So THAT's what happened to the public intellectuals

A few weeks ago, I posted a long and quite diffuse piece on the declining prominence of public intellectuals: leading thinkers who used the mass media to introduce a degree of thoughtfulness and complexity into public debates. It got republished by the LSE Impact site, and by an American site too, so clearly it's not just me.

I was thinking about it again last night, having decided for some reason to watch the BBC's Question Time programme, in which political and public figures are invited to respond to current affairs questions from the general public. It's the TV version of BBC Radio 4's Any Questions?, which also has an unlistenably reactionary phone-in element, Any Answers?, the nearest this country gets to Alabama.



The shows have a long and arguably proud history, but they're also at the heart of the problem.  The format of several politicians plus a couple of 'colourful' or eccentric celebrities lends itself to propaganda and demagoguery: the pressure to be entertaining leads to the selection of controversialists who have media careers to push, while the politicians have become less and less thoughtful. 24 news, media monitoring and a hysterical press means that any politician on the show is forced to remain robotically 'on-message', parroting the briefing of the party's communications team. Individuality, ambiguity and indifference are in short supply. Last night's episode featured Baroness Warsi, a Tory who couldn't get an MPs seat because a) she's quite stupid and b) the Tory party is still very racist, and Stephen Twigg, a former New Labour MP. Neither of them had a single intelligent thing to say, because they were obsessed with repeating their party's 'talking points': Twigg was dull, while Warsi wheeled out inappropriate and unoriginal attack lines because she was incapable of responding to questions in an individual and flexible fashion. The other two guests were Charles Moore, a conservative but quite interesting journalist, and Germaine Greer, exactly the kind of media star picked for her predictably 'outrageous' opinions. Only Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, was intelligent, responsive and measured - which led to Baroness Warsi denouncing her for not being an imperialist. To see the daughter of Pakistani immigrants proclaiming her love for the British Empire was shocking - a triumph of ambition and ideological inflexibility over intelligence.

Rather than take the Douglas Adams approach occasionally ('I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that I don't know the answer', he once said), panellists feel they have to have a definitive response to everything.

Shows like this act as gatekeepers of public opinion. Germaine Greer should understand that she's there not for her media-friendly intellect, but to give the audience a little frisson - ooh, isn't she outrageous with her slightly wacky ideas? The show exists to maintain the dominance of a narrow version of political and intellectual life: the BBC's apology for not editing the 9/11 edition, in which the public expressed harsher opinions than politicians was incredibly high-handed, while the Nick Griffin episode was used not as an opportunity to expose his views as laughable, but for all sorts of celebrities to hold their noses and grab hold of the high ground. I also think that shows like this are dangerous because they imply some sort of accessibility and accountability. Politicians show up, run the risk of being booed sometimes, and feel they've 'faced' the public. It's fraudulent: they're exhaustively briefed on the party line, and their job is to make this preheated pap sound like their own opinions. If they get away with it, they report back to HQ that 'the line' has been propagated: there's no chance that they get back into the limo and ponder another panellist's ideas, or - heaven forbid - something an audience member said. The show looks like 'citizens' two cents' but it's actually a thinly-disguised propaganda outlet.

Question Time is the victim of political and celebrity culture. It's fallen into the trap of believing that everything is a party-political issue requiring representation - this leads only to the robotic utterances of Twigg, Warsi and their colleagues - while restricting discourse to a narrow field by adding a couple of guests by whom we're meant to be outraged or thrilled at their zaniness - Caroline Lucas manages to escape this trap by being hugely intelligent, whereas Greer and people like Alex James don't. Guests who don't take the same discursive approach, who don't accept the playing field set by the party politicians and received opinion are there to be laughed at or reviled - maintaining cultural and political hegemony by excluding whole swathes of opinion rather than examining them. Cannier guests - and I'd very much place Germaine Greer in this category - work out exactly what's wanted of them. She's tailored her 'product', or become a 'brand'. Having started out as a glorious radical feminist who made a huge difference to public culture, she is now a professional celebrity, reliably wheeling out slightly wacky opinions and good personalised putdowns: she adds the appearance of edgy radicalism while making no serious contribution to moving the goalposts away from the mainstream game. She's 'colour' rather than a threat to consensus. She knows this - it's how she makes her living.

Here's one of the most awful episodes: unelected Lord Adonis and Baroness Williams, Tory know-nothing loan-shark advertiser Carol Vorderman, comedy politician Boris Johnson and (thank Christ) Will Self, a man who eats morons for breakfast, though even he isn't immune from the 'opinions for money' syndrome.



Excerpts from the 9/11 episode:



What would I like? More boring guests. Experts. People who don't see an appearance as the route to occasional gigs on News 24 and a column in GQ or the Guardian if they manage to crack out a couple of zingers. People who don't feel the need to frame every question within the paradigm of party politics or triangulation. People whose careers don't depend on repeating a party line in the hope of preferment. People who introduce subordinate clauses to their answers and don't depend on audience applause for validation. People who aren't afraid to say that a question is complicated, difficult or even not worth discussing.

It's not likely to happen. The combination of rolling news (which creates vast swathes of space and time looking for something to fill it) and the gotcha politics of parties with no real ideological differences means that politicians in particular are terrified of saying anything which might give the opposition the chance to attack them for five minutes on Sky News. The cardinal sins in our public discourse are doubt and delay. A politician - or anyone else in the public eye - who says 'I'll need to think about that' is automatically painted as incompetent or untrustworthy. Egg donation? Libya? CDOs? Bankers' bonuses? Steve Jobs? Scottish independence? You've got to churn out the opinions without ever being given the time to research and ponder. (And yes, I know that's a little cheeky given that I'm a blogger).

Lest you think I'm feeling sorry for the politicians, I'm not. It's their fault. The determination to sound decisive and certain on every single event and issue communicates a contempt for the citizens. They've decided that we're all morons, and that we want and believe in the possibility of absolute conviction. We've been trained to belief that uncertainty = weakness, that any politician who doesn't have a snappy answer is out of his or her depth. I don't think that's true: in our own lives we're capable of holding multiple, contradictory or temporary opinions. In my profession, ambiguity and complexity are the highest virtues of contemporary literary studies. So why should we expect our politicians to hold the key to the Ultimate Questions? It's because we've been trained to assume that speed and simplicity of response equates to intelligence.

New Labour was the classic example. An élite group of highly-educated people from private schools, Oxbridge and political careers (very few of them were working class or had ever held jobs outside politics), they were fed the idea that the voters were angry, dumb and often racist. Rather than work out whether this was true, try to change opinions if so, or even meet some of these people, New Labour decided to pander to these perceived questions. It's hard to imagine now, but political communication relied on incredibly simplistic messages (pledge cards, sentences without verbs promising happy families or reduced immigration), while the serious politics (deregulation, interest rates, complicated diplomacy) was hidden away - too boring and complicated for the voters. Now, we're all experts in credit default swaps, bond markets and the intricacies of Syrian opposition groups (aren't we?), but our politicians haven't caught up: they're still treating us like hyperactive children to be pacified until our attention span means something shinier catches our collective eyes.

OK, I've strayed somewhat from my main point. Question Time isn't the cause of political cynicism, celebrity vacuity and the restriction of political discourse to an elite version of 'mainstream' - but it's symptomatic of a degraded and exhausted public sphere.

The Newt Gingrich Caption Competition

What is the serial adulterer, moral hypocrite and political know-nothing saying to this woman?

Me first, because it's my blog.

'Agree to an open marriage, or I'll rip your face off'.
'Who nose about us?'
'Say, were we married'?
Woman: 'you're a hypocrite. I've a nose for these things'. Newt: 'Then off it comes'.
'My wife's got no nose…' (etc.).

Despicable human being of the day

I'm not sure who Mark Wahlberg is. Is he Marky Mark, or was that someone else? Either way, he's got a mouth on him:

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don't worry.' 

Mark Wahlberg on 9/11 flight he was originally scheduled to be aboard

Way to go. Does he really think that there wasn't anybody on that plane capable of bravery? Or that he's exceptional because (now I've looked him up) he has a history of racial violence and could therefore have killed those Saudis? Perhaps his roles in New Kids On The Block and I Heart Huckabees involved some kind of counter-terrorist training? OK, he's waved a toy gun, bulked up his abs and committed some revolting crimes - that doesn't make him any more heroic than those passengers he's implicitly attacking for being too weak or cowardly to take on the terrorists.

I don't normally give space and attention to that parasitical class known as 'celebrities', but this outburst was more than usually repellent. To use the violent deaths of so many people as a means of ego-gratification, self-aggrandisement and self-promotion displays a level of narcissism excessive even by Hollywood standards. It sounds like the kind of moronic rage more often found in Private Eye's 'From the Message Boards' parody ('Anyone comes near my kids I swear ill do time').

Who does Wahlberg think he is? Rudy Giuliani? (Of whom Joe Biden says every sentence consists of 'a noun, a verb and 9/11').

'Roads? Where we're going, we don't need… roads.'

It looks like we might be getting hover cars after all, thanks to the Japan Institute of Science and Technology and their quantum levitation device:



Sadly, this is fake, a bit of promotional shit from Sony. But this one is real:



My favourite visions of the future are coming true…

Welcome, Wikinauts!

OK, I'm not saying that Plashing Vole is the second-most popular and trusted site on the entire internet, but I think it's significant that when Wikipedia went dark yesterday in protest against SOPA, my visitors more than doubled. So actually, I am saying that in the absence of Wikipedia, I am the go-to guy for facts.

I suppose I should give you the answer to yesterday's true-or-false facts. Amazingly, nobody identified 'Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are serious Presidential candidates' as true - either you're not reading the newspapers or you haven't really the depths to which American political discourse has sunk. The other true fact was that Boris Johnson was indeed born in New York and is eligible to run for the Presidency - he was in fact an American citizen until recent years, which makes me wonder whether he used it for tax avoidance. Let's start campaigning for him - then we can have him deported.

You may have come to Vole for the facts, but stick around: I've got politics, music, books and general nonsense. Think of me as a thicker, more sarcastic Radio 4 (that's NPR for you Shermans).

Anyway, back to the marking… I wonder how my students fared without Wikipedia?

Self-defence

The surely-not-long-now death of Thatcher is going to be a horrible time for those of us with a conscience: the right is going to behave as though she were a combination of Boudicca, Mother Teresa and Marie Curie. Carpers (i.e. anyone who points out that her legacy is global despression, inequality and war) will be as welcome as republicans at the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

So here's a cheery and tuneful (no, really) song by Mogwai called 'George Square Thatcher Death Party'. I've a playlist of Thatcher death songs which I'll work my way through.

He's at it again

I'm actually embarrassed by the intellectual frailty of my MP, Paul Uppal. As I predicted yesterday, his speech in Parliament was a shameful rehearsal of all the bees in his bonnet. Despite claiming that

Town centres are not just about retail

he quickly refers to the people in the city centre as 'shoppers' - not citizens or locals.

He's been going on about 'chuggers' (= charity muggers) for months - this is just the latest attempt:

I conducted a survey of small shops and businesses in the city centre to find out why people do not shop there. I was surprised by the No.1 reason—chuggers: people who fundraise, perhaps aggressively. Again and again, shoppers said that the aggressive tactics used by some street fundraisers leave them feeling harassed and intimidated.

It's very thin stuff (and I doubt he was really 'surprised', given his previous claims on the subject). Methodologically very suspect: how many people did he ask? What proportion were shopkeepers? What was the question? The very fact that he calls them 'chuggers' implies bias from the start. It seems very unlikely that fundraisers are a) aggressive (I find them annoying) or that they are the primary reason why people don't shop in the city. I'd be less than surprised to find that he asked a leading question. It seems to me that the reason footfall is down is because there's a massive recession on, one which his government has made worse. But apparently recession is a word that is never going to cross his lips, even in a debate about high street decline. Also, Birmingham, with a wide range of shops, is 20 minutes away on the train.

There's one rather glaring error in this survey, if indeed he conducted one on the street: he claims that shoppers in the city centre told him that they don't shop there because of fundraisers. Can anyone else spot the problem there?

What's his solution? Ah… again he's a little disingenuous:

In Manchester, there is an agreement between the city centre management company, CityCo, and the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association, a self-regulating body that monitors face-to-face fundraising. They have found a balance between fundraising and leaving people in peace to shop. It is important that that fine line is drawn.

It's a disguised call for the privatisation of public space: CityCo is a private corporation given control over what used to be public space by the elected local authority. It's a move to prevent ordinary people using public space for anything other than consumption: try handing out political or religious leaflets in a CityCo area - you'll soon learn the difference between public and pseudo-public space.

Why should people be left 'in peace' to shop? Teenagers aren't left in peace to flirt and play. The arts, sport and leisure have no place in his world. Only shoppers are to be afforded civil rights in Uppal Consumerist Wonderland.

What else does Uppal want? Well SURPRISE SURPRISE: he wants taxpayers to fund commercial developers. Does he mention at any point that he is in fact a commercial property speculator?

 I should also like to offer the Minister some guidance on trust and clarity over tax-incremental financing, which is an issue for the developers of city centres. We have to go back to basics. If we are to see regeneration, we cannot look at the old model whereby development was funded only by bank lending; we need to look at partnerships between local authorities and businesses.

Er… no. Don't be ridiculous. He wants state aid for people like him, and cuts in public services - like Disability Living Allowance - for people like us.

So in summary, a classic Uppal speech: dishonest, intellectually weak and self-interested. I despair, I really do.

Welcome, Wikipedians

Feeling lost? Homework impossible without Wikipedia?

Fear not, brave webnauts! Plashing Vole, as a service to readers, has harvested the key facts from Wikipedia which you might need to get you through the day.

•  Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations while on holiday in Arizona, in the settlement later known Area 51.
•  In Series 3, episode 2 of Doctor Who, a prototype mobile telephone can clearly be glimpsed in the Tardis.
• The eye-in-a-pyramid on the dollar bill was designed by the Earl of Oxford on behalf of the Illuminati.
• There are no Palestinians. Anyone who says otherwise is antisemitic.
• David Miliband is the leader of the Labour Party.
• WMD were found in Iraq.
• The first UK Number 1 hit single was Noel Coward, with 'Half-Caste Woman' (1958).
• Steve Jobs' 'death' was in fact part of the iSingularity - on general release Fall 2012.
• Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were serious presidential candidates in 2012.
• Charles Darwin converted to creationism in 1858, but his diaries were suppressed by the Royal Society. 
• Jon Stewart's PhD thesis was on North-Western Saskatchewan Women's Writing, 1930-1936). He was required to rewrite the final three chapters on the grounds of 'sketchiness'. 
• The 'Occupy' movement takes its inspiration from the Sudetenland, 1938.
• On several South Pacific Islands, effigies of Montgomery Scott are worshipped as gods. 'Beam Me Up' is believed to relate to the Ascension. 
• The 'Hollywood' sign originally advertised Christmas trees. 
• Steve Martin's novels topped the Finnish sales charts in 1983, 1987, 1993, 1994 and 2003. Only William Shatner's Tek Wars series is more popular across Scandinavia.
• Katie Price holds A-levels in Critical Thinking, Textiles and German. She chose 'Jordan' as a stage name after living in Petra as an ascetic for several months in 1998. The claim that she chose the name after her favourite pair of basketball shoes was an internet meme with no foundation. 
• Richard Madeley is a member of the Privy Council. 
• Boris Johnson was born in New York, and is therefore eligible to run for US President. 
• 9/11 was executed by a rogue NSA/CIA unit. All Jews were evacuated from the buildings in advance. Film analysis places Oliver North and Gore Vidal in the cockpit of the first plane but their DNA was never recovered from the scene.

PS: a couple of these are true. Which ones?

Cynical, Moi?

I spend a lot of time abusing politicians, I'll admit. In particular, one Mr. Paul Uppal, the Mediocre Millionaire.

To add a bit of class to my disgraceful behaviour, here's a short piece by Adam Curtis on how the politicians and media managed to poison their own wells.

This just in from the Department of Irony

Well well, Uppal's tweeting from the House of Commons:

In the chamber, hoping to contribute to the debate on the future of town centres and high streets

If you're a regular reader of Plashing Vole, or you follow Uppal's exploits on They Work For You, you'll be able to write his speech in advance:

1. Shoppers only. No charity collectors, layabouts, anti-consumerists or citizens.
2. End all taxes on commercial property owners.
3. Public space to be abolished and turned over to commercial property owners. There is only one conceivable use for space: retail.

What you won't hear:

Mr. Speaker, I should declare an interest before I say anything else. I own commercial property worth millions of pounds and the British Property Federation described me as 'our man in Parliament'. So you should assume that everything I say is informed by my desire to enrich myself and my friends without regard to the public good.

Kidneys… or kids? Kids… or Kidneys

Presumably they mean well, but this horrified me on moral grounds.

I visited a friend last night, and called in to Waitrose near his house (yes, well off my beat). After paying, I was given a green token, and told it related to charity. By the exit was this:

Each compartment was for a particular charity, and shoppers placed the token in the charity of their choice - Waitrose hands over some £1000 according to votes cast. It horrified me - the idea that somebody's future health depended on whether I preferred a renal charity over a bloody dogs' home or whatever the third organisation was. I don't want charity to exist at all - governments exist to solve these problems - but the Darwinian ruthlessness of this game-show scheme made me very uncomfortable. What's next? Cancer v. AIDS: who deserves to survive?

I put my token in the renal slot - balls to the animals until we've got decent healthcare.

Pity for the propertied classes

Fresh from the triumph of his naked self-interest, Paul Uppal made another foray into grown-up politics yesterday. In a brave break from political orthodoxy, he's identified the true 'enemy within' as regards the housing market: first-time buyers.

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what steps his Department is taking to ensure that providing first time property buyers with a partial mortgage guarantee does not reduce access to the housing market for existing property owners.

OK, I accept that this is incredibly boring, but you should remember the phrase 'the banality of evil'. I think that Britain's housing market is distorted and dysfunctional, directly as a result of the Thatcherite belief that housing values should be seen as a personal piggy bank, which led to people remortgaging to buy bigger, or buy frivolous things.

But we're stuck with the system we've got, for now. The government is bringing in a system designed to help house builders - not homeowners - by guaranteeing mortgage payments if buyers fall behind. To Uppal, this appears to be a threat to the British Way Of Life. In a sense, I agree - why should corporations get these kinds of guarantee? - but I suspect he sees it differently. What I smell behind this little manoeuvre is another attempt to cosy up to the moneyed bourgeois whom he thinks will vote for him in 2015.

The people he speaks for aren't in need of protection from hordes of state-funded proles waving their new house keys at the suburbs. They have money and comfortable homes. The first-timers, on the other hand, are having to wait longer to buy a home (average age: 37), stump up a bigger deposit (20-40%, which means depending on parental help or years of living with parents to scrape it together) and higher interest rates. They're excluded from the market across wide swathes of the UK.

But what of Uppal's constituency itself? I picked a central postcode and drew on the ACORN analysis to see whether those already on the property ladder are somehow excluded from the market by these hordes of first-timers with their state guarantees. What do I find? Family incomes are 'low to medium' and mortgage holding is 'very low'.

Often, many of the people who live in this sort of postcode will be single elderly people living in council flats.

Over 40% of the population is over 60 and every other age group is under represented. Almost one in three people in this type is a single pensioner, and, unsurprisingly, levels of long-term illness are double the national average. For those of an economically active age, unemployment is relatively high and people tend to work in routine jobs in manufacturing and retail. The average household income levels for these areas are amongst the lowest in the whole country. Housing in these neighbourhoods is typically small, one or two bedroom, purpose built flats rented from the council or housing association. Very few people have access to a car and they rely on public transport, walking and occasional taxis to get around. These people have little discretionary spend. They are unlikely to go on holiday, but will go to bingo and buy lottery scratch cards. 

OK: there's no crisis outside Paul Uppal's head. What we find is a poor city in which the population is financially struggling. Certainly there are some very affluent suburbs, from which he draws his support (he has a majority of only 600, the result of a decline in Labour supporters voting, rather than a surge in Tory support), but most of us are excluded from Uppal's worldview.

Even Mr. Uppal's Tory comrades think he's off his head with this one: here's the minister's reply:

Grant Shapps (Minister of State (Housing and Local Government), Communities and Local Government; Welwyn Hatfield, Conservative)

My Department is supporting the industry-led new build mortgage indemnity scheme. The scheme will apply to new build properties from participating builders and will be available to all potential buyers, subject to appropriate underwriting and selection criteria. This will include existing property owners who want to move house and buy a new build property.

Approximately 14% of transactions in England in 2010 were for new build properties. The scheme is intended to help builders to build more new homes, and support people to buy them.

So a) the scheme isn't for first-time buyers only and b) it's about saving the construction industry, not helping citizens. Another triumph for Uppal!

Back of the net…

Speaking strictly for myself, I'd have to say that the last couple of hours were amongst the most enjoyable I've had in a classroom for quite some time. What my vict students thought about it, I wouldn't like to speculate, but the fact that the vast majority repeatedly spoke must say something.

I also found it quite educational. It was the first in a series of workshops on the connection - if any - between literature and social class. From next week, we'll be reading a couple of texts per week to discuss their approaches to the subject, but this week I wanted to situate them as classed readers in the literary marketplace. We discussed whether 'doing English' makes you middle class, whether particular genres are associated with certain classes, how class affects the resources you need to read (we didn't get round to discussing the claim that proletarian writers produced short stories more than novels because of their industrial work-patterns), how canons are formed and re-formed, the impact of the literary establishment - which they felt was dead other than educational institutions, especially as they don't read newspaper review sections, book design, misery memoir readerships, book clubs, uses and gratification theory, the commodification of literature, Arnold, Leavis, canon formation, whether poetry is hopelessly compromised, and a range of other subjects.

Very bravely, they each gave me a list of the books they read for pleasure - a category we picked because they do genuinely feel that course material is often picked coercively, even though they do enjoy many of the texts chosen. We discussed them in terms of their marketing, socio-economic position, genre and anything else that came to mind. It was very interesting to argue about why one vampire novel is Literature (Dracula), whereas Twilight (a very popular choice) is 'trash'.

My students' recent reading choices:
Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
Robin Ince, The Bad Book Club (which I intend to purchase)
Linda Lovelace, Ordeal
Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives

Khaled Hossaini, A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite Runner
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Stephenie Myers, Twilight

Bali Rai, Killing Honour

Charles Bukowski, Post Office
Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation.

Nicholas Sparkes, Safe Haven (apparently a romance with a 'weird' twist
Laurie Viera, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict
Tate Hallaway, Tall, Dark and Dead.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter.
Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
Jacqueline Wilson, Girls in Love
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre


Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ


Terry Eagleton, After Theory
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems.

'I haven't ready anything for pleasure since being on this course'. We discussed the institutionalisation of reading and criticism here, which was quite useful.

J K Rowling, Harry Potter.
Running from the Devil, which could be this one about childhood mental health problems, or this one about childhood sexual abuse: we didn't find out, though I (erroneously) speculated that it might be a supernatural thriller.
Lizzie McGlynn, I Forgive You, Daddy. Another misery memoir. I did get some cheap laughs from discussing the way they're marketed and produced, but we did talk seriously about their place in the literary culture and why people might want to read them. Hopefully the anonymous student who's reading these books doesn't feel ridiculed.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, The Naughty Girls' Guide to Life.

Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Myers, Twilight.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (good discussion about whether this was 'trash' or 'literary fiction')
Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad
Bram Stoker, Dracula.

All in all, a fascinating list, as individual books and in the way students are reading them. It's pretty easy to work out that most of the students are female, mostly anglophone, outward-looking and fairly young (oldest is mid-30s), but other than that, there's a range of genres and period represented. Genre fiction is clearly popular - something we discussed - as is young adult/teen fiction. Entertainment is clearly important, and there are signs of a move towards non-fiction: Ince and Goldacre are doing a good job.

One of the interesting things was the discussion of the growth of misery memoirs, their readership and the marketing tactics. Do publishers demand more misery, as the market becomes saturated. Do the covers (of which the one below is exactly representative) tell you all you need to know? Are they read to exercise one's empathy, for personal recovery and empowerment, or for entertainment? (A question I floated but deliberately didn't follow, to avoid causing potential pain).

The session was largely about one's position as a reader, so here's a question I meant to pose to them, but ran out of time. Perhaps you can answer it in the comments section.

What books would you be pleased to be seen reading on public transport? And which ones would you/have you concealed?

With the advent of the Kindle and e-books, the opportunity to play this kind of game is disappearing. Poor Peep Show Mark won't be posing with Friends of the British Museum as a prop for much longer, and a little corner of public culture will have disappeared. No more literary conversations or flirtations - you could be reading anything from Zizek to Megaboobs on your black plastic square, and nobody will ever know. 

What a fascinating discussion we had - the kind of session which makes everything else worthwhile.

Yee-ha!

Over at the Leveson inquiry, the editor of the Daily Mirror has said this about bloggers:

Asked about bloggers, Wallace says: "The out and out cowboys – I don't see in the long term they can survive … people want information that is competent and true."

He's not entirely wrong, though I'd point out that his predecessor resigned after insisting that the front page photos of British soldiers urinating one Iraqi prisoners were true - which they weren't - so much for competence and truth. There are loons here, and I've been known to get stories wrong too - only the other day Paul Uppal contacted a third-party to correct them about something I said on here (which is a bit weird - check the comments section). But bloggers do have a legitimate space in the public sphere, and in a way, it's connected to my pursuit of Uppal.

My local paper is the Express and Star, a paper so astonishingly bad that it's named after the two worst national newspapers on the planet. It gave racist MP Enoch Powell a long-running column, it briefly employed Boris Johnson, it repeatedly demonises ethnic minorities, and it has never knowingly said anything critical of a Conservative. Local newspapers are essential to democracy. As well as providing a platform for the unhinged, they're meant to hold power to account, but this is a function they've largely abandoned. Local journalism is expensive, so the Express and Star has replaced it with publishing PR releases. In any case, it's got no interest in analysing Uppal's behaviour, because it supports the Conservative Party above the needs of the community.

Which is where I fit in. As an amateur, I've got no editor telling me not to bother with the story. Nor do I have financial constraints, because I've got no costs, and my resources are a sarcastic vocabulary and the fruits of my brain, such as they are.

There are downsides to this position of course: I don't have the time to really delve into Uppal's behaviour, nor do I have the skills or resources to track down documentation, interview people and generally get to the heart of matters. This means that I may be inaccurate at times. I also have a lower legal standard, which is what the Mirror editor is getting at: there's no PCC to tick me off (not that it's any good), but then again, I'm economically defenceless if Uppal decides to sue me. All I have to rely on is that it wouldn't look very good for an MP to sue a constituent, particularly as he never deigns to clarify matters here.

For the record, these are his 2010-2011 expenses in summary - I can't find any reference to website hosting, despite WHOIS listing Pinehurst Securities as the registered owner of his site:

Constituency Office
£2,584.42
General Admin
£3,744.19
Staffing
£63,462.88
DIRECT PARLIAMENTARY EXPENSES

Accommodation
£8,439.50
Travel and Subsistence
£2,442.10

Total: £80,673.09

Am I a cowboy? Certainly the blogosphere is a kind of Wild West, which is why corporations and governments are getting twitchy: they don't like criticism. I'd love to leave scrutiny of Uppal to the professionals, but they don't want to do it. Until they do, you're stuck with me.

Looking Brown In A Public Place

Sadly, this sketch from the early 1980s is entirely relevant.



Despite smug bourgeois claims that Britain is the home of individual liberty, the police are allowed to stop and search citizens without needing any suspicion at all. This is the kind of thing usually associated with Nazi Germany or other repressive regimes: an autocratic state taking to itself the power to interfere with people on the whim of a uniformed bully.

You can guess who gets stopped most often: male black teenagers. I've seen it a few times in The Dark Place: a 'random' stop, harsh words exchanged, nothing found, increased resentment amongst the population, while white passers-by have their prejudices reinforced. I once stepped in at the train station after watching a cop harass some kids whose offence seemed to be 'being black in possession of a skateboard'. It was a very scary experience - demanding a name and number from a red-faced, angry policewoman who had clearly never been questioned before. I'd do it again though. I was at Birmingham railway station last year when they police were asking people to step through a metal detector in a 'random' search for knives. I pointed out to the Asian lad next to me that despite the vicissitudes of 'random' selection, no white people appeared to have been chosen, and encouraged him to refuse, which he did. Easy for white, middle-class me to suggest, brave of him to follow it through.

According to the LSE, you are 30 times more likely to be stopped and searched under the 'exceptional circumstances' legislation if you are black. Perhaps that's the 'exception' they mean. Are all these kids criminals? Not really - 0.5% lead to arrests for weapons possession, and I guess another tiny percentage are done for minor crimes. Apart from being nakedly racist, it's astonishingly inefficient.

This stuff makes my blood boil. The police are, or should be, public servants, but too often they act as an external force descending on an area or community as the representatives of power. I've had some very good experiences of policing too, but far too frequently, the individuals I've met have been on some kind of power trip, concerned more with the expression of their authority than with fact, justice or the wider ramifications of their behaviour. That's why the Lawrence murder dragged on so long: to the police, the two black teenagers attacked must have been 'up to no good'. No wonder young black people riot: their only experiences of policing are being stopped and searched in public for no apparent reason.

And it Burns, Burns, Burns…

I see that unpleasant student politician Jim Murphy, now an unpleasant rightwing Labour MP, is calling on Labour to rally round the Union Flag in the referendum on Scottish independence.



Sorry Jim: it's a little more complicated than that. I'd have thought that a Scottish MP with an Irish background would have understood that. Scotland's a complex place: you've got urban v. rural, Catholic and Protestant sectarianism, huge economic inequalities, a separate legal system from England and Wales, a dying language, a very thorny relationship with Ireland, a very different class and social structure, and a long history of independence.

Labour's vote is drawn from urban communities in Scotland, but it's split between the quite distinct Protestant and Catholic (often Irish, poorer) groups, and rivalries between them have often been intense. The Irish - symbolised by Celtic football club - have often looked back to Ireland for cultural values and a degree of protection: one of my ancestors even ran the Irish Party in Scotland in the early years of the twentieth-century. So there's an Irish nationalist strand in the Labour Party, but also a pro-Union one which partly derives from Catholic distrust of the Tory Scottish aristocracy and Establishment, which can be viciously sectarian. The other strand of unionism derives from a traditional socialist distrust of all nationalism: it holds that ethnic division is an artificial imposition on human communities, whereas class solidarity should cross borders. In Ireland, for instance, nationalism hoovered up rebel energy, with the result that the British rulers were replaced with narrow-minded, reactionary leaders for 100 years after independence.

However, I think we should challenge the Labour leadership's assumption that Labour values must always be pro-Union. There's nothing socialist or democratic about insisting on Britishness above Scots, Welsh or Irish independence. After the 1968 New Left, it's perfectly possible to have a progressive, leftwing nationalist movement (indeed, Ireland almost got one in the 19th-century). Plaid Cymru and the SNP are inclusive movements, though it should be admitted that some of their voters would be Tories in England. As Labour moves further right, the nationalist parties have come to seem the repositories of liberationist, pro-state, progressive leftwing policy. Many of Labour's voters and activists are descendants of people forced to leave their conquered and denuded homelands to seek menial work in the Mother of Empire: affection for the Union Flag is much shallower than you might expect.

In the 1930s, Soviet Russia moved from a policy of World Revolution to Socialism In One Country. I wouldn't want to saddle any party with echoes of Stalin, but the phrase is one I think we can usefully recycle. Labour shouldn't take a stand on Scottish independence. Scottish voters should be asked whether they would prefer. The economic arguments should be left out of it - it's about which 'imagined community' the Scots feel is most important. Socialism can be built in Edinburgh or London, regardless of passport. Labour supported Irish independence as a matter of principle, rather than claiming that imperialism would be OK if the Irish voted for socialist London governments.

The pragmatic problem for Labour is this: Scotland is virtually a Tory-free zone. Labour needs those 40 MPs if it hopes ever to get into UK government again. But this is a selfish and self-serving argument. The Scots shouldn't be blackmailed by English politicians. Labour can fight and win elections in independent Wales and Scotland: why should the Scots be compelled to stay in a Union simply to help a party which has decided to support the UK for reasons of electoral strategy?

Unless, of course, Labour isn't being cynical. Perhaps the leadership does care passionately about the UK. If so, I'd suggest that it grows up. Just because the Mail waves the flag constantly, doesn't mean Labour has to. If Celtic nationalism is unsavoury, then so is UK nationalism. Cling to the glories of Empire (and they were only glorious if you were sitting in a bloody big mansion paid for by the proceeds of slave-grown sugar or whatever) is pathetic. Britain's (or England's, Wales's and Scotland's) future lies in Scandinavia: post-imperial small nations which have decided that they don't need to invade America's latest enemy, to wave nuclear weapons at anyone, to 'punch above their weight' on the world stage. It's time to relax, make some friends abroad, accept that this is a small country (or countries) and concentrate on diplomacy and domestic quality of life.

I do think that the socialist case for Union is perfectly honourable, as long as it's part of a discourse which leads to the abolition of all nation-states (difficult to imagine give the unresolved and bloody process by which the UK emerged and is gradually dissolving), but I also think there's a huge gap between socialist values and Labour policy (I know, it's hard to believe). Labour Unionism isn't principled socialism derived from proletarian solidarity: it's British exceptionalism which depends on some of the same chauvinism which dominates the Tory Party and the public sphere. It would take a brave party to move on from that - but perhaps now's the time.

Lots of British people have done wonderful things. Britain as an entity has done a few great things - but there's an awful lot of which to be ashamed. Why cling to a Union that's past its sell-by date? Time for Labour to leave the nostalgia to the Tories and accept the will of the people. An independent Scotland (Wales, England) might become a Danish-style powerhouse, a version of bankrupt Ireland, or an inward-looking, dour Puritan backwater. Fine: it's up to them. Just don't take Unionism as a political principle when it's actually a political calculation.

Down the Rabbit-hole with the Republicans

The Enlightenment is, for Americans, very much over. Which is a shame, because it was explicitly founded on Enlightenment principles by the Founding Fathers, none of whom would ever survive a primary campaign in this day and age.

Science, rationality, intellectual ability, skepticism, doubt: all negatives in the Republican race (and in the Democratic one, of course). Actually knowing stuff is a deeply suspicious quality when the prime characteristics sought by Republican voters are a) feeling and b) total distrust of Washington, big cities, liberals, atheists, career politicians, foreigners, blacks, books, learning… and languages. Never mind that all the candidates are millionaire career politicians. Except for Romney, who's a billionaire who made his pile in asset-stripping companies and sacking hundreds of thousands of people.

Yes. In a true sign of progress, we've moved on from Republicans accusing Democrat opponents of 'looking French' (John Kerry spoke fluent French), to Republicans accusing each other of speaking French. Never mind that the Founding Fathers all had fluent Latin and most of them could read Ancient Greek too, as well as French…



This is a return to the 'Know-Nothings' and 'Ham and Eggs' populist movements, in which suspicion of outsiders was a mark of authenticity and honesty. A bit weird for a nation founded on immigration, and for one which has a military presence in more than two thirds of the world's countries, but American politics is well beyond logic by now.

To read: Pity the Billionaire, by Thomas Frank, about how struggling Americans have been persuaded that the financial system which ruined us all needs more freedom from government.

Marking mayhem

OK, the vast majority of essays I mark are honestly and carefully written. Some are excellent, many are good, too many aren't very good, from which I can learn a lot about my own teaching practice as well as about the students.

But I'm not talking about them today. Instead, I offer you a few very basic tips to help you avoid falling into the trap of PLAGIARISM - or at least how not to get caught.

1. If you cut and paste somebody else's work from the internet, try to change the typeface to match the one you're using.

2. Leaving in the hyperlinks is often a giveaway. The same goes for the source's footnote numbers, especially if you haven't used any footnotes of your own.

3. Don't cite the first editions of Kant, Gramsci, Kierkegaard, Hegel or Marx. Most of them weren't written in a language you read. We don't have them in the library.

4. Do cite books we actually have. Very few things annoy me than references which in fact hide a Google search leading to a single sentence lifted from Google Books. It's really obvious that you haven't read any more of the book than that, and therefore don't understand it. If I haven't read it, or have read it but not understood it (looking at you, Deleuze), I'm going to be a teensy bit suspicious if you're rattling it off with casual abandon.

5. Unless you're a very special individual indeed, turning in work which is instantly publishable in journals which wouldn't accept a bunch of flowers from me, let alone a paper, will raise my suspicions. First-years who discuss Irigaray's theory of phallogocentrism in an essay on media representation are going to have to work rather hard to persuade me that they haven't nicked it.

6. Make sure the bibliography matches the essay.

7. Try not to start essays with (as a colleague recently read) 'In my previous paper on this subject (University of Oxford, 2007)…'.

8. If your English and punctuation is a little bit shaky, throwing in paragraphs of Judith Butler-style sophistication is always going to look a bit dubious. If you don't use capital letters in book titles and don't know that 'media' is a plural, adding post- or neo- to words, or scattering your text with 'discursive' tends to seem slightly suspicious.

9. If your web sources are things like 'megacheat', 'essaycheat' and 'freeessays.com': you've probably cheated. If you're happily nicking AS-level students coursework, you should reassess the level of your abilities. If it says AS on the tin, it's unlikely to be adequate for university, leaving aside issues of honesty. It was very nice of Kelly Brown to put her coursework on the internet, but you shouldn't be handing it in as your own university essay.

10. There's an incredibly simple way to avoid being accused of plagiarism. If you didn't write that sentence, use these things: ' '. Alternatively, you could add 'As X asserts…' at the head of sentences you've paraphrased. Bingo: instant credit for doing research.

The other way to fail an essay is to say things like 'women who have worked in pornography deserve no sympathy if they are subsequently raped'. Despite the correct use of 'subsequent'.

Back to the good essays. We know that you aren't professional academics. We know that academic writing is hard, and that ideas aren't always easy to grasp. We appreciate a clear statement of what you think and how it applies to texts. We don't expect you to have read everything in the field. We can tell when you've put the effort in and we look kindly on you even if you're not quite there.

Tips for success: if you're struggling, talk to us. Talk in the seminars, which is where we try to identify the chewy bits of a subject, talk to us in our office hours, stop us in the corridors. We love enthusiasm and we're always happy to explain things further. That's what we're here for.

Plagiarists tend to split into a few categories: those who don't quite understand that education isn't data-mining information; those who panic because they haven't attended, or managed their time properly; and those who are cynically ready to cut any corners because the qualification is far more important than the process. For the first two groups, the failure is partly ours: we need to explain why academic honesty and effort is worthwhile. For the latter, you're not only cheating us and your colleagues: you're gaining nothing from your time here.

How media works, pt. 94

I'm still reeling from Richard Desmond's appearance yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. Together with the editors of his newspapers, the Star and the Express, he painted a picture of the tabloid media as a sinkhole of greed, cynicism and incompetence. Only this last element truly surprised me: I've always assumed that the purveyors of this vicious, racist, cynical, misleading propaganda and filth knew exactly what they were doing. This is of course, even worse than being enthusiastic. I assume that Mail and Sun writers don't in fact vote for the BNP, leer over young women's breasts and endorse pogroms in their personal lives: they just advocate it for money to sell newspapers. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

Down at the level of the Express and Star though, things are very different. Richard Desmond's appearance was in a sense refreshing. The Mail claims to have some sort of reactionary mission: it's pompous, self-serving and hypocritical. This last charge can't be applied to Desmond and his henchmen. Their testimony was revoltingly honest: they say whatever sells newspapers (and take a cavalier approach to truth), whether that's accusing the royal family of murdering Diana (my two cents: drunk chauffeur, passengers too stupid to wear seat belts) or repeatedly accusing the McCanns of murdering their daughter without any evidence at all (and hearing Desmond add 'etc. etc. etc.' to his apology to the McCanns only added credibility to his opening statement: 'Ethics - I don't know what the word means'.

One of the most unpleasant elements of the Express's hypocrisy is its censorious approach to sexuality. Let's have a look at what was on its owners TV stations while he was giving evidence, shall we? Unfortunately, Portland TV's website is remarkably coy about what its '17 channels', but a little further digging finds Television X, the Fantasy Channel, and various Red Hot stations (showing such treats as 'Bathroom Bitches' during daytime hours) including Red Hot Only 18 and Red Hot Rears. Yesterday's treats included 'Indian Amateur 1', 'Lesbo Chicks Do Boy Girl 4' and 'Hot and Heavy 1'. Over on Television X, you could have watched the frankly baffling 'Cathy Barry Extreme Interracial 2', 'Jim Slip's [geddit?] Euro Matures 2', 'Ready Steady Chav 2' or 'Freddy's British Granny Hunt''.

Other highlights of Mr. Desmond's career include his ownership of a range of pornographic magazines such as Megaboobs, Asian Babes and Skinny and Wriggly, getting an executive tasered in the testicles during a violent confrontation with the Gambino mafia family and - my personal favourite - goose-stepping round a board room while singing 'Deutschland Über Alles' to Telegraph executives during a business dispute. Mr. Desmond is Jewish.

Now the salient point is this: Desmond explicitly sees newspapers as vehicles for selling advertising. He has no truck with high-flown notions of the public sphere. Newspaper content has no responsibility to the wider community: a position even the Mail, which has delusions of running the country, would find distasteful. To honest Dick, this is pompous nonsense put about by the Establishment which wants to freeze him out. In a sense, I agree with him: I wouldn't want to go back to a situation in which newspapers are solely owned by plutocratic peers of the realm who use their organs as vehicles for hegemonic continuity. Nor would I want a world in which only broadsheets are permitted. But is the media sphere - especially on the right - particularly independent now? They all hate the EU, foreigners, black people, women, socialists, the poor. To read the tabloids is to enter a world of fear, paranoia, hatred and easy bigotry. At least the Mail genuinely believes all these things: Desmond appears to promote them solely to sell advertising space.

Quotes of the day

I've been following the Leveson inquiry as well as marking and attending a school meeting. In case you've missed them, there have been some jaw-dropping gems from the editors of the Daily Star and the Daily Express:


On the sources of Daily Star stories:

We don't just lift stories from the Mail website and put them in the Star... without at least checking them.

So that's alright then. 


And then there's the Express editor explaining why his newspaper withdrew from the Press Complaints Commission:

He says one of the reasons for withdrawing was because it failed to stop the paper publishing defamatory articles about the McCanns.

"Because of the McCanns I think that was a huge problem for us and I think they should have intervened … no one was intervening at all. Everybody had too much leeway, it just went on and on," 

So to be clear: the Press Complaints Commission is useless because it didn't stop his paper publishing numerous libellous articles, leading to them being convicted in court and having to pay out huge amounts of money. Stop me before I kill again!