Musical and Political Twists

What an odd 18 hours or so. My emotions – so far as I have any – are mixed. The joy is easy: my arch-nemesis Paul Uppal lost resoundingly. His campaign to return as Tory MP relied on keeping utterly silent about his record and his distasteful business activities while hiding behind Theresa May's coattails. Faced with three excellent young women running for the Lib Dems, the Greens and Labour, he avoided almost all public appearances, and turned a 400-vote loss in 2015 into a 2000-vote one in 2017. Next time he might think twice about campaigning by covering a £70,000 SUV with his posters and driving through one of the country's most deprived areas. He was venal, dishonest and self-interested. Let's hope that he will slide back into the obscurity he so richly deserves.

I'm also hugely impressed by my students. After indulging in the usual academic's lament ('you're so apathetic, you've got no politics or beliefs', as my UG tutor constantly told us) for years, I've been hearing my students plan and discuss and read political material and register to vote. I think most of them voted Labour, but it's more important that having been on the receiving end for so long, they're riled up. It's a shame they won't get the immediate reward of a decent minimum wage and the abolition of tuition fees, but as long as they stay enthused, we can help mitigate the damage of Brexit and the decades of neglect to which they've been subjected.

I also had two friends standing for Parliament, neither of whom won: Julia Buckley for Labour in Ludlow, who didn't win but did achieve the best placing for Labour in nearly 50 years, and Daniel Williams for Plaid in Neath. Labour won by a massive amount and the Tories nearly doubled their vote to 20%, squeezing Daniel out, which I'm very sad about.

Nationally I'm confused. It was glorious to see places like Canterbury turn Labour, and Labour's result is far better than expected, but other aspects confuse and sadden me. I still find it almost impossible to comprehend why Welsh and Scottish people would vote for the Conservative Party, and I don't really understand how Scots could move their votes from the separatist SNP to the Unionist Tories so decisively in several constituencies. The ideological gulf just seems so wide. I was also hugely disappointed that Amber Rudd just about survived, alongside various other excrescences. But most shocking – though not surprising – is May's decision to form a government with the DUP. A party which took less than 1% of the UK vote is now dictating British political policy. Despite May's howling about Corbyn's links to Irish Republicanism, she's in bed with a party that has consorted with and encouraged sectarian terrorism since its foundation. Its leader held a meeting with the Ulster Defence Association's commander only last week.

They oppose women's reproductive rights, firmly believe that homosexuality is a sin and should be illegal, and believe that the earth is six thousand years old. They also designed a renewable energy incentive that was so badly (or carefully) written that £500m was paid out to their friends. They refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Irish language, they accepted a secret donation of nearly £500,000 to spend on Brexit adverts…in London, and they believe that the Pope is the Anti-Christ.

Live footage of Offoster negotiating legislative priorities with the DUP
You're all going to need a DUP name now. I've bagged Ofpaisley.

The DUP's idea of Utopia is that depicted in the current adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale: unremittingly brutal, hostile to joy, self-expression, women, ethnic and sexual minorities, imperialist and sectarian. Theresa May will shortly find that she has a new name: Offoster.

So I'm torn: pleased that a radical agenda can attract votes, saddened that it hasn't attracted enough to take power. I wish Plaid, the Greens and the SNP had done better, and I wish that this country would grow up and adopt a proportional electoral system that reflects the obvious complexity of voters' beliefs: there should be more Greens, nationalists and – sadly – UKIP MPs. Instead, we have Conservative and Labour MPs elected with literally a couple or tens of votes more than all the other parties in their constituencies combined. Nowhere is this more outrageous than Northern Ireland, where parties shamelessly collude to make sure that 'protestant areas' get a protestant MP and 'Catholic' ones get a Catholic representative regardless of political beliefs. Look at Jim Wells:

Many complaints about Sinn Fein canvassing in Rathfriland yesterday. They are not welcome in this unionist town- particularly on a Sunday.

So much for the idea that individuals have a right to hear a variety of views then make their own political decisions (and Rathfriland is 40% Catholic). One of my friends campaigned for the Workers' Party in Belfast in the 70s, shortly after it spun off from the Official IRA and ran on a socialist, cross-community ticket. He tramped 'Protestant' Streets in the company of 'Machine-Gun Tommy' for protection, and was surprised to get a warm welcome from people sick of being taken for granted because of where they lived or which chapel they attended.

For now, I'm going to enjoy the crestfallen misery of the Conservatives, and worry about the new regime next week.

Yesterday wasn't all politics. In 2008, I went to see Sigur Ros the night Obama was elected, and ended up partying with some Dutch students as we watched history unfold. I now associate ethereal music with political success. So last night a few of us went to the Arena Theatre for Powerplant, a percussion-electronica-visuals musical performance. I knew that some Steve Reich pieces were on the programme, but nothing prepared me for one of the best and most mind-bending performances I've ever seen. Joby Burgess mixes various percussion instruments with live-looping and samples to produce immersive, hypnotic performances. The first piece was a drums-only version of weird visionary Conlon Nancarrow's Piece for Tape: Nancarrow's music is so fiendishly complicated and fast that he ended up writing for mechanical player-piano, because humans couldn't manage it: the invention of tape loops and sampling brought it into the realms of the possible.

Here's a few seconds of Burgess's version, plus another bit of classic Nancarrow.




Here's Burgess's percussion plus taped piano performance of de Wardener's 'Im Dorfe', essentially sampled and warped from a Schubert phrase used in The Piano Teacher:



Burgess also played this astonishing piece by Gabriel Prokofiev, written for 3 Nigerian Fanta bottles and sampler: apparently Nigerian bottles have striations, and the musician consumes some of the Fanta to change the pitch during the performance.



Burgess also 'played' Steve Reich's 'My Name Is', which I hadn't heard of. He recorded several audience members including a distinguished member of my party saying 'My Name Is (their name)' and looped it in phases, moving in and out of comprehensibility. Having to extract meaning from a babble of my managers' voices was eerily reminiscent of being at meetings. It was amazing though, and wonderful to think that those sampled people made a piece of amazing art that can never be reproduced. It's gone for ever.



There was also a piece called 'Temazcal' by Javier Alvarez, a sampled piece about music censorship by Nicole Lizée called 'The Filthy Fifteen', then two classics given amazing twists. He performed Arvo Pärt's 'Fratres' (usually drums and choir) using drums and a Canna Sonora, or Aluminium Harp, a weird friction-operated metal contraption. Sadly there's no recording but the effect was astonishing, moving and ethereal. Here's a different bit of music played on this odd instrument.



Burgess finished by playing Reich's 'Electric Counterpoint' on the xylosynth - amazing performance, but I admit to hating the sound of that instrument. Try the marimba/vibraphone and (original) electric guitar versions instead. If you liked The Orb's classic 'Little Fluffy Clouds' you'll recognise this piece.



So, mind blown, I went home for a night of anxious election coverage. I was not disappointed.

Labour! Back to the Future with Morris and Kropotkin!

I've largely kept my own counsel about the Labour Party leadership election. It's proving so divisive, and the arguments are so tediously familiar that it's hardly felt worth joining in. I'm a Labour member despite the attractions of more radical, purer and (sometimes) open-minded alternatives to the left such as the Greens, Plaid and various groupuscules. Mostly I'm in because I don't like vanguard parties: those who would far prefer having another purge of ideologically suspect splinter factions than actually make any effort to attain power. Labour, for all its myriad sins, wants to be elected and actually run the country. Also, the SWP is run by a rapist and his rape apologist friends. If any one of the revolutionary parties actually showed any sign of getting a revolution going, I'd be tempted but I strongly suspect that they're actually just fantasists.

So anyway, that leaves us with Labour and its interminable election. The party which encouraged its MPs to 'lend' left-winger Jeremy Corbyn enough nominations to 'widen the debate' beyond the three centre-to-right Oxbridge wonk candidates and whose higher echelons are now screaming blue murder because people listened to the debate and seem to have decided that they rather like what Mr Corbyn has to say. We're not quite at the stage of Dick Tuck's 'The people have spoken, the bastards', but several rival candidates say they wouldn't serve under Corbyn while the newspapers are full of threats to stage a coup against him if he wins. That implies that New Labour hasn't yet grasped the point of democracy yet.

The New Labour argument is that the people are now very rightwing, and if you don't become equally rightwing, you can't be elected. If you think back to the Blair government, the discourse around the poor, minorities, civil liberties etc. seemed to imply that the Masses are small-minded racists who should be pandered to, while simultaneously providing some social support to make up for the determination to become a fully-fledged neoliberal economy.

There's also the – very real – threat of the press. Politicians need the press because there's no way to communicate with the electorate in an unmediated fashion. Yes, there are social media but the research I've read suggests that it's far less important than we might think. The printed press is overwhelmingly Conservative and the BBC long ago adopted the discourse of the right.

So that's the message from Cooper, Burnham, and Kendall. The market has won, the people hate scroungers and foreigners, the state should shrink and shut up. It's the politics of fear, and of failure: they have abandoned any attempt to formulate a set of principles, and to attempt to persuade the electorate of the virtues of said principles.

And then there's Jeremy Corbyn. I read this short profile and found myself nodding. He attended a polytechnic for higher education, a much more common experience than the elevated world of the others. He grew up in the rural provinces – Wiltshire and Shropshire – and moved to London, so he's seen several sides of life. Like me, he's a socialist and a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and opposed the war in Iraq. He opposed apartheid actively and made links with Sinn Féin in an effort to end the war in Northern Ireland, years before it became fashionable. He supports the Palestinians without being an anti-semite. He's a cycling vegetarian who also takes the train, and he likes his stimulants to be of the Fairtrade variety.

In sum, he's everything that Orwell hated about the left back in the 30s, and that the sharp-suited managers of neoliberalism who run Labour abhor. He's that most tedious of things, a true believer. He has principles which alter not when he alteration finds.

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” (Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier)

A few months ago, I suggested that Labour would win if they returned to the optimistic vision of the pre-Labour socialist movements, particularly William Morris. It's been a bloody awful century or so for Labour: always on the back foot, always struggling to protect those battered by the worst depredations of capitalism and global realpolitik (when it bothered, that is). Labour has been so preoccupied with defensive manoeuvres that it forgot to articulate any positive vision: the big ideas have all been from the right, and Labour has, in government, attempted to ameliorate them round the edges.  But if you look back to the late 19th century when London was a hotbed of leftwing debate from Kropotkin to Marx, Crane, Morris and the Socialist League, you see a left that thought the future belonged to the workers, that a new society was possible. They were confident, optimistic and articulate. That their campaign material was beautiful made the point: a socialist future was a beautiful, fulfilling future which was within reach.

Walter Crane

I can't imagine Morris or Crane designing this, for instance:

I'm being told that a vote for Jeremy Corbyn is a vote to make Labour just another purist sect with no interest in governing; that a vote for any of the others is 'serious', a commitment to seizing the reins of power. What I don't see from them is any indication that they know what to do once they get there: they are neoliberal technocrats. I don't know whether they have any beliefs because all I hear from them is tactics. Do they really think the British people are mostly selfish racists, or is it just a tactic? Either way, they depress me.

Walter Crane

I genuinely believe in most of what Jeremy Corbyn stands for. But more importantly, I think he has a value system and a programme which goes beyond triangulating the results of focus groups. I think he – perhaps naively – believes that his fellow citizens are at heart kind and thoughtful, and that if he articulates a clear vision of a better society, they will vote Labour.

Neither I nor, I suspect, Corbyn, is quite the unreconstructed Dictatorship of the Proletariat socialist he's being painted by his Labour or external opponents. We all know that industrial, economic, social and global upheaval means that a movement based on and only obsessed with skilled manual labour has little future. The miners, millworkers and factory hands are largely gone. Their work has mostly been shipped off to dictatorships so that we don't have to think about it. In its place here is a working life of insecurity and invisibility: for now it's the cleaners and call-centre workers who are exploited, bullied and fired without cause. But soon it will be almost all of us. Our jobs are becoming weightless: we work in isolation, on zero-hour contracts. Not just the immigrant cleaners and traffic wardens but the university lecturers, those who care for our old folk and those who grow our food. Being middle class won't help: virtually every job can be automated (check your job via that link). Our climate sickens and dies, but we get cheap flights and cheap clothes (thanks, Indonesian toddlers).

Trained to be individualists and isolated in the way that the factory workers and miners weren't, we've been stripped of the means to resist, but also stripped of the opportunity to formulate positive alternatives: those obsessed with the promise of Big Tech and the 'sharing economy' might like to recall that Google, Apple, Pixar and Co engage in some very Old Economy behaviour: tax avoidance and ganging up to stop its workforce becoming mobile and demanding a fair share of the profits. It is a new world, and forward-thinking socialists must generate new solutions to new problems, new ways to organise, new conceptions of the state and new arguments formulated in collaboration with the people. I think that Corbyn will, whereas I think the other candidates don't even see them as problems at all. The ultra-poor don't vote, so why bother worrying about them?

I'm voting for Corbyn because I think that a point comes where you have to shake off the fear that drives political calculation and express faith in a set of principles. I think people are sick of the petty differences between essentially indistinguishable parties. I would like to elect a leader who thinks that persuading the electorate is his or her job, rather than to assume that its darker impulses are its overriding values. In the end, I'm a democrat. I think that most people, given the chance, want to be kind, supportive, co-operative, peaceful and fair to each other: tendencies despised and rejected by the current political model. All we need is the political space to express those instincts, and I think a Labour Party led by Mr Corbyn could go some way to creating that space. And if I can't vote according to my principles in an internal party election, when can I?

'You know nothing, Jon Snow'

Jon Snow knows nothing. Evan Davis knows nothing. ICM knows nothing. Ipsos-Mori knows nothing. Lord Ashcroft knows nothing. Party HQs know nothing.

In particular, I know nothing.

I'm not so stupid as to think that my social and social media circles reflect the views of the man and woman on the Clapham omnibus: my Twitter feed is disproportionately middle-class, PhD-heavy and privileged in a number of ways, as are my friends and family in meatspace. And yet, and yet. I've been out on the streets delivering leaflets for Labour in this depressed city. My students are culturally diverse and virtually all working-class. I read political coverage on paper and online every day. Although I expressed worries about a 'shy Tory' vote in the days running up to the election, I genuinely thought – as did every pollster and commentator – that Ed Miliband was advancing on a gentle wave of personal and political support, and that Labour would lead an administration of some sort.

I do not know how the pollsters got it so wrong. At this point, having demonstrated that I know nothing, further speculation from me would seem utterly pointless. Dick Tuck's 'The people have spoken – the bastards' might be gracelessly witty, but it's lurking in the back of my mind. Why would people vote Tory? The xenophobic campaign against the Scots appears to have paid off amongst English voters. The Scots seem to have abandoned any faith in pan-British parties to represent them and put it into the SNP in the hope that they really are a progressive post-68 nationalist party and not crypto-Tory ethnic essentialists. Labour in Scotland has rotted from within over the decades, the inevitable result of complacency, arrogance and all the special (sectarian) ingredients of that nation's politics.

In the end, I'm left with the conclusion that democracy works. People have got what they wanted. You can't blame the political parties - especially the Tories – for their breathtaking cynicism. While they tried to obscure some issues such as where cuts will come, we have to admit that a large enough group of English and Welsh people deliberately voted for zero-hours contracts, for the abolition of the Human Rights Act, for eventual dissolution of the UK and exit from the EU, against environmental protection and clean air, against union rights and workers' protection, for the privatisation of the NHS and the education system, for higher tuition fees, for enhancing our contribution towards nuclear holocaust, for global warming, for racial and social segregation, for total surveillance, for poverty-shaming, and of course for food banks.

Perhaps the famous British class system has never gone away, and the voters actually feel comfortable tugging their forelocks and installing the upper classes in power as though it's 1815, not 2015.

In sum, the voters have decided that there is no social contract, no moral or political bond between us all, that we have no responsibility for the wellbeing of others or our shared commons. The fantasies of Gove, Murdoch, Mensch, Osborne, Ayn Rand, Jeremy Clarkson, the hedge funders and financiers whom we saved at the cost of Sure Start, EMA and all our other social provisions are about to be put into action. We've had no shortage of personal and corporate lies, fraud and deceit over the past five years. The Chairman of the Conservative Party is a proven liar and con-man: we voted for him. The newspapers which hacked the phones of everyone from murdered teenagers to people who shared the same name as celebrities' relatives have been rewarded. The banks which ripped off individuals via PPI schemes, fixed LIBOR and other rates and – in the case of HSBC – knowingly aided drug cartels are going to be encouraged. Tax cheats will be pressed close to the government's bosom. Even more of our schools will be handed over to cranks, fundamentalists and arms dealers.

Meanwhile the elites on the liberal left such as the New Statesman are going to argue, alongside rightwing commentators, that Labour lost because it wasn't rightwing enough. I think they're wrong. The Scots voted for what appears to be a leftwing party. I don't think there's any mileage or point in Labour becoming any more neo-Tory. That's what the Lib Dems did and the voters preferred to go straight for the real thing. Without wanting to make excuses for Labour, it was also faced with an almost uniformly hostile media landscape, from the newspapers owned almost entirely by tax-avoiding non-coms via offshore shell companies to broadcast media which seems so entirely dominated by exactly the same people as the politicians. They mostly went to private schools, then to Oxford and Cambridge, where they knew the politicians. James Langley: Etonian. The Financial Times leader writer who condemned Labour's concern for inequality: a member of the Bullingdon Club alongside Cameron and Johnson. The commentators, whether BBC or not, are almost exclusively the 1% and find it impossible to challenge the dominant discourse.

Can I find any bright spots in this? It's some consolation that my local Tory MP Paul Uppal was deservedly ousted: a smug, lazy, arrogant, untrustworthy property speculator, he was the very definition of mediocrity.

On a very selfish level, I have one of these on my desk.

Despite occasional wobbles, I always thought the British were capable of a generosity of spirit and altruism that would keep life here bearable. After this election result, I'm starting to have my doubts. I like this country and its people very much, but it's not looking this morning like a country whose citizens care about each other very much. Exit from the EU and the break-up of the UK now looks only too plausible, and even if these things don't happen, an administration of Cameron, Gove, Shapps, Pickles, Iain Duncan Smith, Osborne, Jeremy Hunt and co can only produce a country strong on envy, suspicion, xenophobia and meanness. That the British people consciously voted for it makes me wonder whether it's time to look elsewhere. Cowardly, I know, but I'm shell-shocked this morning.

If I don't run, what can I do? Working in Higher Education, particularly at this institution, I feel a responsibility to my students that far outweighs the exchange of teaching for cash. These (mostly young) people have never known a leftwing or even liberal polity. The vicious individualism of loans, debt, privatisation seem natural to them. Collectively, I can work harder (somehow) to rebuild a caring, socialist politics in the face of overwhelming odds. Personally, all I can do is repress the instinct to run and redouble my effort to embody the values of the left, which boil down to one thing: kindness.

I had such high hopes. I thought Ed Miliband was capable of greatness. I thought the electorate, battered by neoliberalism, was ready for a period of thoughtful altruism. I thought that having spent most of the past 40 years wearily fighting against the neoliberal tide that I'd be able to relax for a while, even enjoy life. I was ready for a rest.

I was wrong. As I said, I know nothing.

Election Advice From A Proven Winner

I won an election this week. A real, old-fashioned two-horse race with no prospect of coalitions, confidence-and-supply, deals, minority administrations or any of the shenanigans currently being attempted by the participants in the other – and frankly minor – election being held this week.

Yes, dear readers, I was re-elected by a landslide, on an admittedly low turnout, as the academic member of the Board of Governors. In return for my muted protests against the corporatisation of higher education, I get the key to the velvet-padded Executive Conveniences and a prime seat on the Juggernaut of Educational Decline.*

(This space is reserved for an illustrative clip from The Simpsons' 'Homer and Delilah' if one ever turns up)

In return, the Executive and my fellow governors receive my patented blend of cosseted idealism and weary sarcasm, with which they cope with considerable grace and forbearance.

Having triumphed as a Tribune of the People once more, do I have any advice to proffer my Westminster colleagues? Well as it happens, I do!

Firstly: accept that the closer you get to Power, the further away you are. Was it Yes Minister which described the levers of government as made of rubber? Decisions are either made in an inner sanctum and presented as a fait accompli, or dissolved beyond recognition. Most of the things you want to do are pointless anyway. In a globalised capitalist system, the most you can do is throw some sand into the gear. Not that there's anything wrong with doing that.

Secondly: as much as people moan, they like a vile, negative campaign. I recommended that Ed Miliband take a leaf from William Morris's book and promote the sunny uplands of the Socialist Future. Socialism is inherently optimistic because it believes that people are essentially good and look out for each other. Ed had a go, but the rest of the grim-faed pragmatists in the Party joined the Tories by raging on about immigrants, scroungers, the Scottish Traitors and so, endlessly, on. Result? A core vote tie which I'm fully expecting to turn into a stronger-than-expected Tory result. Negative campaigning works.

Thirdly: never meet the public. The late Dick Tuck once quipped 'The people have spoken, the bastards'. When Sid Vicious was asked what the man in the street thought of his music, his response was pungent: 'I've met the man in the street. He's a c…'. This is the key to the 2015 Westminster election, and one I took to heart. Beyond writing a paragraph-long manifesto (no nukes on campus, no illegal wars, be kind to animals and students, I will aspire to abolish marking and Bad Things under my long-term pedagogical plan, stick with me so I can finish the job), I studiously avoided meeting my electorate. I skipped meetings, left work under cover of darkness and pretended to be David Mitchell whenever anyone tried to speak to me.**

Similarly, my junior colleagues have done their very best to avoid meeting any voter who hasn't been fully vetted.

It's not just the Tories of course: I met Ed Balls, who appeared at the tram station to pose for photos with Labour activists, then left. Political content: zero. The thinking appears to be – rightly when it comes to both them and me – that the more people you meet, the more people vote against you. Instead, you organise what photographers call a goat-fuck so that while the event looks like a cynical pretence of engagement there, it looks like a massive crowd on television.

The same event from the preferred angle.

Which is what matters. It is, as Baudrillard might say, a 'simulation' of symbolic exchange. The concomitant strategy is to avoid all public hustings and debates: the Prime Minister ducked TV debates, Radio 4's long-standing Election Call, the Citizens' debates a couple of days ago and many other events. Across the country, Tory candidates – including mine – have decided not to appear, to the extent that it now looks like a strategic decision. Imagine being in Tory HQ and issuing this advice. 'It turns out that people who meet you vote for the other candidate. Hide, and appeal to their worst side via staged events about immigrants and Jocks'. What a triumph of democracy. Still, it worked for me and will probably work for them.

As the Guardian reports, one woman dragooned into a faux-rally held at her workplace appears to have been threatened for asking a real question rather than holding a placard and grinning inanely while a politician makes a speech consisting of disconnected nouns, the occasional imperative, the word 'passionate' and a swipe at Perfidious Caledonia and its hordes of heroin-munching, Irn-Bru-injecting, er, citizens of the World's Greatest Democracy.

Rolled-up sleeves? I'm just an honest worker doing a fair day's work for a fair day's pay just like you guv. And doesn't George Osborne look uncomfortable surrounded by his own supporters (what a diverse and representative bunch of people they are too)?

Still, one of the advantages of an election campaign is that I can update my list of Companies That Don't Need My Custom Because They Support The Tories In Crushing Workers' Rights and Pay. Banks's/Marstons' Beer: goodbye. I'm unlikely to buy a JCB or Rolls-Royce soon either.

'I drove one of these, until those footballer chaps at West Villa made them a bit chavvy. Carry on, oiks'

Always, always wear high-vis jackets. It doesn't make you look like one of the entitled plutocrats Kevin McCloud subtly denigrates on Grand Designs at all.

'I'll have the platinum hip bath next to the eternity pool yah'

Organise a compliant media. It helps if almost all of them are owned offshore by non-dom tax evaders with little concern for the importance of the Fourth Estate and absolutely no sense of shame. Yes, the Mail, Telegraph, Times and Sun, I'm looking at you.

On the left, Reason 2 reads 'Stop SNP running the country'. On the right: 'Why it's time to vote SNP'. Let's just hope that nobody has access to social media, eh? Oh. As to the broadcast media, that looks after itself. Do all the sofa shows, if you have to do a serious one just recite the list of catchphrases and look, just don't worry about it: the few reporters on Newsnight, Today and the others who weren't in the Bullingdon or Oxford University Conservative Association with us are fixated by the same bubble stuff we like anyway yah? Get them on the campaign bus and threaten to leave them in Stoke or Rochdale or whereversville if they try to cut up rough OK?

Never apologise, never explain. Whether it's cutting taxes on the rich while beggaring the poor, tripling tuition fees, deregulating the banks, making absolute, racist and hypocritical promises to cut immigration with 'no ifs, no buts', just keep robotically demonising your opponents. Harp on about their broken promises while ignoring your own. Above all, never, ever suggest that governing a country is a complicated business which requires adaptation in changing circumstances. If the public doesn't crucify you, the newspapers will (unless they're your newspapers, obviously). This tactic worked very well for me. I made no specific promises, mumbled something about being responsive to the electorate, then went back to my desk. Most people don't vote. Those who do, appear to be the ones doing quite nicely thank you. Pander to their prejudices. Ridicule anyone who tries to engage the poor, young, sick and marginalised, like poor Ed Miliband having actual serious arguments with Russell Brand.

So in summary: take off your jacket; stage events behind closed doors; bash the Scots; launch a pre-emptive campaign against parliamentary democracy in case your opponents might be able to get a majority together; sell fear; blame the poor; say anything but say it with absolute confidence. 'Long-term economic plan'. 'I'm going to win a majority'. Whatever. But be ready to say it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. People don't want ideas. They want reductive mantras. What do we want? Reductive Mantras. Don't Let Them Sell Off Our Reductive Mantras. Long-Term Economic Mantras. Reductive Mantras: Winning Here. British Reductive Mantras For British Workers. End The Tax on Reductive Mantras. Stop Driving Away Reductive Mantra Creators. A Reductive Mantra On Every Table.

With apologies to Rudyard Kipling.

If you can scam some crowds and fake your virtue,   

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, 

If neither foes nor silly hacks can reach you,   

If rich men count with you, but not the poor; 

If you can fill the unforgiving minute  

With sixty seconds’ worth of waffle run, 

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

And—which is more—you’ll be PM, my son.

So there you have it. If you can't see the sound good sense in my election-winning guide, you must be some kind of subversive lefty whinger. Your name's already on a list. See you on May 8th.

*Not really. We're actually rather democratic when it comes to the jakes. I'm not joking about the Educational Decline though.
** Sort of true. We share a birthday, opinions, style and looks to such an extent that nobody noticed I had his photo on my ID card for several years. People used to shout his name at me in the street. I once had lunch with an ex of his. She kept calling me David. I wondered if this was a good sign or a bad one. Bad, as it turned out.

Just stuff going round my head

It's been an interesting week, for me at least. Varied, anyway. The election campaign rumbles away in the background and I'm getting nervous that the Tories will somehow scrape back in. All these 'shy Tories' as the pollsters call them, too ashamed to admit that they're selfish racists. Though who knows, maybe they're shy UKIPpers these days…

I'm not sure why everyone's calling it the dullest election campaign in generations. It's not the first coalition government to be tested at the polls but it is the first election in a while since the outcome is virtually certain to be another coalition, formal or informal. Boring? No. Cynical? Absolutely. The parade of faked public meetings is deeply depressing, as is the signposting of speeches through the media. I don't think the media have been particularly good or interesting this time either. Sure, the papers have fallen in line with their favoured parties, but there's been a distinct lack of incisive analysis and critique.

The Telegraph has been particularly disgraceful. Having sold its editorial integrity to HSBC, I suppose it's easier to sell it to the next bidder. In particular, making Tory 'open letters' front page news was spectacularly craven. Even worse, the 'small business' letter turned out to be an embarrassing fiasco. If the Telegraph couldn't even be bothered to count the number of real names, check the solvency and trading status of these companies or even whether the companies were aware their names had been put to the letter (one was signed by a waiter on behalf of his company: he happened to be a Tory candidate too), it doesn't deserve the name 'newspaper'.

TV and radio have also been largely poor. Cameron sabotaged the debates by refusing to appear which is cowardly but a standard response by incumbents. It seemed bad then but I don't know if there's been any long-lasting damage. There's rumbling from his own side about disengagement of course (his 'pumped up' speech reminded me of a slightly drunk squire cheering on his nag at a point-to-point) but this campaign seems to consist of a series of tea-cup storms which last no more than a day.

My own broadcast media choices have been disappointing. The Today show is its usual blustering, hectoring but ignorant self only more so, Newsnight is desperate to appear alternative but ultimately comes across as gimmicky, while the pair of them seem to be wholly dependent on the talking points – and weltanschauang – of Conservative Central Office. Certain presenters are openly rightwing (Humphrys, Evan Davies) and the media pool is culturally disposed towards an elitist status quo, having attended the same (private) schools and universities as those they're meant to be reporting upon, but there's also a deeper structural condition which renders the media an essential part of hegemonic control. The discourse used is instructive: not on the election but indicative of the mindset is what I heard on Moneybox recently: 'Is your cleaner stealing from you?'. Heaven forfend that a cleaner might listen to Radio Four rather than be employed by listeners…

Is it, as an email I just received claims, 'the Digital Election'? It's not clear. Certainly billboards seem a bit passé now we can all circulate them on Twitter or photoshop them then circulate them. And yet… most social media are closed circles. We choose our contacts who tend to be just like us, then reinforce our cohesion by passing around links, photos, jokes and so on. It gives us, I suspect, an inflated sense of our importance. My Twitter feed looks like the vanguard of the socialist revolution but I rather suspect that my contacts are not representative of the proletariat.

What is useful though is the swift debunking and circulation of stories. When the Sun supported the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland the first time (1992) virtually nobody would have noticed because the mass media wouldn't have paid much attention. Now the pictures can be put together and circulated in seconds to expose the pretensions of a print media which hasn't quite realised the extent of its decline. But the more powerless it is, the more vicious it gets. Compare the Sun's announcement with the vitriol applied to Miliband talking to Russell Brand.



Now I'm fairly allergic to Brand for all the obvious reasons plus several others, but this was a master-stroke by Miliband. Brand's followers outweigh almost all of the tabloids, and Miliband avoided the obvious trap of becoming the magician's assistant as Brand went off on one of his conspiracist rants. Instead, Ed took Brand seriously enough to challenge his arguments where necessary. Like many of his recent appearances on unorthodox or apparently lightweight outlets, Miliband has successfully countered the (allegedly negative) perception of him an an unworldly wonk. Personally I'd like the individual with his finger on the nuclear button to be nerdy rather obsessed with his haircut or GQ ranking, but that's just me…

Cameron's campaign hasn't been disastrous, just deeply tedious: another day, another even more cynical and hackneyed device from the toolkit. National security, perfidious Scots, the Red Menace, the Appeal to the Pocketbook. Tired, tired tired.

In my area it's been a bit of a phoney war. The sitting Tory MP in this marginal has been invisible. Extremely well-funded by various shady outfits, it's unlikely that he's doing nothing at all, but his core vote strategy seems to rely on appearing on Sikh media (a racist strategy that assumes there's a Sikh bloc vote whereas my assumption is that Sikhs vote on a range of issues just like everyone else) and concentrating on the rich white, ageing suburbs where 'his' voters may be tempted to go UKIP. I've been leafleting for the Labour party and have seen almost no evidence of a Tory ground campaign and absolutely no indication of a Liberal presence. UKIP too have been pretty invisible - I guess they're relying on Farage's media omnipresence.

Away from politics (thankfully?) I've had a funny week. On Tuesday I went to London for the relaunch of our School of Art, at the House of Lords. I went down early to spend the afternoon lunching with my aunt, visiting various book shops and strolling round bits of London I don't know well. I enjoyed the complex ironies of the Ministry of Justice being on the site of Jeremy Bentham's house. He'd have approved of their electronic Panopticon but very much not approved of their erosion of human rights.

The event was kind of interesting. It was on the Terrace overlooking the Thames, which was personally thrilling. Only because I'm working on politicians' novels and in Mary Hamilton's 1931  Murder in the House of Commons two MPs find the body of a blackmailing prostitute on that very terrace. Thinking their party leader murdered her, they tip the body over the wall into the river and set about covering it up. You are, it transpires, meant to approve of their actions. The other joy was meeting the editor of the Express and Star, the local newspaper whose columnist variously reproduced my work without acknowledgement and tried to get me sacked. A nice chap, the editor expressed (ironic?) bafflement at my suggestion that the paper – which employed Enoch Powell for years and only employs hard-right commentators – could be perceived as rightwing. We got along very well and even had a photo taken as a memento of our detente.

What else is going on? Difficult, draining union casework, though I contributed to one victory this week: maternity leave for students is no longer considered Leave of Absence. It sounds dull, but there's a limit to LoA in terms of length and number of times you can have it, so mothers were being discriminated against and leaving without completing their degrees. I don't know why it wasn't sorted earlier but I have to say that management really took this seriously and moved very fast once we raised the issue.

Apart from all that, we had the launch of our inaugural Arts Festival yesterday, and I'm doing some interesting reading. I'm currently stuck into Andrea Wulff's The Founding Gardeners which is a fascinating exploration of the way the Founding Fathers expressed their American and Republican values through horticultural symbolism, though I'm a bit shocked by the casual references (so far) to the slaves who did the actual work. I'm reading Daniel G Williams's Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century which follows his Black Skin, Blue Books: African-Americans and Wales 1845-1945: Daniel's really cornered the market in widening perceptions of  Welsh cultural experience. Also for review (in Planet this time) and doing the same thing in a sense, I've just got Jasmine Donahaye's The Greatest Need, her biography of Lily Tobias, 'a Welsh Jew in Palestine'. Jasmine's a force of nature, so I'm looking forward to this.

What I should be doing, of course, is my own research. The politicians' writing project continues and I need to present something next month. I'm working on a conference paper comparing Caradoc Evans's My People to Brinsley McNamara's The Valley of the Squinting Windows and a couple of other things are in progress too. But they'll all have to fit round the Positive Environment Working Group, the Digital Campus 2020 Academic Reference Group, the Faculty Reward Committee, the Media Review Committee and so on… we played with post-it notes today. Which was nice.

Anyway: I'm off to see The Ladykillers tonight: Graham Linehan's stage version, though not this original production:

Obligatory election commentary

Excellent photo by Justin Sullivan

OK. My all-purpose Reckon on the election.

Overall result: generally good. Obama's electoral college numbers higher than I predicted, even though I erred on the side of optimism. I was surprised Wisconsin went Democrat - Republican V-P candidate Ryan is from there, and Scott Walker survived a recall vote after he smashed the unions, so I thought it would trend rightwards.

Also pleased that the various rape-friendly republicans (Akin, Mourdock etc) lost, and that more women, a lesbian and an Asian-American were elected. Bernie Sanders, who sometimes calls himself a socialist, won by 71% to 25% in Vermont. The Senate is up to 19 women… of 100 seats. Not exactly a revolution. Sadly Michele Bachmann, who claimed the Founding Fathers abolished slavery (clue: they all owned slaves) amongst other idiocies, was re-elected by 3000 votes.

Obama's weak version of healthcare survives, and he'll probably get to pick one or two Supreme Court judges. In a constitutionally-based political economy, this is in some ways as important as winning an election.

And now for the backlash: I'm getting mine in early.

Keeping Romney out was probably a good thing: he's a naked hyper-capitalist who would have tried to strip government down to total military dominance of the globe and little else. But that's about it. Obama is a symbolic candidate - in terms of identity politics, he makes the US look progressive. Perhaps some black kids will be inspired to follow a political path. But in political terms, he's a no-change conservative. He wants more black, gay, poor and female faces in the corridors of power, which is a good thing. But he wants this wider pool of people to carry on doing the same things, principally maintain a capitalist model which has manifestly failed the world's citizens (and not simply over the past 5 years), he wants to ignore the looming disaster of climate change, and he wants the American Hegemon to extend its global domination. Poor people around the world will continue to be paid less for making more consumer good for people like us. Pakistani weddings will still be illegally bombed by drones. Bond markets and hedge funds will continue to avoid tax, subvert sound economics and be bailed out by taxpayers. Americans will continue to drive gas-guzzlers, suck in oil-shale, run the A/C and shoot each other in massive numbers. Israel will continue to run open-air concentration camps for Palestinians.

Still, we'll all feel better knowing that presiding over all this is someone young and cool. I'm genuinely pleased that nasty old racists like Bill O'Reilly, homophobes and rape apologists are pissed off. But when we all go home, the US and hence the world will still be run by and for a tiny clique of obscenely rich people for their own benefit. Some of them may not fit the WASP demographic, but they're still quite literally in a class of their own.

Another of my favourite moments from the campaign. A real Freudian slip

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I don't know if you've been following the American Presidential nomination campaigns, but it's a fascinating example of why we are doomed to a future of environmental misery, scientific ignorance and social decay.

The primary system pitches potential party candidates against each other in a bitter, gladiatorial contest. Any voter registered as a supporter (not member) of the party can vote in their statewide poll. In some ways, it's quite useful: the flaws of the candidate can be highlighted before the actual national election. On the other hand, those flaws are exposed for the nation to see even years before the candidate faces the official vote. Additionally, the public can become bored with the candidate very early on.

Apart from the obscene amounts of money soaked up by essentially 3 years of campaigning during a 4-year election cycle, the major problem for the American 2-party system is extremism. This year's Republican candidates are Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain (until yesterday), Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich. All of them are hugely rich, privileged people - and all of them are running as political 'outsiders': even Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican Congress against Bill Clinton. He's up to his neck in lobbying corruption and accusations of hypocrisy: while pursuing Clinton for the Lewinsky affair, he was conducting several of his own…

The problem with the primary system is this: to win the nomination, you have to appeal to the minority of voters who turn out. This is the hardcore: those who want a candidate exactly like them, which means loudly proclaiming your fundamentalist Christianity, attacking science, denying that there's anything wrong with the environment at all, wielding heavy artillery at every opportunity, and promising to deport anyone who's ever looked longingly at a taco.

Which is all very well: but it pays no attention to the rest of the country. The Republicans are facing a liked but not massively popular incumbent in Obama. There's a percentage of the country which will switch to the Republicans without too much guilt if their candidate is reasonably centrist (by American standards: horrendously conservative by our's). But this is exactly what won't happen. The most reasonable Republican candidate is Mitt Romney, the billionaire Mormon: but even he's had to abandon all common sense and drink the extremist Kool-Aid. So the Republicans will get a candidate in their image - and lose heavily. It's a problem common to political parties everywhere: true believers are often a bit odd, whereas the plausible candidates can't always be trusted (looking at you, Blair), but it seems to be magnified in the US, where the Republicans are becoming a narrow, bitter faith-based sect, and the Democrats are simply technocratic avatars of the status quo with very little in the way of actual, y'know, beliefs. 

It's the old conundrum: electable or true believer? I'm pretty certain that there's a big chunk of potential ordinary decent Republicans out there who espouse small-town conservative values who are essentially disenfranchised by the activists' extremism.

And while we're at it, yesterday's Doonesbury is a magnificent attack on Rick Perry and election funding.

Meanwhile in America…

Your Republican candidates:
1. Mitt Romney - billionaire who claims the Republicans are about looking after the 'little guy'. Believes that Americans (but not the native ones or the black ones) are the lost tribe of Israel and that God gave them some new commandments on solid gold slabs which were carelessly misplaced. He also believes in converting your dead ancestors, which is how it came about that the Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust are now officially all Mormons.


He's the man in the middle:

Caption competition: 'these are much easier to carry round than gold tablets'? Or 'Wow, I didn't know these came in lower than $500 bills. How cute'. 

2. Rick Perry. Governor of Texas and very much in the GWB mould (i.e. vicious and dumb and not averse to the N-word): he's already accused the chairman of the Federal Reserve of treason and applied Biblical wisdom to the recession and the BP oil spill:

"I think in America from time to time we have to go through some difficult times — and I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don't spend all the money. You work hard for those six years and you put up that seventh year in the warehouse to take you through the hard times. And not spending all of our money. Not asking for Pharaoh to give everything to everybody and to take care of folks because at the end of the day, it's slavery. We become slaves to government." 

3. Hermann Cain: sex pest, pizza shill, possibly corrupt, madman. 

'It will be a twenty foot wall, barbed wire, electrified on the top, and on this side of the fence, I'll have that moat that President Obama talked about. And I would put those alligators in that moat!" - Cain on his illegal immigration plan.'

He did this as a presidential ad (warning: it will sicken you):





4. Michele Bachmann: 

 ''Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.''

“But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

Er… no, they were slave owners. 

'[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said she has even said she is trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that 2,000 years ago.''

''And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it.''

''Normalization (of gayness) through desensitization. Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders, is take a picture of 'The Lion King' for instance, and a teacher might say, 'Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?' The message is: I'm better at what I do, because I'm gay.''

''I don't know where they're going to get all this money because we're running out of rich people in this country.''

''I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence.''

“The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. Its all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”

Under normal circumstances, you'd assume that Obama would have to be caught in bed, with a goat, wiping his bottom on the Bible before he lost this election. Now, I'm not too sure… Still, it'll be amusing until one of these loons decides to nuke Eurabia (that's what they call Europe now because we're all living under the Muslim yoke. Apparently.  

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Well, the Irish election results are pretty much in, and if you listen to the press, it's a momentous revolution:

With recounts taking place in a number of constituencies, the projected outcome last night was Fine Gael 76 seats, Labour 37, Fianna Fáil 20, Sinn Féin 14, United Left Alliance 5 and Others 14.

The share of first-preference votes was: Fine Gael 36.1 per cent, Labour 19.4 per cent, Fianna Fáil 17.4 per cent, Sinn Féin 9.9 per cent, Independents 15.2 per cent and Green Party 1.8 per cent.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Yes, Fianna Fáil has been handed a thorough beating, after being the party of government for most of the past 80 years. Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin have done better this time than in any election since the state was founded.

But: this is a social revolution, not a political one. Fianna Fáil is out not because most of the voters wanted a different ideological and economic model, but because they wanted a less corrupt one. The political, legal and financial élite consisted of a couple of hundred men, all told - sitting on each others' boards, handing each other donations, lifting regulations to help each other out. It came - naturally - to a crashing stop and bankrupted the whole country.

So what did the voters do? They elected a party in Fine Gael which believes in the same things as Fianna Fáil: that the route to Irish prosperity is to maintain its status as a European tax haven for any dubious corporation with a brass plate to screw up on a rented front door. Other than the Labour voters and those angry enough to vote Sinn Féin, the Irish have voted for a new set of faces on the old policies. Enda Kenny and his friends haven't been hobnobbing to the same degree with the disgraced financiers who destroyed the entire country, but they're fully paid-up members of the permanent political class all the same: the neo-liberal consensus remains fully intact.

The difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael - and this isn't a joke - isn't ideological: it goes back to the civil war. People vote between two rightwing parties on the basis of what happened in 1922, and to a shameful extent on the hereditary principle: too many people inherit their seats as part of family dynasties.

Perhaps the biggest change in dynastic terms is the fact that the new Dáil includes no member of the Haughey or Lemass families. A junior minister at the Department of Education and the Department of Enterprise, Seán Haughey was first elected a TD in 1992 but has now lost his seat in Dublin North Central. Both his father and grandfather held the office of taoiseach: he is a son of the late Charles Haughey, and his mother, Maureen, is a daughter of Seán Lemass. His uncle, Noel Lemass Jnr, and aunt, Eileen Lemass, were also members of the Dáil.

The Lenihans had three representatives in the outgoing Dáil but this has been reduced to one. Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan made it on the fifth count in Dublin West but he will no longer be accompanied by his brother Conor, who lost out in Dublin South West. Their aunt, Mary O’Rourke (née Lenihan) was eliminated on the second count in Longford-Westmeath. Brian Lenihan Snr, (1930-1995) father of Brian Jnr and Conor and brother of Mary, held the office of tánaiste and a variety of cabinet posts; he was first elected a TD in 1961 and, unusually, his father, Patrick Lenihan (1902-1970), joined him in the Dáil after the general election of 1965, and they served together for five years.

And on, and on: the Hanafins, the Coughlans, the Andrews, the Healy-Raes, the Tom McEllistrims, the Cowens, Springs, de Valeras, Kennys, Barrys and Uptons all point to a rotten, and permanent, political class.

FF have been handed their hats in a big way today, and a few proper lefties have got in, but we really shouldn't mistake a change of guard for a change of policy, which I think is a real shame. Some cogs have fallen out, but the machine carries on.

The other tragedies in the election are the annihilation of all FF female candidates, and the total destruction of the Green Party. They propped up the Fianna Fáil government in a coalition, enabling the total destruction of the island's economy, while making virtually no gains for environmentalism. The result was rejection, and I can't see Ireland electing another Green to parliament for a generation, just when we need serious environmental politics desperately. John Gormley traded credibility for a ministerial limo and a higher profile, and betrayed his beliefs in the process: we'll all suffer for this.

A big day for Ireland

No, not the Ireland v Bangladesh match in the Cricket World Cup: it's general election day too, in which the Irish people are going to express their disgust at crony capitalism by voting for the crony capitalist party which was on the other side in the Civil War.

That'll show the bankers…

(By the way, Ireland's quite amused by Cameron telling you all that the Alternative Vote system is rubbish and complicated: Ireland uses the STV method of proportional representation, and everybody seems to understand it quite well).

US Election finally ends

Congratulations to Al Franken, committed lefty (by US standards anyway) and comedian, who was finally declared the winner of the Minnesota Senatorial race by the Supreme Court, despite the increasingly ridiculous refusal of Norm Coleman to admit he'd lost.

It's important because it takes the Democrats to 60 (including 2 pro-democrat independents), which can stop the Republicans killing legislation through filibustering (talking until time runs out). Now the Dems can get on with founding a first world health service, if the lobbyists don't ruin it.

Uneasy Lies The Wig

Today we learn the answer to the question that's been on all our lips: which superannuated pompous idiot wants to stop representing their constituents and instead slip on wigs, gaiters, stockings etc. and spend their declining years weakly insisting on 'order' amongst 'Right Honourable Gentlemen'?

The live (though barely) blog will help sustain enthusiasm for an election with all the transparency and user-friendliness as those we've recently seen in North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe. Result around 10 p.m.!

Scrap Scrap Scrap

Brilliant. Ian Gibson, the brilliant, troublemaking MP for Norwich has resigned his seat to trigger a bye-election. Hope he runs as an independent socialist and wins.

UKIP's poor relations also caught cheating

Merciless Public picks up on the story that the BNP's latest leaflet turns out to feature lots of happy smiling white people who aren't, well, British - or even British resident. 'Why we're all voting BNP' headlines some headshots of, amongst others, an Italian photographer's parents - and they aren't fascists. The images were from a stock photography site. Presumably the BNP couldn't find any supporters proud enough to pose - or any without a swastika tattoo on their foreheads. Two Americans feature, as well as an unfortunate British soldier who told the press that the BNP are 'scumbags' and 'I wouldn't vote for them in a million years'.

A few weeks ago, I objected to UKIP using Churchill to oppose the EU, despite Winston's keen support for a United States of Europe. Now, a BNP campaign seems similarly deceitful. It claims, much to the fury of religious leaders, that Jesus would vote BNP and quotes this legendary figure: 'If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you' (John 15:20). Presumably they couldn't find a biblical reference for 'wogs out'.

Are they really claiming that a Jewish asylum seeker (his parents fled to Egypt as soon as he was born, if you believe all this stuff) would identify with the BNP, who seem to me to be the likely persecutors? Clearly this Jesus bloke didn't have a problem with Arabs (unlike Israel now) and would no doubt be defending Muslim families from the BNP in Stoke, Blackburn, Gaza and elsewhere. I seem to remember that Jesus's people didn't exactly thrive in various countries in which the BNP's friends came to power.

I note that they've chosen a horrible sentimental Caucasian-style image of Jesus, of the kind that abounded in my Catholic schools. Perhaps they don't know where he was allegedly from.

Euro-pudding or mean Little England

Amidst all this disgust about political sleaze, there's an election going on, for the European parliament. I'm a hardline socialist, but unlike most on the proper left, I'm in favour of a United States of Europe - as long as it's a United Socialist States of Europe.

Despite its structural weaknesses, corruption, inefficiency and inevitable political fudging, the EU is currently a better state to be a part of than Britain. In some ways, the EU is a capitalist plot, as my comrades on the left say - but Britain under the Tories and New Labour is a capitalist concentration camp, in which de-unionised workers labour for longer hours, lower pay, less protection and fewer rights than our European cousins. So I'm happy to trade a little bit of British state power for egalitarianism and a better deal for the worker.

Will Hutton, a centrist whom I respect greatly, says that only a shock will remind us of how brilliant EU membership is:

Along with the BNP, the opinion polls suggest that more than 50% of the vote will go to anti-EU parties. I'm not sure the British know the consequence of their vote, but a dynamic is in train that will lead to our exit from the EU.

As a pro-European, I don't want this to happen, but I've begun to wonder whether it wouldn't be better for Europe. Only living outside the EU as the sceptics want - creating a politically diminished Britain fit for hedge funds, tax-avoiders and asset-strippers - is likely to convince the British majority that the option is a disaster.

Meanwhile, the Europeans can deepen the EU, along the way empowering the European Parliament. When a Tory government leads an impoverished, embittered Britain back into the EU in 25 years' time, reality will have imposed political maturity.

His point is that Europeans are beginning to question the benefit of being the targets of constant, bitter carping from Britain - yes, the UK is a net donor to the EU, but its diplomatic and political efforts are so selfish (and sometimes so slavishly pro-American), its financial policies so wholly devoted to beggar-thy-neighbour quick-buck capitalism, that the continental Europeans are starting to wonder whether an amicabledivorce might be better for them too.

Sorry about the margins and italics - this bloody interface won't let me put them back and it's driving me crazy.

I know this isn't Kansas, Toto

I've no idea what Sean Tevis is really like, but anyone who says good things about evolution and science, and steals ideas from XKCD for his campaign deserves your attention, Kansans.

US election stats

I follow the US election statistics on the Guardian's round-up page, but an article today suggests that if you really want to get into the electoral nitty-gritty, you should head to FiveThirtyEight.com where Nate Silver, who used to collate baseball statistics, is hard at work tracking every bit of polling data available. 

Is blogging unsuitable for political journalism?

John McCain certainly thinks so, according to Robert Draper. The idea is that blogging journalists are so desperate to get a 'gotcha' comment online that they've lost the art of sustained questioning - though neither candidate has gone out of his way to encourage this type of interview.