poisonous than an already lax law allowed, then b) decided to find a way to hide this fact and c) invented a mechanism to do so. Then they did it. They produced 11 MILLION of these vehicles, worldwide.

This isn't a rogue engineer fiddling with a couple of test vehicles. VW is a global corporation worth hundreds of billions of euro. To install a device on a range of cars required work by engineers, software developers, chemists, accountants, lawyers and directors. Multiple committees will have held meetings to agree that they would deliberately break the law and add massively to global warming, pollution, and to damage the health of millions of people. It's not an accident, it's a conspiracy. Car manufacturers have always fiddled their performance and emissions results: it's well known that the figures in unreadable text on adverts are produced in lab conditions with heavily modified vehicles rather than in ordinary driving conditions, but this is way beyond that kind of game-playing, and it's likely other manufacturers will have done the same. 

My point, I think, is that you can't trust corporations. They are liars and cheats. They spend a lot of money persuading us that they care and that they are progressive contributors to a better future. Car manufacturers always promote efficiency, safety and green credentials. They make and sell a few hybrid or electric vehicles and make sure they get press coverage. Here's what Volkswagen claims, for instance:

It produces a Sustainability Report and claims it will become the 'world leader in environmental protection'. 

This is lies from start to finish. Greenwash. Tony Benn once said that 'the way migrants are treated is instructive, because it shows you how governments would treat the rest of us if they could get away with it'. Volkswagen treats us this way because it thought it could get away with it. Like every other capitalist institution, its purpose is the immediate acquisition of profit. It has no conscience, green or otherwise. Producing a few thousand electric cars is part of a PR operation, not a commitment to mitigate the destructive effects of the internal combustion engine. When faced with the opportunity to make billions, it deliberately opted to poison us all and break the laws of the most powerful state on earth. 

Volkswagen is not an outlier, or an outlaw, or an aberration. It is a mainstream, ordinary company, and it behaves the way all companies do if they think they can get away with it. Will anyone go to prison? Probably not, though the American authorities are tougher on this kind of thing than you might think. 

And people wonder why I'm a socialist…

Doing god?

If I were a vole of faith, which I'm not, I'd feel pretty let down by my political leaders: those who profess a strong faith (such as Blair and Bush) seemed to use God as a mute supporter for torture, surveillance, illegal wars and free-market capitalism. Their sins are enough to persuade any reasonable believer that secular states are infinitely preferable to religious ones.

The latest intervention is by David Cameron, who has released an 'Easter Message'. This is weird enough. Christmas is one of many winter festivals across the world and it's closely followed by the new year, so it seems reasonable that prominent citizens might have some kind of message at the year's end, even if none of us pay any attention. But Easter's a very specific event, and not one easily understood other than on a deeply theological level.

What does Call Me Dave say?

The prime minister, who held an Easter reception in Downing Street, quoted from the Gospel of Luke as he spoke of "we"  Christians.
"This is the time when, as Christians, we remember the life, sacrifice and living legacy of Christ. The New Testament tells us so much about the character of Jesus; a man of incomparable compassion, generosity, grace, humility and love. These are the values that Jesus embraced, and I believe these are values people of any faith, or no faith, can also share in, and admire.
"It is values like these that make our country what it is – a place which is tolerant, generous and caring. A nation which has an established faith, that together is most content when we are defined by what we are for, rather than defined by what we are against. In the book of Luke, we are told that Jesus said, 'Do to others as you would have them do to you' – advice that when followed makes for a happier, and better society for everyone."
He told the assembled guests that he welcomed a Christian "fightback". He said: "I think there's something of a fightback going on, and we should welcome that. The values of the Bible, the values of Christianity, are the values that we need."

I fear that Dave is developing messianic tendencies - always useful when one's administration is in difficulties. Whenever Blair didn't have any evidence, he referred to God and his conscience in place of empirical truth. In Dave's case, it's particularly cynical because he previously said this about his beliefs:

"As Boris Johnson once said, his religious faith is a bit like the reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes. That sums up a lot of people in the Church of England. We are racked with doubts, but sort of fundamentally believe, but don't sort of wear it on our sleeves or make too much of it. I think that is sort of where I am."

I think we can assume from this that he's a lazy atheist or agnostic: not someone who's every given religion much thought, but a cultural Anglican who knows very well that his core voters wouldn't be very impressed by indifference. So he's recast uninterest as a classic English tolerance. 


So I think this original statement is rather deceptive, and his latest 'message' seems to by a cynical and dishonest attempt to import the Reaganite playbook into the UK. I could spend several paragraphs pointing out that tolerance and kindness is only one strand of Christianity - but instead, I'd advise you to visit any Northern Irish Presbyterian chapel, consult the actual Bible to familiarise yourself with certain rather unpleasant aspects to be found there, or read about the Crusades, the Reformation etc. etc. etc. (or read the Left Behind books). I could also point out that of all the positive characteristics Cameron lists as specifically Christian (which is pretty insulting: I'm caring, generous and tolerant, and so are many Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Jedi), none are terms which one could currently apply to his government. This is the administration which has cut state support for disabled children, for instance, yet continues to design new nuclear weapons at a cost of £80bn - not a policy sanctioned by the New Testament, as far as I remember.


But what really caught my eye in this statement is this talk of a 'fightback'. Against whom? Atheists are not burning Christians at the stake. Nor are Christians discriminated against by law: far from it. Anglican Bishops have permanent seats in the legislature. England and Scotland have Established churches (Wales, despite being traditionally very religious, disestablished the Church in Wales). Certainly leading scientists and intellectuals are more strident in defence of atheism, but in general, postmodernity seems to be a culture of religion. See for example, the way sub-contintental immigrants are now routinely described in terms of their religion rather than their other cultural or ethnic identities, bringing about confrontation. 


No, there's another, more disgusting reason why David Cameron has suddenly declared jihad upon we inoffensive atheists. Just as the Tories have been attempting to import the culture wars into British politics (whipping up 'morality' and 'identity' politics to disguise viciously sectarian economic policies), they've decided to extend this to the religious arena. 


Perhaps you're too young to remember the Reagan-Carter election of 1980. I was 5, but distinctly remember poring avidly over the newspapers as the campaign unfolded. The sitting Democratic President Carter was a peanut farmer from Georgia, and a practicing and ordained Baptist minister. He was (and is) a fundamentally decent, humane and thoughtful man who governed for all Americans and allowed his faith to inform his politics without directing it. He is, I think, one of the greatest politicians of the last century, though one whose Presidency was marooned and curtailed by events and the viciousness of his opponents. 


Ronald Reagan was a former actor, turncoat union leader, vacuous and vicious governor of California and a long-term machine politician, a cheery (and brilliant) communicatory who fronted for a sinister security and business network desperate to regain power after the Nixon disaster made Republicans damaged goods. Reagan was technically Christian, but wore his religious beliefs - if any - very lightly indeed, appearing in church only on official duties or - and this bit is important - when an election was in the offing. 


In 1980, the Cold War was at its height, characterised by the Republicans as the Godly against the Godless Atheists in Moscow. The 1970s had exposed (just like now) the total failure of American capitalism to generate good jobs for Americans - real wages peaked in 1975 and American workers have been getting poorer ever since. Reagan beat Carter with two messages: 'the shining city on the hill', which promised a brighter future without any explanation of how it would be achieved (credit/debt turned out to be the answer), in contrast to Carter's gloomy realism, and by harnessing the latent anger of core Republican voters - those who saw America as a religious crusade. 


Reagan's genius was to persuade voters that he - the non-practising man who preferred golf to god on a Sunday morning - was the true candidate of the religious electorate, rather than the Reverend Carter, who still preaches and teaches Sunday School. In doing so, Reagan unleashed the revolting elements active in American protestantism: bigotry, fraud, 'prosperity gospels', homophobia and so, with which he probably had no sympathy at all. As a political strategy, it was absolute genius: millions of men and women denied decent jobs, homes, a stake in society, were persuaded that only the Republicans stood between them and Atheist Communism. The fight against abortion, women's rights and a whole panoply of other causes rallied them round the flag and saved the party from irrelevance. Over the longer term, however, it's proved destructive. Moderates defected from the party and it was taken over by ageing extremists out of touch with the electorate - hence the current race for the Republican nomination and impending defeat. 


This is the politics which Cameron's confected Manichaean battle draws on. He knows that even the Daily Mail is hostile to his economic policies. He knows that it, the Telegraph and similar outlets want a more-or-less censorious and dominant Church of England, and that they think the world is in the throes of a religious war to the death. It's fertile territory, and he's making a grab for it - and just like Reagan, he doesn't even believe it. He's just cynically harnessing the fears of religious voters to garner votes. It may work in the short term - though I doubt it because British Christians (having a folk memory of the religious Civil War) are scared of extremes.


I imagine that ordinary decent believers would be horrified by this. Certainly there are plenty of religious bigots in this country, across all faiths, but I get the sense that most religious people are kind and tolerant people. The cynicism with which they're being encouraged to see the Conservative Party as Defenders of Faith against liberal atheism is breathtaking, especially as the party's neoliberalism runs counter to pretty much everything Jesus said about caring for one another and its leaders are as Godless as the rest of us. 

Merry Christmas, Proles!

The semiotics of David Cameron's Christmas card are fascinating.

Of course his children are in it: privacy is something you wield as a weapon, and break when you feel like it. It's nice, though, to see Cameron kicking back in the kind of clothes he wears at home, rather than the rather downmarket clobber he's forced to wear in public because his advisors don't think that Lord Liverpool is a role model the public can relate to.

The union-flag painted child is intriguing. I didn't know that the UK had a team playing in the Nativity, but clearly the Camerons have found someone to cheer on. I'm guessing it's Herod. More worryingly though, they seem to have borrowed Will from The Inbetweeners to pose as Cameron's son.

Clearly there are similarities: one's also a confused and uptight spoilt brat slumming it amongst the proletariat in a derelict public sphere. The other one's a fictional character. The only remaining question is this: which one is really the Briefcase Wanker?

Cameron's New York smackdown

The New York Times isn't impressed with David Cameron's adoption of Mubarak techniques for dealing with urban disorder:

Mr. Cameron, and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, should know better. They risk long-term damage to Britain’s already fraying social compact.Making poor people poorer will not make them less likely to steal. Making them, or their families, homeless will not promote respect for the law. Trying to shut down the Internet in neighborhoods would be an appalling violation of civil liberties and a threat to public safety, denying vital real-time information to frightened residents.Britain’s urban wastelands need constructive attention from the Cameron government, not just punishment. His government’s wrongheaded austerity policies have meant fewer public sector jobs and social services. Even police strength is scheduled to be cut. The poor are generally more dependent on government than the affluent, so they have been hit the hardest.What Britain’s sputtering economy really needs is short-term stimulus, not more budget cutting. Unfortunately, there is no sign that Mr. Cameron has figured that out. But, at a minimum, burdens need to be more fairly shared between rich and poor — not as a reward to anyone, but because it is right.

Fair play is one traditional British value we have always admired. And one we fear is increasingly at risk. 

When you're too rightwing and populist for Americans to stomach, you've really lost it. His desperate cheerleading for swingeing penalties (6 months for stealing a bottle of water) is driven by two things: fear, and a pathological preference for Daily Mail-friendly electoral calculation over thoughtful administration.

Vignettes of democracy

Two tit-bits from the world of politics: 

Cameron spoke to the Conservative backbench 1922 committee for about 20 minutes tonight but not one asked him about hacking scandal, PA reports.

A Conservative source said Cameron was adamant he would not apologise for trying to get the media onside in the run-up to the general election.

Right. So the only Tory Party body dedicated to holding the leader to account didn't bother raising the only news issue of the month, despite Cameron's former press secretary being arrested, and evidence that his aides deliberately kept him in the dark to avoid incriminating him. Mother of Parliaments everyone!

Meanwhile, Cameron has clearly decided that presentation is far more important than the principle that politicians shouldn't be pushed around by the press. Getting the Murdochs onside for political advantage is far more important. What an example to us all. How confident do I feel about his leadership? Er, not very.

Meanwhile, I'm reading the Moomins cartoon strip, volume 6. Here's how I'm feeling:

Should David Cameron resign?

I mentioned this aspect of the hacking story briefly yesterday, but Polly Toynbee takes it up very effectively.

But is there more to come? The Mail on Sunday reported that Cameron intended to hire the BBC's Guto Harri as his press secretary. So close, apparently, was the appointment that the Harri family visited the Camerons one weekend in 2007 at Chipping Norton to discuss it, but the job went to Andy Coulson after Rebekah Brooks "is said to have told Mr Cameron that the post should go to Mr Coulson to strengthen links between the Tories and News International". Is this true? Reviewing the papers on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday, I pointed out this story and said Harri was well-known in the BBC as a straight-as-a-die, honest man. I was pleased to get a text from Harri just after the show saying "Thanks". Does that mean it is true? I called Harri, who now works for Boris Johnson, to check. Yes, he said he'd heard tell that his name was not acceptable to News International. "I heard it as gossip on the grapevine – but I have no idea whether or not it's true. Yes, I did talk to David Cameron about taking the job – but whilst I lingered they'd clearly approached Andy Coulson." He had a good idea who the source from the Sun was for the story. How Cameron must wish he had given Harri the job. The idea that News International planted their man in the heart of Downing Street is truly shocking.

If this is true, then the Prime Minister has to resign. You can't have the man running the country choosing taxpayer-paid officials according to how acceptable he is to a particular media company.

Time to Gove

Who else in government is in hock to News International? How about everybody's favourite ex-Newsnight Education Moron Minister Michael Gove?

Will Michael Gove also be drawn into the sleaze? In 2009, the Conservatives published a list of shadow cabinet ministers' outside interests. News International were very generous to him, paying £5,000 a month for his services as journalist for one hour a week. That’s £1,250 a week. Contrast this with the £250 he received from Scotland on Sunday.

Meanwhile, one of the most evil papers on the planet (the Daily Mail, in case you didn't realise), claims that Rebekah Brooks vetoed Cameron's plan to have an ex-BBC press spokesman, and suggested Coulson instead - to 'strengthen links' between News International and the Tory administration.

If that's true - and as it's in the Mail, that's an 'if' the size of Greenland - then the Prime Minister will have to resign. If it isn't true, he'll have to sue, given the monstrosity of such a claim.

Out of their own mouths, they condemn themselves

What do the Tories think about themselves?

"Over the years we have come across as graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take"

"collectively we are not always an appealing proposition". 

 "Over the years we have come across as graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take."

He concluded that people don't join because they "think we'll beg and steal from them. And they're right". 

"When we are together we are not always a group of people to whom many of our potential members are going to be magnetically drawn." 

Their solution: snob appeal and corruption?

One idea was for "The PMQ DIY Lunch: Bring your own sandwiches to watch PMQs in a different fine country house in the constituency (by courtesy of a PPC member) every week; glass of wine, cup of coffee, informal discussion, yours for a fiver".

He also proposed party supporters are given access to politicians in the US in return for cash. "We might have 'Just Another Ordinary Day: We'll organise it but choose how you get there, stay where you like for as long as you like and on one of the days breakfast briefing with a senior staffer, tour of the White House, lunch with a senator … yours for cost plus a £1,000 donation to Woca."

Who is this guy? Well, until he was found dead in a toilet at Glastonbury Festival this weekend (and what an indictment of the so-called 'alternative culture' that Tories feel welcome there), he was in charge of West Oxfordshire Conservative Association. Its MP? One David Cameron.

Cheeky bastard

David Cameron is threatening to block Gordon Brown's appointment to the IMF because

 it was important that the role went to someone who "gets" the dangers of excessive debt and deficit. 

Er… that's true. Gordon Brown's utterly guilty of encouraging the banks and other speculators to go mad. The idea was that taxes from the City would fill in the gap where proper industries that employed lots of people used to be. More generous benefits and better schools, hospitals and so on would go some way to ameliorating the fact that we had an economy but fewer and fewer jobs other than hairdressers and Starbucks waiters.

In a swipe at Brown, Cameron raised doubts about his suitability for the post, saying he was someone "who didn't think we had a debt problem in the UK when we self evidently do".

But I'm not taking this from Cameron. (It's not true, for a start: lots of countries have far worse deficits and higher debts and get along fine: he's just using the recession as an excuse to cut public services for ideological reasons).

Cameron's the multimillionaire son of a stockbroker who spent his entire time in opposition calling for less regulation of the banks. He actually thought that the minimal rules in place under Labour should be weakened even further because he has this idea that 'creative chaos' will produce an innovative society. Bashing Brown is a deeply cynical attempt to rewrite history, and I'm shocked he's been this blatant. The pair of them thought that a global economy could and should be run on massive multiples of debt - but Cameron was by far the worst of the two.

What we need at the IMF is someone who isn't white and western, who isn't a man, and who isn't a capitalist. The IMF shouldn't be the first-aid kit for a system that's failed: it should be a toolbox for a more sensible and redistributive economy. It was pointed out recently that the entire crash was the result of too much money sloshing around, not too little: the IMF is guilty of punishing those countries who resisted these overbalancing attacks (particularly the South Americans, who've ridden the storm very well) and rewarding those who've got into the worse messes through their own greed.

Boo to Brown and Cameron can just feck off.

Thoughts, schmoughts

Our Dear Leader, who inexplicably bothered acquiring an Oxford degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, has announced that from now on, intelligence and reason are no longer required to be a politician.

"For me, politics shouldn't be some mind-bending exercise. It's about what you feel in your gut – about the values you hold dear and the beliefs you instinctively have. And I just feel it, in my gut, that AV is wrong."

Lovely. I look forward to the return of hanging, book-burning, paedo-lynching and all the other manifestations of nice, decisive gut-following. Clearly having an ideological vision of the ideal state is old hat. We just want knees jerking in unison, not mature reflection in response to changing events and contexts.

Unless… you don't think that he's posturing as a populist simply to pander to the prejudices of the Sun and Daily Mail readership do you? Surely not. That would be desperately cynical.

Anyway, I'm keen to hear what his 'gut' tells him about the Public Sector Borrowing Rate, what the maximum PPM CO2 level should be, where interest rates should be and all the other intricate decisions that need a little more thought than an instant 'reckon'.

Tax the Rich, Says David Cameron

No, you're not dreaming, and neither am I. He really did say it, and point out that the tax base shouldn't be the ordinary citizen without the means to avoid paying his or her fair share.

The Pakistani fiscal position was a serious one because "too few people pay tax. Too many of your richest people are getting away without paying much tax at all – and that's not fair".

Unfortunately, he said it in Pakistan, about Pakistan. Back at home, his brutal assault on the Inland Revenue's corporate and High-Earner units, his obsession with beggaring the poor and grovelling to the rich continues. He's even employing the worst tax avoiders: such as Philip Green, who paid his Monaco-dwelling wife £1,500,000,000 tax-free!

As you were.

Outrageous spin of the day

David Cameron meekly proposed banning Libyan Air Force flights over Libya to protect civilians (despite not saying a word when the Saudis crossed into Bahrain to use British weaponry on peaceful protestors). In any case, the rest of the West jeered and told him to shut up.

Unless you're the Foreign Secretary. Apparently Cameron's thinking-aloud has miraculous powers:

Hague also says that the talk of no-fly zones has affected the way Gaddafi has used air power. It is possible that Cameron has "saved many lives", he says.

Of course it has. Well done Dave.

Parliamentary Pantomime

It's Prime Minister's Question Time again - the weekly ritual of smartarse point-scoring which unfailingly persuades citizens that their elected representatives are both dim and petty. David Cameron's by far the worst: instead of substantively discussing issues, he relies on an Eton/Oxford debating club wit which mostly consists of snide put-downs and deliberate misquotes.

One question caught my eye today.

Robert Halfon, a Conservative, asks if it was wrong for British universities to engage with Libya.

Cameron says universities should ask themselves some "searching questions" about what they did.

Now, I've slagged off the universities who've got into bed with dictatorships on this site, and I stick to that. Universities should be held to a higher standard, quite frankly, because we're more intelligent, although I'd make a distinction between the executives and academics on this point.

However, I won't be lectured on this subject by a Tory: they ruined the university sector last time they were in government and forced universities to beg borrow or steal funding from anywhere. The whole point of Thatcherite economics is that the pursuit of money is the highest venture, and that morality is a question to be discarded in favour of efficiency and free markets. The universities didn't wake up one day and give Gaddafi a call: they were forced to abandon morality amidst a greedy free-f0r-all established by the Conservatives. They created the market: they can't then preach to people forced to shop there.

Finally: it's a incredibly rich for him to claim that universities should be feeling bad while his government has consistently sold the Libyans massive amounts of weaponry. Sheer hypocrisy.

You've got to admire Cameron's sheer chutzpah

Watching TV today, you'll see the Prime Minister in various North African and Near Eastern countries (Egypt yesterday, dictatorship Kuwait today) expounding his firm belief in democracy, peaceful protest and freedom.

Wonderful. Until you look at the people on the plane with him.

Ian King, chief executive of BAE Systems, will be the most senior figure on the trade delegation that also includes Victor Chavez of Thales UK and Alastair Bisset of Qinetiq. The 36-strong business delegation, nearly a quarter of whom come from the defence and aerospace sectors, will attend some, but not all, of the prime minister's three-day visit to the Gulf.

Other defence and aerospace manufacturers accompanying Cameron include Rob Watson, regional director of Rolls Royce; Charles Hughes, vice president marketing of the Cobham Group; Douglas Caster, the chief executive of Ultra Electronics; Andy Pearson, managing director of Babcock International Group; and Richard Barrett, regional director of Atkins.

Following on from his government's recent statements about not being 'ashamed' but 'proud' of the arms trade, and having ordered Britain's embassies to privilege trade above every other activity, Cameron's tour is actually a weapons sales roadshow, flogging anti-citizen devices as much as defence machinery. The UK sells huge amounts of weaponry to tiny Kuwait (not sure why: their armed forces ran away when the Iraqis visited in 1990) and is currently selling Eurofighters around the Gulf: there are several going spare as they're a bit rubbish and the UK can't afford its full order. The defence minister, Gerald Howarth, is manning a stall at a weapons fair featuring 93 British arms dealers flogging (no pun intended) everything an insecure despot might need, from tasers to riot control vans. 15 civil servants are there too, 'supporting' ADS, the British death-merchants' promotional body ('free cattle prod with every dungeon'). (If that site sickens you, take the antidote with CAAT).

So don't swallow Cameron's hastily arranged speeches whole: this is a sales trip with a lot of shadowy men who sniff opportunity.

Full Marx

Steve Bell - genius cartoonist - has excelled himself today with his take on Cameron's economic philosophy:

Lib Dems aren't the only liars

The Educational Maintenance Allowance is a small amount of money (maximum £30 per week) paid to 16-19 years old students to allow them to stay in further education. It's means tested, and covers perhaps a week's bus tickets, lunches, or some study materials. It makes a huge difference to many students, and keeps them off the dole queue (there's no alternative work: 1 million of the 2.5 million unemployed people are in the 16-24 age range.

So obviously the junta - largely millionaires privately educated at Eton and St. Paul's before Oxford and Cambridge) - are abolishing it.

The Prime Minister must be shocked by this savage attack on the young. After all, he promised before the election that it would be safe. Promised on camera. And they wonder why people don't trust the Tories.

Poor people's violence is different…

David Cameron was overjoyed by the student violence: it meant he could spend the interview time condemning it, rather than deal with the issues. Violence, he says, is 'unacceptable'.

I agree. There's nothing more despicable than anonymous, disguised students running wild and going on orgies of pointless, selfish violence.

Let's remind ourselves of what Call Me Dave was up to when he was a student, shall we?

Each year, he paid around £10,000 for membership of the Bullingdon Club. He'd dress up in special silly clothes (another few thousand pounds) and go on sprees of drinking and smashing. Because the club had a reputation for destroying restaurants then buying the owners' silence with wads of cash, the club had to go under false names to book rooms.

David Cameron was among drunken posh yobs who vandalised a restaurant, it was claimed last night.

The Tory leader has always denied taking part in the attack by the Bullingdon Club, the elitist Oxford University student society.

Mayor of London and Cameron's fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson, below, admits he was part of the mayhem.But a former club member says the idea Cameron was not there on the night in 1987 is "ludicrous", claiming he "sprinted off" when others ended up in the cells. The idea someone just went to bed early! I mean, come on... " the Financial Times blogs reports him as saying.

He adds: "Details have been kept a closely-guarded secret by the group of old friends. A policy of omerta has descended on the Cameron episode."

Clearly upper-class violence is a jolly jape, whereas political violence is despicable. Or am I missing something here?

Say "cheese" and look caring

Ferdinand VI had Amigoni.
Jahangir had Bishandas.
George III had Bourgeois
Charles I (England) had van Dyck
Charles III and IV of Spain had Goya.
Henry VIII had Hans Holbein.
Charles V had Titian
Philip IV had Vélaquez.

David Cameron has Andrew Parsons and Nicky Woodhouse.

Who?

David Cameron's personal photographer and film-maker. They used to be paid by the Tory Party, and now they're paid by the taxpayer, because obviously every government needs a court artist, especially in the midst of a deep recession.

Parsons takes propaganda pictures like this (and if he objects to me reproducing it without a fee, he can sod off. I've paid for it through my taxes):

I'm sure all the public servants losing their jobs will recognise that some people are more deserving than others.

Tories = scum (reprise)

Like a one-man demolition crew hellbent on knocking down Cameron's house of lovely cards, Daniel Hannan comes out with another gem. Not content with treating Europe like a leper colony (he's an MEP) and describing the NHS as a 60-year disaster, he's announced that his political hero is Enoch Powell, the Wolverhampton MP who prophesied 'rivers of blood' if immigration wasn't halted, before leaving the Tories to become an Ulster Unionist MP - presumably immigration's fine as long as it's British people invading others people's countries.

What a charmer. Don't fool yourself that he's a loose cannon or the last hurrah of the buffers: he's young and a rising star, a new generation of the mean-spirited, racist, Thatcherite men in sharp suits who caused the 1980s. Behind Cameron's devious, plummy niceness, there are sharp teeth and dangerous views.

Don't forget: Tories = scum

Amongst the other books I've got on the go at the moment, I'm reading Iain Sinclair's Downriver, a sprawling exposé of the full Thatcherite horror that was London in the 1980s. Now it looks like that pink-cheeked proletariat-rapist Cameron looks like being the next Prime Minister, here's a passage about the Tories from Sinclair's book - the Minister reminds me of Cameron:

Closer inspection… revealed no youth, but a shrink-wrapped young man - who had forgotten to climb out of his lightweight suit before sending it to the cleaners. Or some kind of quantum leap in the field of headshrinking. The Minister looked like a ventriloquist's dummy - which, in a sense, he was: the latex exception that proves the rule. The rest of the Widow's gang split neatly into the Uglies (shifty, weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven-week embryos) and the Bunters: smooth, fleshy, near-identical, bum-faced nonentities in Savile Row suits and bulletproof glasses. Apocalypse-resistant unflappables. The Uglies had lost ground recently, the time for cracking skulls was past. They were ennobled, sent to the city like feral cats. No longer the nights of broken glass, lycanthropes and zoo-rejects with burning brands: it was the mid-term era of soft sell, Brylcreem-condomed, safe-handed boys, and public men of conscience (and private fortune).

This boy, the Minister, had been picked because he smelt like a political virgin: he was fresh, oven-ready, blatant with coal tar and Old Spice; bubbling enthusiastic, popping up everywhere with endorsements that kept him spinning him dizzily around the outer circle, never quite 'one of us', but very useful as a fag and disposable messenger… he remained, basically, a whipping boy, buoyant enough, and stupid enough, to deflect heat-seeking missiles from such entrenched citadels of the left as the Church of England, the Royal Opera House, and the Sunday Telegraph.