This old dog likes New Tricks

The wonderful cartoonist Sydney Padua (author of Babbage and Lovelace, crazy computational comic crime fighters) has designed this badge in honour of Owen Paterson, the Secretary of State for the Environment, who says the badger cull has fallen flat because the pesky predators 'moved the goalposts'.

Should you require more interactive cutting-edge satire, I recommend this game, in which you attempt to score a goal while the badger move the goalpost, as is their wont. If on the other hand you have higher-brow tastes, you might wish to discover which eminent Elizabethan you are. I came out as Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Dashing, rakish, liked a duel, a hit with the ladies (including Elizabeth I), was beheaded. It's all about the self-fashioning, so keep trying (sorry, little New Historicist humour there). 

I have actually been working today, but I'm also tired (and falling behind in the lecture writing) and now have two colleagues in hospital, so a little light relief is in order. 

And while we're here, I have an argument to settle. Now you may know that I'm a fan of supposedly rubbish TV drama New Tricks, which follows the investigations of some semi-retired cops as they look into cold cases. There are two reasons why I love New Tricks; firstly it's a comedy-drama, which my friends refuse to admit, and secondly, it's clearly written by some left-wing satirists who keep a keen eye on current affairs. 

As evidence, I present the episode 'It Smells of Books', in which a university lecturer dies in suspicious circumstances. It opens with one of our heroes losing his temper in a noisy library, plugs the London Library, promotes reading as the route to enlightenment and wickedly satirises a vice-chancellor more interested in the bottom line than in learning, gets rid of the humanities and staff who defend them and talks of investment, leverage and payback. In the show, the university library is being converted to student accommodation. (You may think I'm having a pop at my own dear institution here, but I'm not: my VC actually wants to rename the Learning Centre as 'the Library', which is rather delightful). Here's the first 10 minutes or so. It's a delightful popular culture intervention which reaches an audience generally resistant to ideological debate. It is, I might say, an interpretation of Newman's The Idea of a University and McGettigan's The Great University Gamble thinly disguised as prime-time detective drama in which the death of humanistic university principles are played out in a murder plot, and I thoroughly recommend it. 

The rest of the episode is available on a popular video-streaming website well-known for copyright fraud. If you like TV campus comedies, you may also enjoy A Very Peculiar Practice. 

Tuition fees: the solution

A simple plan to simplify student funding.

1. Charge students exactly what they paid for their secondary education.
2. Distribute the money around universities, weighting funding towards institutions without massive reserves, farmland and rent income, and towards those places which welcome students from all socio-economic sectors.

Eton College

A comprehensive school in the Midlands.

At the moment, students from the 5% who attend private schools and disproportionately swell the ranks of the Russell Group universities think they're getting a discount at university: Etonians go from £36,000 p.a. to £9000 p.a. at university. Bargainus Maximus as those of you with Classics degrees might say. No wonder they can afford postgraduate study while my students can't.

They've opted out of the free state education available to them thus far: let's hold them to that decision and redistribute the wealth. They've rejected equality: let's hold it against them. Any shortfall in funding can be made up through taxation rather than charging everyone else, because (all together now) education is a collective good rather than a private benefit. 

Now who's going to break the news to Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and the rest of the Cabinet multimillionaires.

Andrew Hamilton deserves a booting

In a long-ago episode of The Simpsons, Bart insulted the people of Australia by mooning them from the safety of the American Embassy (Bart vs Australia) and those simple people decided that the only way to exact justice was to inflict a 'booting'.

Now, despite the evidence to the contrary, chiefly here on Plashing Vole, I'm not a violent rodent. But this evening, just as a diversion from writing lectures, I checked the education news. Because that's how I roll, alright. And what did I find? That the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University is a man in sore need of a public booting.

What did he say? Well, he started off predictably, by demanding that his university and those like it be allowed to charge whatever fees they wish. Wrong (and bear in mind that they're amongst the richest educational institutions on the planet), but a reasonable point.

What really got my foot itching was the way he put it:

Top universities that offer better outcomes for students should be allowed to charge significantly higher tuition fees than institutions that provide an inferior education, Oxford University's vice-chancellor has said.

Now a snob might consider my university 'inferior'.

Superior

'Inferior'

We lack quadrangles, honeyed stone and Nobel prize winners. Tailcoats and gowns are rarely sighted on campus, and there are no clubs restricted solely to Etonians and charging £3500 just for the costume. Our students tend not to come from what the Daily Mail likes to call the 'great schools', i.e. the £35,000 per year Etons and Harrows. Nor do they flock from every corner of the globe: we welcome a good number of international students, but our intake is overwhelmingly local, poor, state-educated and working-class. Our intake is noticeably more welcoming to ethnic minorities too: Oxford has a rather unfortunate habit of preferring white students to black ones with equal grades, and you'll rarely hear a northern accent or female voice either, and that applies to the staff too. Quite a lot of fee-paying schools send more kids to Oxford than entire northern cities.

So when I hear a senior so-called academic assert that his institution is 'superior' because its students have 'better outcomes', I put on my biggest boot. How does he define a 'better outcome'? His university selects those students with the highest achievements at A-level and equivalent, largely from white, economically secure backgrounds, showers them with cash and other support, and they come out with degrees. My university admits students from a much more diverse background. Many have poor or no qualifications. Most of them have family commitments and have to work for a living while studying. They are motivated and we motivate them further.

Once in, we push them. We expect as much dedication from them as my Oxford colleague. Our curriculae may be different but it's no less intensive or cutting edge. We offer a wide range of degrees and other qualifications and draw on the latest research, some of which we conduct. While we taught the latest in post-structural literary criticism and tinkered with computers, Oxford was condemning Derrida and chasing imaginary ducks with flaming torches.

Like all university departments, we have external examiners who certify that our degrees are as good as anyone else's. Otherwise we'd get closed down. As the latest report on my subject states, our first-class students are as good as those at the examiner's own (Russell Group) university. My university lacks the cash to provide tutorials of 1-3 people, ancient manuscripts, subsidised foreign travel, trout for lunch (true) and an art collection for the student residences, and yet our students achieve, and achieve well: many of them sail into postgraduate study in 'prestigious' universities and thrive.

If Oxford's Vice-Chancellor is so confident that his place is superior and mine inferior, I challenge him. Let him take a semester teaching here, and I'll take one at his gaff. If he's so great, he'll be fine and my students will suddenly blossom. If not, he might have to accept that it's a damn sight easier to pre-select your students and then claim success than it is to struggle against the social forces which oppress my intake. And let's not forget that even amongst the Oxford students, those from state schools achieve better degrees than the 50% drawn from the 5% of students educated at fee-paying schools. Is it really that challenging to turn AAA(often AAAA) students into 1 and 2.1 graduates, compared with an institution like mine in which EE students achieve comparable grades?

I admire many of my Oxford colleagues and respect the achievements of my friends who graduated from that university, but we really have to challenge this kind of rubbish. When a VC explicitly sees his institution's role as 'competing' in some global race, I wonder what on earth he thinks his university is for, and whom it serves. My university serves its community. When he speaks like this, he makes it sound like his serves only itself and a narrow class of moneyed global elitists. I know this isn't true, but interventions like his are divisive and selfish. My university arguably needs the money more than his. We don't own land. Our students aren't rich. We're understaffed. Think what we could do with 10% of the cash Oxford rakes in annually in farm rents and gifts.

If Oxford University demonstrably recruited on a background-blind, needs-blind, race-blind basis, taking students from any area of the country on the understanding that the courses and methods it provides are ideal for those particular students, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But it doesn't. It recruits largely (not entirely) from a privileged elite and then cheers when those students achieve good degrees. Where's the 'added value' in that?

When Andrew Hamilton attempts to cut his institution loose from the likes of us, and this country, he damages not only the rest of us but Oxford University too, by making it look complacent, greedy and disconnected. It shouldn't be a finishing school for intensively-coached rich kids, and I'm sure it isn't really, but that's the impression given.

Now you'll have to excuse me: I have to finish an inferior lecture on pre-Shakespearian theatre practice for my inferior students at my inferior university.

Student Grant

I knew last night's edition of Question Time would be a humdinger. Left-leaning Medhi Hasan versus the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts days after that paper called Miliband Sr. 'evil' promised fireworks, and we got them.



So that was fun. But for me, the presence of Grant Shapps, MP, Conservative Party Chairman and possible money-launderer, was equally attractive. You see, Grant and I have history. It was me who complained to the Advertising Standards about his shady company's practice of putting together crappy little money-making documents, selling them under the names of 'Michael Green MP' and other pseudonyms, and proclaiming endorsements from large numbers of people who don't exist. As a result, Shapps agreed to withdraw the adverts rather than face an ASA ruling. His companies were also banned from Google's rankings for 'scraping': stealing other sites' copy to attract clicks.

The most amusing bit was when Shapps was asked by the media about my complaint: he dismissed it as 'politically motivated', which seems a bit strange coming from a man who has devoted at least one of his personalities to being an MP and Chairman of Britain's oldest political parties.

So as you can imagine, I look forward to Grant's appearances on shows like QT with considerable relish. For me, the English language developed solely to provide the word 'glib' for application to Mr Shapps. Last night's episode was a true vintage. Smug, sneering, evasive, patronising, facetious and mendacious, good old Grant gave a master-class in modern Conservative manners.

But amongst all the other fun, one sentence Grant uttered caught my attention. While evading any discussion of the economy in favour of another unfounded attack on Keynesianism, he said to Yvette Cooper of the Labour Party 'You can't just magic money from nowhere' (around the 50 minute mark). 'That's funny', I thought. I have a dim memory of Grant Shapps' alter ego Michael Green insisting (for money) that you really can. In fact, isn't that his entire business model?

Two minutes later, I find this delightful document from the Shapps family firm, HowToCorp.

And what a magnificent opus it is:

Michael Green spent 12 years building his conventional offline business before turning his hand to online marketing on a strictly part-time basis.
And from a standing start – as recently as February 2002 – Michael has created his online How To Corp business empire! 

Part-time is right!

And how does one make all this money?

you can make money overnight, you can have success, you can earn a 6 figure income, you can do all of these things 

Easy: sack your staff:

I have been in the printing business for 12 years, you could not find a more traditional, conventional business than printing, you have stock, you have paper, people and management, all those personnel issues and so on....
What attracted me to the internet business model is that I can do away with all of those things and I can make as much money or more money, but it goes directly into my pocket, it doesn't go to anyone else, I don't need staff, I don't need premises. 

The rest of this dismal document is blindingly obvious business tips of the kind you get from 5 minutes' Googling, although I was amused by the suggestion that other internet marketers can't be trusted:

very well known names in internet marketing…sell similar 'How To' products and I think they are very dishonest 

Not like Grant/Michael at all. Interestingly, he also plugs 'Costly Internet Blunders' by one 'Rick Adams', also published by the Shapps company. Is Rick actually Grant? Who can tell? But that particular volume is no longer available. Perhaps it's being updated to include the sorry tale of Grant Shapps.

'Michael Green' is a very honest man. It says so here:

Protect your own success by preventing others from stealing what’s rightfully yours.

I am seeing people in real time trying to steal my products 

And yet here's the Daily Telegraph reporting that his company has been caught plagiarising software. I hope Grant's having a serious word with…himself.

But having read all 24 pages of Michael Green's guide to making a mint, what actually is the secret? Well, here we go! All you need to do is

Click Here And Discover How To Make 'Real' Money Online By Developing & Selling Your Very Own Products.
Find Out About Michael Green's Private System For Creating Wealth - Now Revealed For The First Time In His Amazing New Easy-To-Follow Toolkit. 

That's right. The big secret is that you need to buy another Michael Green business guide.

Ironically, given that 'Michael Green' is actually a senior government politician, you can still get 'How To Bounce Back From Recession', which I presume the rest of the Conservative Party hasn't read, or we'd all be rich again.

Remember, folks: there's an election in 2015.

Round and about

Spotted in The Dark Place over the last few days. Taken on my phone, hence the execrable quality of the pictures.

I would avoid the bacon in this pub. 

This week's Private Eye. I assume that Dominic Lawson is reassessing his view of the Right's behaviour given his own paper's attack on Ed Miliband's dead dad, or as I'm putting it in tabloidese: 'The Belgian Who Battled For Britain and the Paper that Batted For Berlin'.

Interesting bit of left-wing agitation posted at various sites around the city. The use of the West Midlands Police logo is quite cunning: people do tend to stop and read them. 

Rather lovely letter and newspaper box on the Central Library. A bit Deco, a bit Nouveau, and the luxury of separate slots for papers and letters!

I've had an interesting, if expensive morning already. The daily hate of the Today programme riled me up good and proper. It finished with a reading of a Dylan Thomas poem. Brilliant. Read by… Prince Charles. Because when you need a voice which really expresses the joys of a dissolute, cultured, Welsh thinker, you automatically think of a billionaire monarch-in-waiting with a plummy English accent and a courtesy title to remind Wales of its subjection. Next week he's back to read The Road to Wigan Pier, followed by a preview of his new album, This Land Is My Land: Prince Charles Sings the Hits of Woody Guthrie. 

After that, it was off to the bike shop with both my bikes. The 1967 Moulton Classic needs a full service, and the Forme is getting its 3-month once-over. I don't think the guys in the shop had ever seen a Moulton, and needed persuading that it isn't a shopper or Bike-Shaped Object. Then they started to notice the weird and interesting bits and got quite interested. Needless to say, the simple servicing visit was a trap: I walked out with a pair of Specialized cycling shoes and the associated pedal clips, and significantly financially lighter. Despite my politics, I have a terrible weakness for techy stuff: it's my capitalist Achilles heel. It's the same with my photography and fencing: there's always an essential extra bit of kit with my name on it…

OK, time for some work. Got a friend's book chapters on 30s Welsh literature to read, and a lecture on Volpone to write. I did one last year but it didn't quite work, so this is attempt No. 2. 

What a piece of work is a man

Firstly, a word with Mr Peter Rhodes about 'news values'.

I made a passing comment recently about my university restructuring its departments, resulting in a Faculty of Arts. People have been referring to it as FArts, which isn't very funny but is fairly predictable. My preference would be for the more accurate Faculty of Arts and Humanities, but I'm just not that bothered.

Although I can't link you to his column in the Express and Star as it isn't considered worthy of webspace, Mr Peter Rhodes thought that my comment was a) worth repeating (without payment) and b) 'whistleblowing'. Then again, he does think that the term 'school lunch' is bourgeois political correctness. Unless he's joking. I can no longer tell these days.

Whistleblowing is when you reveal dangerous, illegal or unethical activity in the workplace. It's worth column inches. I'm very pleased that Mr Peter Rhodes is a regular reader of Plashing Vole, because he might learn something. Not because I'm particularly well-informed, but because he's even less well-informed. It's just a shame that he feels it's important to recycle lame fart gags rather than reconsider whether, for instance, supporters of equal marriage are 'fascist', as he claims (clue: fascists put gay people into concentration camps and make them wear pink triangles, rather than legalising marriage between same-sex couples).

Anyway, that's as much space as Mr Peter Rhodes deserves. But I'm afraid I'm going to upset him again by telling you all what I did in class today.

The first class of the day was a two-hour lecture on Shakespeare, with me as the boss's minion. Or lovely assistant, depending on how myopic you are. An introductory session, we spent a lot of time talking about the cultural blocks around having a rich and dynamic relationship with Shakespeare. We talked about the way Shakespeare has been appropriated by the state and cultural authority as in some way emblematic of Englishness and Britishness. For instance, this 1944 Olivier version of Henry V was clearly part of the patriotic propaganda drive:



But it needs some editing to make it Glorious Brits versus Evil German Scum. Principally, the lines in the next scene in which Henry orders 'every soldier kill his prisoners' are cut - we can't have a king of England, or English people, committing war crimes (even though they did, and do, quite a lot).

We talked about Shakespeare as a businessman, as perhaps being Catholic, perhaps being homosexual, of definitely being a creation of each age. There is no Shakespeare, we said: there are Shakespeares. There's the man churning out bums-on-seats material and negotiating the political vicissitudes of a dangerous period. There's the uncouth dullard who slipped into obscurity for 150+ years after his death,  to be revived in cut-down versions and tragedies with happy endings (really: in one popular staging, Romeo and Juliet wake up and live happily ever after). There's the prophet of Empire (the Victorians saw The Tempest as justifying Empire as a means of civilising the brutes and the anti-Imperial Shakespeare, such as the Irish seashore version I saw this summer which played The Tempest as an examination of the evils of invasion and colonisation. There's Straight Shakespeare and Gay Shakespeare, all working off the sonnets, and there are Conservative and Lefty Shakespeares. Most of these send the guardians of conservative culture off the deep end, but they're all there in the texts, waiting to be uncovered. That's why Shakespeare (and his contemporaries) are so fascinating. Yes, you end up less certain at the end of the course than at that start, but I consider that an intellectual victory.

Our point was that you could easily do a degree in Shakespeare Studies without even opening a copy of the plays because in the absence of authorial intent, all texts and especially plays, can be read (or not read) in a variety of ways. Shakespeare didn't leave manuscripts, didn't do interviews in the Sunday papers, didn't arrange publication of the plays (the cash came from performances, and he co-owned a production company). There's no Authorised Version, only varying texts cribbed from actors' notes and friends' memories. Hence the Shakespeare Industry, which puts him up on a pedestal. World's Greatest Playwright. Timeless. Immortal. Always Relevant. Englishman of the Ages.

All crap. This stuff gets in the way of close, informed readings of the texts. Resistance to Shakespeare is often a result of this patronising guff, most often found in education ministers' speeches and little-Englander editorials in the Daily Mail. Once you've cleared all this cultural undergrowth, you can start reading the texts: asking how (and whether) they work on stage and on screen, what the cultural context was, what perspectives are being privileged and which are being silenced. I'm with Derrida: the author's dead. His opinion no longer matters, but the words he (probably) wrote do, and so does the relationship the reader and audience have with those words.

What we want to do is strip away the unthinking hierarchisation of Shakespeare v other authors, English Literature versus Others (such as MacAulay's assertion that a single shelf of European literature was worth 'the whole native literature of India and Arabia') and get back to texts and contexts. Down with Great Men. This is what the know-nothings refer to as Cultural Relativism and Political Correctness Gone Mad. We need to do this: there's nothing intellectually stimulating or informative about constructing league tables of playwrights. You can't compare The Frogs, Hamlet and Shopping and Fucking in qualitative terms: what you can do is compare technique, staging, setting, their relationships to each other and their contexts and learn things through those comparisons. This isn't controversial in my world, but there are plenty of reactionaries (most of whom haven't seen a play since they were the Third Ass in their primary Nativity) who think this is treason, subversion and filth.

As an encore, I went straight into a class which pulled apart the concept of universal morality based on utilitarianism, Bentham and Mill's formula which problematically relates ethics to a complicated calculation of pleasure, pain-avoidance and consequences while covertly relying on very subjective ideas (we don't agree on what constitutes happiness, nor on how to acquire it). We successfully demolished conventional bourgeois morality in one two-hour slot and thus it was a day well-spent.

Peter: if you're lacking material for next week's column, you're welcome to turn up at any of my classes.

Behold! The virtuous politician!

It seems sad that I can name more lazy, morally bankrupt, cynical and machine politicians than principled ones. The United States, an experiment in running a 21st-century polity with 18th-century structures (and 13th-century science and morality to a great extent) has the benefit of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who scares the right, the misogynists and the corporate sector to death. Here she is attacking the undemocratic Republican government shut-down.

Just enjoy.

We get Mail

Well after yesterday's relaxing and non-political blog-post, I'm sorry to say that we have to return to bitter and impotent ranting, because everything's gone wrong.

Firstly over the pond our American cousins – or the Republican half – have decided that they don't need democracy any more. Instead they've shut down the government (except for the NSA spying, the drone strikes and Guantanamo: just the good bits like paying employees and opening the Statue of Liberty).

Why? Because the Republicans won't pass a budget unless Obama suspends his health insurance laws. You know, the laws that were passed four years ago by a democratically elected government, then upheld by the Supreme Court, then endorsed by the electorate when Obama was re-elected. That looks like the will of the people to me, but the Republican Party has decided that it would rather suspend an entire country's normal operations than allow people to have a weak and (from our perspective) rather poor mode of health provision. It's a matter of principle, that principle being your right as an American to sicken and die on the street without Big Guvmint interfering with their communist dialysis machines and defibrillators.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has finally gone off the deep end. It's always been evil, but now it's added wild and vicious idiocy to the mix. On Sunday, it published an article (The Man Who Hated Britain) about Ed Miliband's father, who died in 1994. Ralph Miliband was a Belgian who in 1940 at the age of 16 fled the Nazi invasion by the skin of his teeth, thus avoiding the fate of many of his Jewish family, murdered in the concentration camps. He ended up in London, working hard, pursuing an education and trying to come to terms with a world war and personal tragedy. The Mail has a single diary entry, four lines long, from when he was 17, in which he records a few caustic thoughts about British isolationism and imperialism.

'The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.'

I don't know about you, but I go red and wish the ground would swallow me up whenever I think about anything I said or did at that age. And I don't have a body of beautifully-argued political science to form my adult oeuvre, as Ralph did.

What happened to Ralph Miliband? By the time he was 20, he'd decided that whatever Britain's faults were, it represented Europe's best hope for freedom and he joined the Royal Navy, serving with distinction. Afterwards, he became a leading socialist thinker (I strongly recommend his Parliamentary Socialism). Despite the Mail's best efforts to claim, Ralph utterly failed to convince his sons that the Labour Party was no longer a useful tool in the struggle for socialism. Ralph wasn't a communist, let alone the Stalinist monster the Mail claims: but he was a proper socialist, unlike David and Ed.

What was the Mail doing around the time Ralph Miliband arrived on these shores as one of the millions suffering at the hands of one of the world's most evil regimes?

Er… supporting the Nazis, both German and British. Here's it's owner proclaiming his support for Oswald Mosley's anti-semitic, pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists.

And here he is having a cozy chat with Adolf Hitler:

And here he is in another newspaper again calling for fascism in the UK. Had he succeeded, Ralph Miliband would no doubt have been gassed in a concentration camp on Salisbury Plain or the Yorkshire Moors and the camp guards would all have been Mail readers only to eager to help.

Today, the Mail grudgingly gave space to a rebuttal by Ed Miliband, and surrounded it by an editorial on Ralph's 'Evil Legacy' and a re-run of the original hatchet job, with the added detail that Ralph is buried only a few yards from Karl Marx, the traitorous bastard. Apparently the man lampooned last week as Wallace (of Gromit fame) is 'menacing' and determined to 'drive a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation'. In Mail land, you're a traitor if your father is a) a foreigner and b) dreams of a different political philosophy. I detect a clear line of inheritance from the 30s Mail fascism to the smearing articles they're publishing today. Their problem with Ralph Miliband is that he was foreign and intellectual: terms repeatedly used to cover anti-semitism. The phrase used in the 30s was 'rootless cosmopolitans': men and women with no national allegiance and a set of ideas opposed to 

the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished

Except that – oops, easily done – that list of Great British Institutions is taken from today's attack on Milibands Senior and Junior. Personally, I too oppose the 'great' (i.e. fee-paying) schools, the Established Church, the army which tortures and bombs its way round Ireland, the Empire, Iraq and Afghanistan, and I especially despise the tabloid newspapers which spent the last decade bribing, bugging and stealing. Today's Mail is still, at heart, a nasty-minded, anti-semitic toad. 

But I can think of one foreigner at the heart of the Daily Mail, a man who has done more damage to this country than any forgotten and unregarded political scientist. A man who, rather than pay his taxes to keep this great country on the road, claims to be French… for tax purposes. That man is Viscount Rothermere. Yes, he has a British title and yes, his main residence is a massive mansion in Wiltshire, but for legal purposes, he's discovered that he's French. How very patriotic. 

And that's not all. You'd think that the Mail, which has always wrapped itself in the Union Flag, would be horrified by its owner avoiding his responsibilities. See, for example, this campaign from the 1920s:

Sadly, racism and consistency don't go together. Whisper it, but the Daily Mail isn't a British paper. It's owned by a series of tax-avoiding Bermudan and Jersey shell companies to ensure that while it robustly lobbies on a range of political perspectives, it's never going to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us - and yet it calls Ralph Miliband The Man Who Hated Britain. Very patriotic!

There is a positive side to this story. Ed Miliband, while not my kind of socialist (i.e. not a socialist) has repeatedly displayed considerable backbone in standing up to this kind of bile. He demanded rebuttal space in the rag to demonstrate that his father did in fact love the UK for which he fought with distinction, and goes on to identify the true poison in British politics: overmighty press barons and their vicious, ad hominem attacks. I'm of course disappointed that Ed feels the need to adopt the language of kneejerk patriotism, and most especially by the (not entirely surprising) assertion that:

I want to make capitalism work for working people, not destroy it.

but that's because I'd rather Ralph had led the country than most other people. But I'm impressed with Ed here, and rather less impressed with David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and the other Tories who've been sniggered and quietly applauding the Mail's piece.

The other bright side is that this vile, unsubtle, bilious and incoherent attack, clearly carried out in connivance with the Conservative Party, shows that the right is genuinely scared of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. They've dropped all pretence of principled opposition, fighting on the battleground of ideas, contrasting policies: they've gone right back to the days of the Zinoviev letter and the hysterical scaremongering of a class which knows things are falling apart at the seams. This is panic, but it's a panic which reveals the festering insecurities of a party and a newspaper which have happily hacked, bugged and burgled their way around Britain for too long and now spies Nemesis approaching in the form of a mild-mannered Miliband who has rather admirably decided that he's going to take them on. Once you've decided that the only line of attack is to assert that a dead man was once a) foreign and b) opposed jingoism, you've pretty much given up on any positive vision and turned back to spreading fear and lies.

What links the US government shutdown and the Mail? Simply that their political strategies are identical. Having failed ideologically, they have to invent boogeymen to scare the children. They have no ideas, only the power to spread fear and loathing. It's poisonous, and it will subvert even the lily-livered democracy we have left. What happens if the Tea Party and the Mail get their way? It won't be back to an imagined paradise of Mom'n'Pop niceness and Neighbourhood Watch: it'll be corporate terrorism, joblessness, mistrust and social decay. Have we learned nothing from the 80s Culture Wars?

Update: I gather that Peter Rhodes has used this blog as a source for snide comment in his awful little column in the local rag. Just to be clear Peter: I'm glad you're a reader, because you really, really need the education provided here, but I'm entirely unimpressed with this, and with everything you write. You are a hate-fuelled bigot with the emotional and cultural range of a slug. 

Heroes and Villains

The 1978 film Superman is one I'm always happy to settle down and watch. It's a superhero film from the days before superheroes were the monstrous, all-pervading beefcake-with-psychoses cinematic wallpaper they've become today, every cheap short-run failed comic-book experiment turned into a very expensive failed cinema experiment. I now refuse to watch them: Watchmen was an embarrassing sacrilege and I gather Green Lantern was an insult to the original.

Superman was different. Innocent in many ways: it's a caper without any designs on profundity, which is where our current costumed creations fail: the screenwriters aren't good enough. Superman isn't quite All-American. Yes, he tells Lois that he's there – from another galaxy –  to fight for 'Truth, Justice and the American Way', which you could read as an attempt to recuperate American spirits after having their asses (as they call them) well and truly kicked in Vietnam), but the film's over-riding light-heartedness of tone undercuts this rather implausible claim. He has no political axe to grind nor unresolved Oedipal desires (though his dead father is a Law he breaks, giving rise to the appalling teen-misery of the recent Superman film and Smallville).

The clip above is one of my favourites, and one I show to students when trying to explain semiotics, and cultural studies. Arch-villain Lex Luthor neatly encapsulates the know-nothing reverence for the canon we find in the reactionary newspapers and the views of people forced to read by rote without ever understanding them. He beautifully encapsulates the need to examine all of culture and media – down to the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper – to truly understand our condition. Raymond Williams and Norman Fairclough would be proud.

My other favourite line in the film is towards the end of this clip. Past the glorious geological pun 'We all have our faults: mine's in California' (Lex has launched a nuke to trigger the San Andreas fault so that California slips into the sea, boosting the value of the desert he's bought cheaply), Miss Hackensack points out that the other missile aimed at Hackensack will kill her own mother. Rarely has a shaken head been put to such good use.

Wot no blog?

Plashing Vole Towers apologises for the break in service. Outrage and irony levels are currently heavily depleted by a) Israel denouncing Iran for potentially possessing nuclear weapons and breaching UN resolutions (b) Dan Hodges (c) The Tories and (d) the wilful destruction of New Tricks.

Fresh supplies of outrage will be delivered soon, when normal service will resume. In the meantime, feel free to acquire opinions from so-called rival sources.

It's true. I've been busy with pleasant and/or quotidian duties recently and my blood isn't currently angried-up. Last night I attended my colleague @MsEmentor's book launch (pics) followed by a convivial curry. I've read a couple of books (Jonathan Coe's Expo '58 which was enjoyable but wasn't quite funny, profound or moving enough compared with his usual work, and DJ Taylor's The Windsor Faction, which I immersed myself in, but which would require the Dictionary of National Biography and a decent encyclopaedia for people who aren't, as I am, 1930s culture obsessives: half the pleasure is in appreciating his research).

I've been to some decent classes, met some very promising students and recovered from the trauma of watching Threads the other night. In fact I'm so full of general bonhomie that I'm going to post some cheery songs by The Wonder Stuff, The Delgados, Shack, George Formby and finally some Cannonball Adderley:

Come, friendly bombs?

Afternoon all. It's afternoon because I've been busy doing actual teaching today, rather than simply lecturing you lot over the interweb. And what a schedule it's been. Last night, I popped along to the Unpopular Texts module which kicked off in sunny style with that feel-good classic, Threads. Written by Barry Hines, socialist author of A Kestrel For A Knave and other delights, it details with unflinching horror the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the UK. Set in Sheffield, it follows the fortunes of the local emergency committee and two linked families, though to be honest they're reduced to one broken woman before very long. 'Bleak' and 'harrowing' don't cover the half of it. The story is harsh enough, and the style merely adds to it. Long periods of silence broken only by the wind howling over smashed cities, or the sobbing of our heroine reduced to exchanging sex for a couple of dead rats. There isn't a chink of light or hope in the whole thing.

Threads and The War Game (suppressed by the state and the BBC for decades: I saw it in a nuclear bunker and it scared the hell out of me) are partly why I joined and remain a member of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The UK's 'independent nuclear deterrent' isn't independent (it's owned and controlled by the USA), nor a deterrent. It's a weapon designed not to knock out enemy military materiel, but explicitly to kill millions of civilians and poison the earth for generations. As a peace campaigner in Threads points out, there is no victory in a nuclear war. The winning side doesn't get to expand its borders and loot the homes of the losers. There will be no homes, and no loot. The earth will be dead, the wind toxic and the rain poisonous.

British nuclear policy is to launch 'first strikes'. That means that our government will kill millions even if the enemy hasn't launched nuclear weapons. The claim is that this will 'deter' attacks on us. But if you know the British will nuke you, you may as well nuke them too, rather than using conventional weapons.

I won't go on: either you're happy with the holocaust or you're not. Aside from the principles, last night's class was astonishing because of the students. After the first five minutes, the phones were ignored. Nobody twitched, fidgeted, whispered, texted or updated their status. They were stock still for two hours. When the film ended, they got up and left, in silence. No chatting, no hanging around to talk to us or their mates, just a sense of shock and oppression. I wondered how affected they'd be, having been born a decade at least after the end of the Cold War. Their apocalypses (judging by the shelves of the stuff in the YA Fiction aisle) are environmental.

I felt it too: I went home alone and found myself wondering how my flat would protect me, what the locals would do, how long I'd survive for and what I'd do. By and large, I'm with the Soviet president, Nikita Kruschev, who said of nuclear war that 'the living will envy the dead'.

Here's the entire film. It starts early with some interesting soap-style scene-setting, then rapidly descends into pitiless, scientifically accurate, horror.



I like Threads precisely because of its bleak honesty. It rejects all preparation and defence as useless and self-deluding. It's an antidote to the holocaust-as-thrill discourse prevalent in so many (particularly American) post-apocalypse texts. Britain's John Wyndham, for instance, depicted fallen worlds in which upstanding sensible chaps overcame the horror through moral courage and Boy Scout skills. I recently read Peter Heller's The Dog Stars which – while having a serious side – did seem to see the general depopulation of the world as an opportunity for Daniel Boone/Thoreau types: his hero rather enjoys hunting, walking his dog and flying his plane in the absence of millions. Then there are the countless post-apocalypse survivalist fantasies which allowed readers to revel in gun lore and dreams of throwing off the veneer of civilisation required in a dense urban situation: many of them are deeply fascist and seemed to welcome the End of Days. Not that this is simply a gung-ho American instinct: Betjeman's 'Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough / It isn't fit for humans now' is funny, but does display a certain level of contempt for those denied the social lives of his own circle.

Still, there's always humour to be found in the total annihilation of civilisation, as Mitchell and Webb discovered:



Compared with that, today's Renaissance class, followed by Media, Communications and Ethics, were a doddle!

Scumbag of the week

I know this is hardly a controversial nomination, but this week's recipient is Bono. 

Not, this time, for the stupid glasses, the mullet (it may have gone but its spirit lingers on) or the appalling music, not for the sanctimony, nor for the cosying up to some of the vilest people on the planet. 

No, this week's prize is awarded for his statement, in the course of an incoherent and hypocritical interview, that people who criticise his band's tax affairs are terrorists. 

That's right. After claiming that moving his money to the Dutch Antilles to avoid paying any tax in his now bankrupt country actually helps the Irish economy, he made this observation:

 I think some of the people who criticise us in Ireland and America have a history that you can trace back to our opposition to Noraid.

Noraid was the IRA's fundraising-and-arms-buying organisation in the US: if anyone jangled a collecting tin under your nose in a proper Irish bar in Boston, it was probably them.  Personally, I can't see much clear blue water between misty-eyed Irish-Americans supporting physical-force republicanism from the safety of the US and misty-eyed rich jet-setting rock stars condemning it from the cosy seats of the Clarence or the Lear jet. 

I'm pretty certain, however, that almost everyone who thinks you don't end poverty by hiding your money offshore while your country's young emigrate at a rate of 100,000 per year is a terrorist. 

His alternative explanation is even more pathetic:

A lot of the others probably hate our music.

That's right. We all base our moral and political judgements on whether or not we think 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' is searing comment or empty bluster, Bono. I think what I find most objectionable about him is the sanctimonious hypocrisy. There are lots of very unpleasant rock stars out there, and a lot of them avoid paying their taxes. But only Bono has the sheer gall to avoid his taxes and lecture the rest of us about fairness, making poverty history and moral responsibility. I'd far rather listen to Ted Nugent ranting about his gun collection than endure another sermon by Mr Vox. 

Whovians v Thaterites

Reading an MA thesis, it strikes me that I've never actively considered the use of relative pronouns and what they mean in an essay. It is – for me at least – more interesting than you might think.

Lots and lots of students use 'that' when they're referring to people, which is plain wrong. When the subject of the sentence is a person, it's 'who' (and 'whom' as the object of a sentence). As in 'Churchill is someone who…' or 'To whom did you give it?'. When it's a thing, use 'that': 'that thing in the corner'.

That's basic grammar. But of course language is always an exercise of power and ideology, even down at this level. The choices you make tell us a lot about the way you see the world. I refer to animals as 'it' whereas my more sentimental pals use 'he' or 'she', which may be sexually accurate but confers rather more agency and consideration on the dumb beasts than I'm prepared to bestow. For me, the pronoun you get reflects the likelihood that I'll be able to have an intelligible conversation with you about Samuel Richardson at some point. Obviously that renders most babies and Conservatives as 'it'.

Miss Havisham: just a string of words

But it gets more complicated when we're talking and writing about literature. I've been sitting here for years crossing out 'that' in essays discussing literary characters (yes, I know I micro-mark and I'm not proud) and replacing it with 'who', like some kind of mechanical grammar-Nazi. Mostly because I am a mechanical grammar Nazi.

Until this week, when I realised that this insistence on 'who' marks me out as some kind of 19th-century humanist romantic who'd never read Propp or indeed any structuralist, post-structuralist or 'linguistic turn' criticism. The who/that divide struck me as the key to literary criticism's twentieth-century struggles. On the one hand, the Whovians, determinedly asserting the claim that literature reflects 'real life', that words can authentically recreate the interior and social contexts of characters: that we can get into other people's heads and explain them to a reader. On the other hand, the Thaterites imply the constructed nature of literary characters: they're simply collections of words on a page. Some texts dishonestly (or arrogantly) pretend to reproduce reality by making us believe that Miss Havisham is a person, while more honest texts openly proclaim their artificiality. And then of course there's the tricksy postmodernist work which tries to have its cake and eat it. Take Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which the hapless characters of an abandoned text desperately seek an author to release them from the stasis in which they were left:

But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.” 

“Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”  

Then there's Spike Milligan's novel Puckoon, in which the author's (also a character) legs criticise his/its characterisation and behaviour, thoroughly messing up the real/fictional divide:

'Legs? LEGS? Whose legs?'
'Yours'.
'Mine? And who are you?'
'The Author.'
'Author? Author? Did you write these legs?'
'Yes.'
'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs myself. Did you write your legs?'
'No'.
'Ahhh. Sooo. You got some one else to write your legs, some one who's a good leg writer and den you write dis pair of crappy legs fer me, well mister, it's not good enough,'
'I'll try and develop them with the plot.'
It's a dia-bo-likal liberty lettin' an untrained leg writer loose on an unsuspectin' human bean like me'.

Finally, I recently read John Scalzi's Redshirts, an SF romp in which a spaceship crew starts to realise that they're characters in a lazily written Star Trek-like show and develop serious existential angst.

A Whovian treats characters as real people, a Thaterite analyses them linguistically and celebrates the separation of art and what some people still refer to as 'real life'.*

I suspect my students don't notice the that/who divide consciously, and why should they? Now I have, I can tell it's going to nag at me whenever I read or write anything. I don't know if there's anything written on this conundrum: certainly I've never heard it discussed anywhere. What do you think? Is 'that' too cold and mechanical? Or is 'who' a reactionary turn back to Leavis and the humanists? Should we speak of Hamlet or Alice or Ratty as 'it'?

Pressing stuff… I'll leave you with a Gadda sentence sent to me by that excellent author on all things educational, Andrew McGettigan:

"Pronouns! They're the lice of thought. When a thought has lice, it scratches... they get in the fingernails, then… you find pronouns, the personal pronouns.”

*This is reminding me too strongly of another famously bitter war of principle.

Jim Murphy, affront to democracy

In case you don't know who Jim Murphy is, he's the current Labour Shadow Minister for Defence. I remember him as a particularly reactionary president of the National Union of Students, back in the days when the National Organisation of Labour Students stitched up the presidency to ensure that a) the NUS continued to blindly serve the interests of the Labour Party's upper echelons and b) provide a training job for future MPs and Cabinet Ministers (cf. Jack Straw). Indeed, I have a file of satirical flyers and posters about Mr Murphy from those halcyon days, all predicting his eventual elevation.

Mr Murphy was then and still is one of those grim-faced machine politicians whose self-appointed job is to ensure that the Labour Party tacks ever to the right wing of politics. He has zero interest in the ordinary lives of this country's citizens. I've never detected a shred of political principle on his part, merely a determination to submit to the prejudices of the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Telegraph. As Defence Shadow Minister, his role is to deify the military and ensure that we never stop spending billions on illegal weapons of mass destruction, driven by taunts that his party is 'soft on defence': he's a spiritual grandson of Bevin et al.

This morning's outrage is brought to you by Mr Murphy's performance at the Labour Party conference, where he's cynically utilised the brutal murder of young soldier Lee Rigby several months ago. Mr Murphy has announced that attacking a member of the armed forces is now to be a specific criminal offence.

What's wrong with this, you may ask? It was an horrific event and the military do a difficult job (etc. etc. our boys…heroes…blah blah blah).

What's wrong with this is that attacking anyone is already a criminal offence: violence is reserved for the state under this country's laws. The safety of the individual is paramount, and the law demands that it be applied equally. As one military officer, Colonel Rainsborough, said in 1647,

'I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest… I do find that all Englishmen must be subject to English laws; and I do verily believe that there is no man but will say that the foundation of all law lies in the people; and if it lie in the people, I am to seek for this exemption.

It's really simple for me. If you stab a soldier on the street, you go to prison. If you stab a milkman, teenager, pensioner or stockbroker on the street, you go to prison. The right to life is sacrosanct. Yet Murphy's Law will divide the people of this country into two categories: the military and the rest of us. Yet British law and custom specifically holds uniformed personnel to be simply 'citizens in uniform', with surprisingly few privileges: a bulwark against martial law and state oppression. In practice of course the police and armed services behave as though the'yre exempt from the laws applying to the rest of us: de Menezes, the guy killed while making his way home during the G20 protests, Northern Ireland and Baha Moussa, extraordinary rendition, the behaviour of the TSG and the the undercover cops fathering children with activists and subverting their legal activities. But the principle is an important one: that the armed and uniformed services are public servants, not our masters.

Imagine being caught up in some bar brawl in Aldershot, Colchester, Warminster or any of those garrison towns. Some drunk soldier takes exception to you and swings a punch. You all get to court and he's charged with common assault while you're done for common assault and violence against the person of the armed forces. A Quaker CND marcher is done for impeding a nuclear base's guard. Or a Northern Irish nationalist protest defending herself against state violence gets charged with extra offences. Does that look like fair and equal treatment? Once we decide that one person's body is more worthy of legal protection than another's, we've abandoned the notion of basic human rights entirely, on favour of a system in which power accrues rights while the rest of us hope for legal goodwill.

The second embarrassing thing about Mr Murphy's proposal is that it's such a shameless exercise in headline-grabbing. He isn't promising that a Labour Government will bring in this law. He's going to table it in Parliament next month, from the opposition benches. He knows perfectly well that such bills never succeed. They run out of time. Governments defeat opposition bills simply for political reasons. That's what Murphy wants: he can achieve headlines about uncaring Tories abandoning Our Boys. Either that, or the government adopts the Bill and declares itself the winner. I can't see any Conservative politicians making the point about equal citizenship: they'll wrap themselves in the flag at the first opportunity and another blow is struck against equality. So Murphy knows that this isn't going to become law: he's just after cheap headlines,

This is cynical, awful stuff. Murphy's got no defensible principle and he's reaching for the lowest form of tactical politics for short-term. I honestly thought that under Ed Miliband's leadership, this kind of nonsense was a thing of the past. I know he's under pressure to get some quick wins with the press, but he should be beyond this kind of rubbish. It's the sort of nonsense that makes me ashamed to be a member of the party.

Of Sluts, and Strikes, Or, Forward to 1912!

One of the interesting things about postmodernism is that with language and meaning sundered, anyone can appropriate it for their own purposes. 

Take this clip of Godfrey Bloom, Member of the European Parliament and former habitué of Hong Kong brothels, berating – and hitting – journalist Michael Crick for his supposed 'disgraceful' racism, after the Channel 4 hack pointed out that UKIP's conference material didn't stretch to a single non-Caucasian face.



This is the Godfrey Bloom whom this morning described women in politics as 'sluts' and referred to Africa as, well, see for yourself:



Somewhat unfashionably, I'm quite a supporter of 'political correctness', or to put it more simply, politeness. Anyone with a serious argument to make doesn't need to reach for personal, racial or sexual comments to further said argument. Bloom's dyspeptic accusation of racism is laughable on one level, but also dangerous: it's a deliberate attempt to render the term meaningless so that it can't be used against him and people like him when they say racist things.

Perhaps UKIP couldn't find a single black person for their publicity because they don't have any black candidates or even members. In a sense, their brochure may be honest at a deeper level: where other parties (and even some advertisers) feature people from ethnic minorities to look inclusive and progressive, UKIP is clear: they just don't want black people in their party. The leadership might not say so out loud, but the membership speaks volumes. They see all black people as foreigners and would happily see them deported. 

It's easy to dismiss UKIP as the latest manifestation of red-faced blustering Tory golf-club bar bores calling for 'a small libation for my good lady wife' and dreaming of bringing back the birch. For good reason: that's what they are. But they're far more important than that. The UK has a shrill, rightwing media which concertedly plays on the prejudice of bourgeois reactionaries while tacitly encouraging the dominance of another group of rightwingers, the financial engineers. The little-Englanders attract votes for neoliberal parties through dog-whistle politics while the parties they elect get on with cutting wages, axing pensions, privatising hospitals, denying climate science and removing workers' protection. On some of these things, the UKIP voters agree with the money-men; on others, they just don't care. Currently, the rightwing newspapers loathe the Coalition government and use UKIP to drag the Tories further to the right, economically and socially. This contradiction in the strands of conservatism is encapsulated in Nigel Farage: while he talks endlessly about the conservative culture wars (hating political correctness, the little man being crushed by Brussels etc etc), he made millions in the City, exactly the kind of 'socially useless' gambling which erodes the supposedly 'English' or 'British' values many of his members purport to endorse. Given the opportunity, he would privatise everything in sight, yet his members are staunchly against the free-market free-for-all for which their monetarist cousins yearn. Farage wants a low-wage economy in which shareholders take what the workers should be paid: whatever he says in public, he knows that a globalised, mobile proletariat is key to maintaining this capitalist Utopia. Truly, being a conservative politician is to ride two horses straining to gallop in different directions. 

Giving UKIP the oxygen of publicity makes them seem important, provoking the Tory Party to chase their votes by shaping an even more reactionary agenda. We all know UKIP's leadership are bluff 'common sense' buffoons who'd steer the country into a ditch on their first day in office, or liek Farage, appear to be bluff common sense buffoons while actually pursuing a private agenda inimical to their own voters. But they're important because they're being given the opportunity to make the political running, despite their minimal size and lack of elected representatives. We're being dragged to the hard right. 

The Tories have accepted this drift from respectable conservatism to fringe lunacy as the price of power, becoming a Tea Party in tailored suits. So much, we'd expect: the Tories value political survival way above principle or ideology. But Labour should be ashamed. Ever since the dark days of Blair, the Oxford-Party HQ-SpAd-Safe Seat brigade who run the party have assumed that the working class is made up of thuggish racists. Needless to say, virtually none of these Bright Young Things have ever worked for a living, originated in the working class or lived amongst them. But they've read about them, and they know that White Van Man reads The Sun and hates Gypsies, women, foreigners and 'poofs' (his boss reads the Mail and expresses his identical prejudices in politer language). 

Rather than assume that a misinformed population has better instincts which can be awakened by discussion, education and reason, New Labour decided that it would be easier to pander to these prejudices, hence the vile race-baiting perpetuated by Labour ministers like Reid, Blunkett and Woolas, the immigration minister who claimed that 'illegal immigrants' and al-Qaeda wanted the Lib Dems to win in his constituency:

So what we now have is a political system in which all the major parties have decided that a) the voters are vile scum and b) their perceived prejudices should be adopted as party policy. UKIP is merely the latest boogie-man used by Murdoch et al. to make potential governing parties stay at heel. 

I'd like the Labour Party, at least, to return to the 1930s. Back then, it was forced by the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party to remain agile, radical and close to the electorate without adopting the darker impulses of the populus. It had confidence in the people's intelligence and goodwill. Now, we have parties which fear and resent the population, a political class which wants to be left to get on with things unhindered by the mere citizenry. One section of the left was Syndicalist. Their vision of the future was workers' co-operatives running each industry and negotiating with other industries to the people's mutual benefit, without government. You may or may not see this as a good idea, but the Syndicalists had a very keen eye for the pitfalls of representative politics such as the UK adopted. Here's what the 1912 South Wales Miners' pamphlet The Miners' Next Step has to say about political and trade union leaders' inherent conservatism:

In the main, and on things that matter, the Executive have the supreme power. The workmen for a time look up to these men and when things are going well they idolise them. The employers respect them. Why? Because they have the men - the real power - in the hollow of their hands. They, the leaders, become "gentlemen," they become M.P.'s and have considerable social prestige because of this power. Now when any man or men assume power of this description, we have a right to ask them to be infallible. That is the penalty, a just one too, of autocracy. When things go wrong, and we have shown that they have gone wrong, they deserve to be, and are blamed. What really is blameworthy, is the conciliation policy which demands leaders of this description.

For a moment let us look at this question from the leaders' standpoint. First, they are "trade unionists by trade" and their profession demands certain privileges. The greatest of all these are plenary powers. Now, every inroad the rank and file make on this privilege lessens the power and prestige of the leader. Can we wonder then that leaders are averse to change? Can we wonder that they try and prevent progress? Progress may arrive at such a point that they would not be able to retain their "jobs," or their "jobs" would become so unimportant that from their point of view, they would not be worth retaining.

The leader then has an interest - a vested interest - in stopping progress. They have therefore in some things an antagonism of interests with the rank and file.

The ordinary people, they say, are reduced to the status of fans at a football match: while they might have picked the team, they no longer have any say in how play is organised. For the Syndicalists, betrayal was inevitable. The leaders would go to London, sit in negotiating rooms with the opposition, visit their tailors, drink their whisky, pick up their discourse and before long, those outside would find it hard – to nick Orwell – to tell the difference between the pigs and the men. 

Reading today's revelations about New Labour's infighting in the dying days of the Blair regime, it's depressing to note that neither Blair's nor Brown's minions give a moment's thought to political principle, to the hopes and dreams of their party members or the people they're elected to govern. The people are an inconvenient embarrassment, carping and jeering while their leaders try to look dignified in the offices of The Sun or Goldman Sachs. Again, those miners knew what they were talking about in 1912: the leader

sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion. His motto is, "Men, be loyal to your leaders."

In order to be effective, the leader must keep the men in order, or he forfeits the respect of the employers and "the public," and thus becomes ineffective as a leader.

Paid-up members of what Sampson called 'the political class', this is politics reduced to a game of who's up and who's down, who's in and who's out. That lives, communities and futures depended on how they behaved appears not to have occurred to Blair, Brown, the Blairites and the Brownites. Bereft of any political principle, they'd read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and agreed that ideological differences were dead: we were all free market capitalists now (a weak argument demolished along with the Twin Towers) and all that remained was to bicker over who would referee the bunfight. As usual, the Tories were hatefully honest: they never believed that the war was over. Not until the last worker is reduced to peon status, the last job exported to some North Korean slave factory will they declare victory over us. There's no humbug in the Tory wing of the Capitalist Party, unlike the Lib Dems or Labour: they hate and fear us and aren't afraid to say so, sure that false consciousness will deliver them enough votes to be in with a shot of power at each election.

Ed Miliband shows signs of understanding this, but there's little hope of success without as much pressure from the left as there is from the right and the media conglomerates who serve as the PR wing of Big Money. Which brings us back to dear old Godfrey, Boris and Co. They're the jesters of Big Money. They raise a stunned gape at their knowing use of language and ideas previously thought beyond the pale. Like comedians relying on rape jokes, the shock diminishes but the ideas permeate into polite society, disguised as 'speaking your mind' or 'common sense'. Exaggerated by an echo-chamber media pursuing other private interests, their plain-speaking is seen as attractive to the serious politicians and we're dragged, one gaffe at a time, into a smaller, meaner, less hospitable, more suspicious condition. 

Other than that, I'm quite relaxed at the moment. Looking forward to teaching next week. Toodle-pip!

"Books! And cleverness!"

Despite being a largely 'insensitive wart' with 'the emotional range of a teaspoon', and once having been described – by a friend, no less – as 'emotionally dead', I shall make an exception today to wish a happy birthday to a fictional character.

Today, we celebrate the birth of one Hermione Granger, the true hero of the Harry Potter novels. Lacking a Messiah complex, her character is a paean to the virtues of reading and research. 



Without her devotion to books, the world would not have been saved. Yes, she's a little pompous in the early novels and films, and her upper-middle-class status, it is implied, is normative (whereas the Weasleys' poverty is picturesque and sentimental) but she becomes an exemplary young woman: intellectual, thoughtful and independent. 

She's also a skeptic of the finest kind, turning down Divination lessons and evoking a response which warms my own shrivelled heart:



I disagree with Hermione in only one regard:

"Books! And cleverness! There are more important things--friendship and bravery"

Nonsense. Friends can unpick the locks and escape while you're asleep, whereas books stay exactly where you leave them and don't whine about needing daylight or to 'go home' or another bowl of gruel.  More trouble than they're worth. 

Another hero who spent a lot of time in libraries was Buffy: you younger readers may not remember her but Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a superb satire on teenage hopes and dreams, in which Buffy discovered (rather to her dismay) that she was another Chosen One (adolescent literature teems with them: perhaps they need a union), which promised to put a severe dent in her plans for dating and teen high-jinks. Conveniently, the opening to hell is located in her school, providing a neat opportunity for an even odder examination of the American education system than the many other fine sit-coms and dramas set there. Props too for Blossom, My So-Called Life and Canadian Degrassi Junior High, Lisa Simpson and for BBC2 for showing them all: without them I'd have assumed that all other girls were like my myriad sisters and become a socially maladjusted weirdo. Oh, wait…

Aided by Giles, the dryly humorous British school librarian and mentor ('What are you going to do?' 'Get my books, look stuff up'), Buffy saves the world from assorted hell-beasts in every episode, through a combination of book-smarts, sarcasm and roundhouse kicks. 

Both Hermione and Buffy negotiate the demands of adolescence (sexuality, education, isolation, socialisation, soul-sucking monsters) with aplomb. They aren't obsessed with appearance or validation through boys and popularity. They don't always wear pink and they aren't simpering sidekicks to some macho male here. Being the products of a capitalist, patriarchal media industry, they aren't ideal feminists, especially the film version of Hermione, and their post-adventure trajectories are fairly conservative, but looking around the fiction landscape, they're quite impressive. They do and know things rather than aspiring to fame or attachment to some equally vacuous man. As characters, they have intrinsic worth, rather than existing to accentuate a male hero's attractive qualities. When Hermione and Ron get together, they enrich each other: she's not a prize. 

There are some pretty awful role models relentlessly promoted in the media. Hermione and Buffy are good alternatives from pop culture - and not just for girls. 

(And while we're at it, here's my boss explaining to students why they need to talk in seminars: 'you don't get fit by going down to the gym and watching someone else work out').