Let's forget about fashion and go back to politics

David Cameron's announced his big new plan at a press conference complete with 'real people' saying suspiciously focus-grouped bland things designed to attract people who've never vote Tory before: sell public services to co-operatives. Not, you understand, the co-operatives founded by lefty types in the 19th century to pass on economies of scale rather than enriching middlemen.

No, Dave hates government, with its pension-providing, healthcare-arranging, schoolteaching meddling. He wants to privatise all that, but he knows that the British rather like the NHS and getting pensions backed by the 5th largest economy in the world. So he's dreamed up this co-op idea: that we could form a group to 'provide' services (e.g. open a school or social services centre) contracted by the state, in much the same way that Nike only brands trainers rather than making them.

What are the advantages to the Tories? Mainly, getting rid of 'big government' and the trade unions who are active in public service. It's ideological rather than beneficial. One point: if a council fails to provide an adequate service, you can sack them by voting them out. You also have a degree of oversight - you can demand documents, for instance. None of this will happen under the RyanGovernment model: weird cults and big businesses will start schools and their decisions and practices will be 'commercially confidential'.

The Swedes elected a rightwing government which permitted private groups to operate state schools - and equality has started to slip backwards in this most egalitarian of states.

Stand up for government. When it goes wrong (e.g. Iraq), it goes horribly wrong. When it goes right (the NHS, the Open University, pensions, education) it shows how great humans can be when they decide to work together rather than grabbing their personal piece of heaven. But then again, grabbing what you can is the core of Conservative ideology.

Propaganda

An election approaches, folks. Here's Labour's latest puntastic effort:

More Tory Evil

I know you're all bored by politics (despite the fact that some of you clearly need to know more), and I promise to talk about kittens and things soon, but there was a big story last week which absolutely nobody followed up, and I think it's important.

The Conservative Party announced plans to allow local government to vary the benefits given to the jobless in their area: the idea is to force the unemployed to take work by paying less if there are more jobs available.

Fine, you might say: everyone should take whatever work is out there, whether it fits their skills or not. Work is, as Marx knew, good for self-esteem.

However, it's far more likely that councils will use this power for evil, and with no consequences at all. The money for unemployment benefit doesn't come from your council tax, it comes from income tax, via central government - but most people neither know nor care. So parties can run nasty-minded campaigns locally promising 'lower benefits for dole scroungers' and win big - the poor don't vote and the middle-classes fear and loathe the poor (hence the existence of the Daily Mail).

What we'll get is a beggar-thy-neighbour routine which takes us back to the system of Parish Relief, when the Parish had to pay for gruel and workhouse accommodation for the poor: the result was that the workless were ruthlessly forced to move on to the next parish. It's not difficult to imagine Tory (or even Labour/Lib Dem) councils reducing benefits for local people so much that these unfortunate people move on to another, perhaps more caring council, which will then have to pay their housing benefit (which is a locally-controlled fund). This will lead to rich areas attracting rich people who vote with a combination of low taxes and minimal public services (the rich don't use libraries, Meals on Wheels, lollipop men, environmental health operatives etc.), while other areas will become single-class ghettos of deprivation, in which council money will have to be diverted from quality services to housing benefit for people who don't vote, forced out of their own localities to the detriment of community in every way.

What a nasty, cheap piece of electoral trickery. They're still scum.

Stoke's in the news again

And as usual, for the wrong reasons…

Today saw a march by the latest bunch of fascists, the English Defence League (weirdly, there's a Welsh Defence League too, though it seems to consist of English men and doesn't concern itself with English second-home owners and the fate of the Welsh language). And as usual, the fascists couldn't control themselves and went on the rampage. The supposed cause was 'Islamic extremism', despite the fact that Stoke's Islamic population is small and well-integrated. There's certainly no sign of extremism.

They simply provocateurs. Stoke's been a multicultural city for well over a century. Jews, the Irish and people from the subcontinent helped to build the city and run its services - particularly the hospitals - without any street-level tension. What's happened to Stoke is that fascists have talked the impressionable into thinking that economic failure is the fault of immigrants, foreign bankers or other strangers: Mosley did it very successfully in the 1930s in this city, and the BNP and their splinter groups are doing the same. When they aren't agitating, there isn't any trouble - instead, the fascists are trying to inflame a situation for their own political ends.

Stoke's problems are those of capitalism. It had three skilled industries: coal, steel and above all, pottery. Globalisation has encouraged the shareholders of all these industries to close down their Stoke operations and move elsewhere without a thought for the workers. Neither the proletariat nor the political parties meant to represent them are organised enough to resist the logic of the market, and into this vacuum stepped the fascists, who've replaced the class analysis with a racial one. It's a tempting argument for some Stokies: failed by the educational system, by the economic climate and by the government, some of them listen to a thug with simple answers delivered in a local or at least working-class accent. 95% of Potters aren't that stupid, of course - but the blame must lie with mainstream politics.

The Tories openly espouse globalisation as 'efficient': their interests have never been those of the working classes, but at least they're honest about it. Labour is more culpable, because it deliberately abandoned all pretence of resisting monetarism and globalisation as soon as power beckoned, too spineless to put an alternative case to the voters.

Islamic extremists didn't steal your job: capitalist extremists did.

Cameron's coming for YOU!

David Cameron has announced his big plan for 'saving' the state education sector (i.e. the one he has no personal experience of, having attended Eton).

"With our plans, if you want to become a teacher – and get funding for it – you need a 2:2 or higher. And we will also make sure we get some of the best graduates into teaching by offering to pay off their student loan. As long as you've got a first or 2:1 in maths or a rigorous science subject from a good university, you can apply."

1. Nobody with a third-class degree will be accepted onto teacher-training courses. I'm fine with that.
2. Nobody from former polytechnics will be accepted.

Oh dear. That's all my students. It implies that anybody studying at a former poly is thick. Only… some subjects were and are specialities of ex-polys. They weren't lesser universities, as they're treated now, but specialist institutions.

Many people attend such institutions because they can't or don't want to move away. They have family commitments, or jobs (part-time students are much more common in ex-polys). Staying at home is also a logical response to poverty - not everyone has Cameron's money to support their kids. Likewise, we specialise in second-chance education for mature students, whereas Cameron's vision of education is one of lithe young 18-year olds playing croquet (for some) and surly poor and ethnic students learning the rudiments of plumbing in dour Northern towns (for the rest of us). There's no vision of education as liberation or empowerment here - instead it's a means of entrenching privilege. Sure, a few outstanding poor students will be plucked from Skid Row to prove that the system works, but there sure ain't any commitment to raising the sky for everybody.

It's perfectly possible to end up at a low-entry institution thanks to poor quality schooling or personal failings. I did rather badly at A-level and got into my university (Bangor) via the Clearing system, then finished by first degree top of the year (3 prizes too). Some people blossom late: Cameron will condemn you to the mistakes of your teenage years.

What the hell does Cameron define as a 'good' university? I suspect it's very easy to get high degree results from rich kids with all the resources in the world, who've been trained to assume that they can do whatever they want if they work hard enough and who've always been treated as golden children. It's harder to motivate and equip students who have children, a job, a difficult educational background and still manage to study. I'm hugely more proud of those of my students who've struggled against huge disadvantages and gained a 2.2 than I am of those who stroll in, do no work and get a 2.1.

But no. For the Conservatives, a 'good' university is one with a rowing club, lots of privately-educated students and a good deal of prestige.

The Tory plan (explained in this article) is that the division between polytechnics and universities will be reinstated. On the face of it, that's fine. The polytechnics specialised in high-quality teaching, often of vocational and science-based courses. Many of them did these better than the universities: my own institution was nationally famous for the range and quality of its languages teaching. Then in 1992, they were forced to become universities, and started to look like 2nd-class cousins - judged for the quality of their research output despite never having been funded or encouraged to pursue research before, judged for their 'low' grade intake, despite having a commitment to their local communities and widening participation.

The Tories don't want to reinstate the potentially useful division of labour between universities and polytechnics. Instead, they want a two-tier system in which rich posh kids go to prestigious places to become leaders of society, and the rest go to their local community college to become call-centre drones and mobile phone salemen. Yet again, Ritzer's McDonaldisation thesis is proved accurate.

Cameron's plan is nothing more than thinly-disguised class war.

Now that Kate's instituted it, I nominate David Cameron as Wanker of the Week 2.

Don't mention the war

While the England-South Africa cricket is rained off, enjoy this piece of political satire from Spitting Image, 'I've never met a nice South African', which was their contribution to the anti-Apartheid struggle in the early 1980s.



It certainly wasn't the official line: Margaret Thatcher repeatedly called Nelson Mandela a terrorist (see David Cameron's apology and Tory former minister Tebbit's rejection of that apology here) and supported the South African regime mostly because it was militantly anti-communist. Oh, and she didn't like black people either. Young Conservatives used to wear t-shirts reading 'Hang Nelson Mandela'.

They'll be back in government in May. Just saying.

More fun than marking!

If you haven't seen them, the Tories' poster campaign features a heavily airbrushed leader of the Tory Party with the slogan 'We can't go on like this' (which makes it sound like he's asking for a divorce).

Some naughty boys in the Labour Party have made the tools available to create your own. Here are some examples (I really like the Harry Enfield 'Tim Nice-but-Dim' one), and there are more here. Get the template here and use Franklin Gothic Demi for the font. I'll have a go once I've done more work.

Airbrushed airhead

The Tories are running a Big Brother style poster campaign: airbrushed photos of Call Me Dave Cameron with silly vague statements next to his porky face (they seem to have moved his spare cheeks to his monumental forehead).

Needless to say, people are 'editing' them. I shall fetch the paint-pot as soon as one goes up near me.

With friends like these

Banished for their unspeakable crimes against the universe, the Lords escape with the intention of destroying it for their own ends, aided by selfish humans and renegade time lords, but are thwarted by a plucky Scot whose only concern is for humanity. But that's enough laboured metaphors drawing on the last David Tennant Doctor Who episode.



I've a proud record of never supporting Labour's leaders. I didn't want Brown to become Prime Minister (a McDonnell/Skinner ticket would be my dream team). I hated Blair before he was even party leader. I thought John Smith and Kinnock were rightwing sellouts.

But. For all their incompetent and right-leaning faults, the current Labour leadership is better by far than the Tory government which I think is going to win the election in May or June. Come the Conservapocalypse, you'll realise that Cameron and his well-fed, privileged Friedmanites (the origin of 'greed is good') mean what they've been saying in recent months. They genuinely believe in 'small government', a term they picked up from the Reaganite (brilliantly cheesy site: needs sound) Republicans.

Like Reagan, they mean big government for bailing out their friends in the banking sector, and big government for the armed service and the weapons industry (proof on its own that socialist economics works), and small government for you: worse schools, worse hospitals, less social security, fewer universities with bigger class sizes and smaller subjects, lower or no minimum wage, lower taxes on the things they spend money on (i.e. big houses) and more taxes on the things the rest of us buy (food).

So you'd imagine, given the importance of this election, that the Labour Party would be united in desperation. Determined to pull together and put aside its differences in one last effort to save this country. You'd imagine wrongly. The only thing Labour any longer has in common with leftwing parties is its capacity to stab itself in the face. Today, failed Blairite non-entities Patricia Hewitt (great voting record, you koala-bothering git) and Geoff 'Buff' Hoon (aka Whoon, identical rightwing voting record) have stirred the pot by calling for a ballot of Labour MPs on the leadership.

I'm all for a new leader. A loud, dynamic, lefty. McDonnell, Skinner, Bob Marshall-Andrews, whoever. But not now. There are reasons to vote Labour (still). What undecided voter, however, will be attracted by yet more internecine warfare? The Tories don't do it like this. They're ruthless and decisive. They assassinate their leaders in the middle of the night. Labour prefers to act like an extended family opening up old feuds at a wedding reception - and for the last few years, it's been embittered Blairites like Charles Clarke, hooked on publicity and divorced from reality. The reality is that the Tories don't care about the working and lower-middle classes as anything other than voting fodder. Hewitt and Hoon have just done their bit to make the Rise of the Torymen inevitable.

Don't be evil. Don't vote Tory.

(Here's John McDonnell's reaction to a previous bit of New Labour spinning):

This is about the fourth or fifth, (I lost count some time ago), attempt by former New Labour apparatchiks to try and reinvent themselves. We have had former Blair/Brown insider advisers Neal Lawson and Jon Cruddas with Compass, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn with 2020 Vision, and now James Purnell and Jon Cruddas with Demos's Open Left.

No matter how clever the project's title, how well its re-launch statements are drafted and how smart its website, none of them can escape from the objective history of the part they played in creating and supporting the reactionary, political deviation that was New Labour, a political project that has brought the Labour party to the edge of extinction.

Between them all they have either been the architects of, the advisers to, the parliamentary lobby fodder in support of or the ministerial implementers of policies which have left at least half a million innocent people dead in Iraq, doubled the number of homeless families in Britain, privatised more public sector jobs than Thatcher and Major put together, undermined long-cherished basic civil liberties and forced through so brutal an attack on the recipients of welfare benefits that even the Thatcher government refused to implement.

Quoting past Labour party theoreticians, intellectualising justifications for betrayal in the language of an A-level sociology paper, and speaking left while voting right will not wash off the blood of the murdered Iraqis or stem the tears of a single parent forced off benefits or help explain to the unemployed person how they can live on £65-a-week jobseeker's allowance.

Some among this crew realised sooner than others that the only hope for their future political careers was to jump ship from New Labour and to rebrand themselves on the left. They have been assisted by parts of the media that are implicated in delivering the Labour party and the country up to Blair, Brown and Mandelson, and who are also trying to distance themselves from the creature they helped create.

The doctor's next mission: save the BBC (from the Torymen)

I said that Doctor Who justifies the licence fee (if you're not from the UK: the licence fee costs £142 and covers all BBC TV and radio (ad-free) and pays for the transmission network for all TV and radio, whatever network - bargain).

It's great. Unfortunately, the Conservative party utterly hate the BBC and public service broadcasting, and have done a deal with Rupert Murdoch's publishing and broadcasting empire: support the Tories in the upcoming election and we'll reduce the BBC to a pathetic shadow of its former self.

Russell T Davies (of Who mastery) defends the BBC passionately, here.

"To them it's a tax and they want to get rid of it."

"They'll freeze the licence fee and persuade Daily Mail readers it's the right thing to do by saying they're getting rid of all those digital channels they don't watch, that's the language they'll use."

"I think politicians only experience broadcasting through their own prism, through the Today programme and through the interviews they do. They don't sit down and watch Coronation Street or EastEnders."

"I'll come back and fight them at the barricades. I feel a bit like Alan Bennett, who said his favourite things about Britain were the BBC and the NHS."

If you vote Tory: no more Doctor Who (or semi-objective news, current affairs, documentaries, non-toy advertising children's television etc. etc. etc.). Just Fox, stamping on your face for ever.

What will life be like under the Tories?

Let's look at the ultimate free market economy shall we, one which has followed what the Tories are planning to do? All this is directly quoted from this article:

The state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes.

Outside the Forum in Inglewood, near downtown Los Angeles, California has already failed. The scene is reminiscent of the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, as crowds of impoverished citizens stand or lie aimlessly on the hot tarmac of the centre's car park. It is 10am, and most have already been here for hours. They have come for free healthcare: a travelling medical and dental clinic has set up shop in the Forum (which usually hosts rock concerts) and thousands of the poor, the uninsured and the down-on-their-luck have driven for miles to be here.

The queue began forming at 1am. By 4am, the 1,500 spaces were already full and people were being turned away. On the floor of the Forum, root-canal surgeries are taking place. People are ferried in on cushions, hauled out of decrepit cars.

Yet California is currently cutting healthcare, slashing the "Healthy Families" programme that helped an estimated one million of its poorest children. Los Angeles now has a poverty rate of 20%. Other cities across the state, such as Fresno and Modesto, have jobless rates that rival Detroit's. In order to pass its state budget, California's government has had to agree to a deal that cuts billions of dollars from education and sacks 60,000 state employees. Some teachers have launched a hunger strike in protest. California's education system has become so poor so quickly that it is now effectively failing its future workforce. The percentage of 19-year-olds at college in the state dropped from 43% to 30% between 1996 and 2004, one of the highest falls ever recorded for any developed world economy. California's schools are ranked 47th out of 50 in the nation. Its government-issued bonds have been ranked just above "junk".

Between 2004 and 2008, half a million residents upped sticks and headed elsewhere.

Riverside is an area in the southern part of the state where the desert has been conquered by mile upon mile of housing developments, strip malls and four-lane freeways. The tidal wave of foreclosures and repossessions that burst the state's vastly inflated property bubble first washed ashore here.

 One in four American mortgages that are "under water", meaning they are worth more than the home itself, are in California. In the Central Valley town of Merced, house prices have crashed by 70%. Two Democrat politicians have asked for their districts to be declared disaster zones, because of the poor economic conditions caused by foreclosures. In one city near Riverside, a squatter's camp of newly homeless labourers sleeping in their vehicles has grown up in a supermarket car park – the local government has provided toilets and a mobile shower.

For some campaigners and advocates against suburban sprawl and car culture, it has been a bitter triumph. "Let the gloating begin!" says James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, a warning about the high cost of the suburban lifestyle. Others see the end of the housing boom as a man-made disaster akin to a mass hysteria, but with no redemption in sight. "If California was an experiment then it was an experiment of mass irresponsibility – and that has failed," says Michael Levine.

Mendota … boldly terms itself "the cantaloup capital of the world", now has an unemployment rate of 38%. That is expected to rise above 50% as the harvest ends and labourers are laid off. City officials hold food giveaways every two weeks. More than 40% of the town's people live below the poverty level. Shops have shut, restaurants have closed, drugs and alcohol abuse have become a problem.

The state that once promised opportunities for working men and their families now promises only desperation.

Now, the future might be brighter for California than it seems - it attracts highly-educated migrants, and there's a burgeoning green tech economy, but overall, California is the poster child for capitalism. I don't mean that capitalism has gone wrong there - it's gone right. The idea is to transfer wealth from the poor masses (either through harvesting the surplus value of their labour, or by indoctrinating them into consumerism) to the bourgeoisie - except that millions of Californians are now discovering that, contrary to their understanding, they're actually the proletariat, living 50 miles away from the low-paid jobs to which they commute.

This is the world of The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein's term for the rightwing opportunism which sees crisis as the chance to impose savage, inhumane policies on the helpless. We aren't in a mountain of debt because Labour wasted money (the Tories keep calling it Labour's debt): we're in trouble because Labour presided over the deregulation of financial prudence and authorised greed - and the Tories only complained that they weren't deregulating fast enough. The difference between the two is that Labour could at least point to the (minimal) taxes flowing into the treasury - the Tories oppose tax and government.

So the logical outcome of Osborne's speech is that we'll see the withdrawal of comprehensive social care, healthcare, local services, bigger class sizes at all levels, less after-school activity, no school meals, more playing fields sold off, a stagnating minimum wage… and more freedom for the people who got us into this mess: their kids are privately educated and insured anyway.

If you don't believe me, look at the 1980-1987 period. That led to riots, by the way.

Yes Gideon, you're absolutely right

At the Tory conference yesterday, Gideon Osborne (who prefers to be known by his middle name, George), kept repeating the mantra 'We're all in this together', which according to Radio 4's Today programme, was nicked from High School Musical.

Of course we are, Gid. Only, most of us haven't inherited millions of pounds, gone to a top public school (boys only, £27,000 per year) then Oxford, where he joined the Bullingdon Club (£10,000 per year, men only), then straight into politics, never having had to find a job, struggle financially etc. Unlike you, we depend on the state services (health, education etc) which you are planning to savagely cut, safe in the knowledge that you can buy privately. The effects of these cuts (designed to sort out a deficit caused by bailing out the bankers and speculators you adore, ideologically align with and who fund your party) will hit us hard, not you. Sure, your investments might only grow from millions to several more millions, but freezing pay for civil servants earning £18000 pounds - enough for two terms at your school - will certainly make them poorer.

You lying, hypocritical wanker. How much contempt do you have for the public? Surely you don't really think that claiming solidarity with the rest of us will really work?

Oh dear - perhaps it will.

Bye Tracey! Take Damien with you?

Tracey Emin is planning to leave Britain because tax will rise to 50% on any money earned over £150,000. Brilliant. All those one-joke, limited, attention-seeking ligging artists whose work is funded and bought by shyster Tories like Saatchi can get lost: they're the spirit of vacuous, consumerist 90s Britain, rather than commentaries on it.

Rich wankers always promise to leave - Phil Collins, Paul Daniels, but they never do. Let's try to get a written contract and sue if they don't. Paying tax is a social duty from which we all benefit. We should be publicly shaming corporations and individuals who evade it.

The Sun scuttles back to the Tories - good

As the other media outlets have trumpeted today, The Sun has, after 12 years, returned to the Conservative Party fold, with a front page declaration festooned with a Union Flag (are they suggesting that Labour isn't British?).

All this is very self-important. The Sun likes to think and say that it wins elections for whichever party it supports - it's an equally convincing argument that The Sun supports whoever it thinks its readers support. Lots of data here

The Sun recommended that its readers vote Labour for the past three elections, but it never supported Labour. Its reasons were always hedged and reluctant, and often negative - based on the disarray in which the Conservative Party found itself. Essentially, The Sun supported Tony Blair and his clique, rather than Labour values. The Sun was and is racist, selfish, consumerist, nationalist, anti-green, homophobic, militaristic and misogynistic. For a few years, New Labour captured the Labour Party and catered, shamefully, for these positions. The Sun didn't change - Labour did, and deserves opprobrium for its shameful capitulation to the worst aspects of British culture.

Will readers of The Sun be better off under the Tories? I wouldn't think so. They're working class individualists - not natural supporters of the Etonian land-and-inherited-wealth toffs who really, really don't give a fuck about the poor. Sure, they'll toss some selfish, racist red meat to white van man, but they don't have the interests of the working class at heart. Sun readers like the NHS for instance - the Tories hate and fear it.

But that's irrelevant - The Sun and all the News International papers don't care about their readers either: their writers care about the opinions and commercial interests of Rupert Murdoch, who wants to run the world and wants to run it as a capitalist oligarchy free from competition by boring old state-funded, objective BBC - exactly what the Tories will give him. That's why the declaration was today, and not during the election campaign, as usually happens. It came out the day after Brown and Mandelson made good, fighting speeches. Rather than reporting news, The Sun decided to ruin the Labour conference and help the Tories by intervening in the political process. Mmm…ethical.

Fuck The Sun (sorry, I'm quite angry). It's too stupid to be as evil as the Daily Mail, but it's still a cancer on the public sphere.

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.

I ain't no suit-wearin' businessman like you... you know I'm just a gangsta I suppose...

Quote of the day, from the passionate, leftwing author of The Wire, to which I'm quite attached:

"It is possible," he has observed, "that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: 'You are hopelessly full of shit'."

I do worry a little about watching the show - it's pretty voyeuristic to watch the travails of a mostly-black city. From top to bottom, it depicts a capitalist dystopia in which life is cheap, getting paid is all that matters, and from which all oversight is absent. The newspaper jettisons standards and journalists at an appalling rate. The politicians are obsessed with their careers and kickbacks, whether they started idealistically or not. The legal system is politically compromised, and the police - some of whom are broken, others corrupt - care little for their citizens, with a few exceptions. The unions are mob-controlled, the schools act as mini-prisons for kids who really want to be earning on the corners, and the black men are determined to kill or be killed for money and prestige. Add the racial tensions and you have a recipe for disaster.

Yes, it's fiction, but it's based on long experience. The Tories are currently claiming that the UK is like The Wire, which is astonishingly irresponsible, and proof that they haven't actually watched it: the show's implied solutions are leftwing, calling for altruism, a strong and caring state and a sense of community. The Wire's problems, meanwhile, are those of Thatcherite capitalism, in which unbridled capitalism, the free market, privatisation, contempt for public services and 'there is no such thing as society' (Thatcher) feature prominently. Think about it: drugs are a selfish bit of indulgence. There's demand, and businessmen have spotted a gap in the market and behaved like good little capitalists by filling it. Legality, guns and the like don't matter - we've all been taught that profit is more important than morality or community. The dealers shouldn't be alienated: they're just further along the continuum that is us.

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.

Well done Norwich

The land of Alan Partridge voted in a 27 year old lobbyist and management consultant Tory, Chloe Smith, after their honest, learned, decent and independent Labour MP Ian Gibson was pushed out by a Labour HQ desperate to get rid of a thorn in their side.

Cameron's always on about the 'new politics' (despite a party in which 60% of its MPs went to fee-paying schools), yet his candidate is a LOBBYIST, a paid corporate liar with virtually no experience of real life - having mostly worked for Tory MPs or Central Office - like him. Still, having a young female MP will look progressive, and it's representation that matters in this postmodernist world.

She has a first-class degree in English - proof that however high your grades are, you can still manage to avoid learning anything.

I Foresee Calamity Befalling You At The Next Election

Never mind moat cleaning, duck islands, gold monogrammed well covers and servants' wings (that's wings on the house, not some hideous surgery to create flying servants a la Montgomery Burns) Tory MP David Tredinnick spent £510 of our money on astrology DVDs - and he wants to run the country. The utter, utter, wanker. I predict an election defeat. Actually, I don't, I just want him to lose badly.

Morning all!

You won't be hearing from me much today - meetings, across two campuses - will take up my time. Should be fun though: one's on research strategies and the other one is the union Negotiating Committee. Beer, sandwiches and subversion. Pretty much my ideal lifestyle.

Talking of which, Neal and I had a perfect summer evening last night. We made an effete salad (mint, olives, mozzarella, chorizo, rocket, pine nuts etc.), bought fine local beers (Staffordshire Brewing Company and Wood's of Shropshire) and sat in the evening sun doing pretty much nothing. Then this morning, we ate the finest croissants outside Paris (from Snape's of Woore) before setting off to work. I'm still in immense pain from fencing though. It's a young man's game, I tell you.

Which oddly enough, seems to be the case for Speaker of the Commons. Well, young by their standards. Bercow's made a surprising move from the extreme right to liberal centre, to the displeasure of his own party, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a backlash from the Tories and their friends in medialand. For all the hype though, I distrust these people who go into politics supposedly to represent their electorate, then become dazzled by the machinery or the pomp of the institution. There's no way that politics can return to the ethic of service if its practitioners are fixated on ceremony, precedent, wigs and heritage - it becomes a game for the ruling elite rather than a tool to effect social change.

Labour are saying that Bercow's improved through marrying a Labour supporter. I cannot imagine forming a relationship with somebody with an opposing ideology. What's wrong with her? How can one love a Tory, let alone a Tory MP? There can't be any respect between two people, of whom one is right and the other so mentally and emotionally misguided that they support greed, selfishness and spite? OK, he's got better taste than she has, but how can this fundamental divide be bridged? He must be amazing in bed…