Cameron's coming for YOU!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roll up, Roll up for the Charismatic Hoon

Mr Hoon, you'll recall, was the co-author of the pathetic little plot against Gordon Brown a couple of weeks ago. Those of you with a penchant for very dull men might even recall that he was a spectacularly dull Minister of Defence for a few years.

Today he's giving evidence to the Chilcot enquiry into the war. As you'd expect, he's fighting the spirit of enquiry with the shield of yawn-inducing boredom, but there are a few gems.

He was asked, as Minister of Defence, whether he knew that Britain was offering troops for the Iraq war.

Lyne says that by May 2002 the Americans had reached the view that the British were offering a large land contribution. Sir Christopher Meyer referred to this in his evidence. Did Hoon know about this?

Hoon says that he was not aware of this.

This man was in charge of Britain's armed forces.

Update: understatement of the century:

Chilcot asks if there was a concern about the British not being able to control what the Americans were doing.

Hoon accepts this was an issue.

Wanker of the Week

Nominated by Kate: Steve Penk, the DJ who played one of my favourite songs, 'Jump' by Van Halen, because he was annoyed that a woman was delaying traffic by threatening to do just that, from a bridge.

I seem to remember a story last year in which a Chinese man actually pushed a potential jumper from a bridge because he considered the man to be an attention-seeker.

Mmm, empathetic.

I know how Dumbledore feels

There's a scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which finds the saintly professor forcing himself to drink enchanted/poisoned water which sends him mad with terror - and yet he has to continue imbibing until it's all gone, or his quest fails.

This is an exact analogy for marking essays. The first few this morning were fine. Some were good, others less so. Several hours later, I'm ready to sell my grandmother to cannibals if it would end the torment (though actually the alternative is to clean my flat).

I don't mind marking essays where the effort hasn't been rewarded by enlightenment. It's easy to tell how much work has gone into a piece, and effort does deserve recognition. What's soul-destroying is the plagiarism, especially lazy plagiarism. If you copy from the web, at least copy a decent source. I've had a couple today that have cut-and-pasted from a site riddled with factual errors. If you'd written it yourself, you might have done better…

A final thought. If you're only here for the piece of paper, I guess plagiarism is fine. It's an efficient method entirely in keeping with the instrumentalist, individualist and consumerist ethos dominant in Western society. However: learning should be transformative. You should be changed by everything you hear and write. Losing the opportunity to debate rather than listen to lecturers, and plagiarising essays doesn't hurt us (though it is disappointing). Most of all, it robs you of the chance to transform your intellect, your personality, and your future.

It's also a mammoth pain in the arse, trawling the web to track down your sources.

For a wittier and more learned take on plagiarism and intertextuality (though he doesn't se the word), read this essay in yesterday's Observer. In case you don't know the difference, plagiarism is the use of other people's ideas or words without acknowledgement. Intertextuality is the use of said ideas or words with the deliberate intention of touching off associations and memories: the author wants you to know where they came from, to add significance. Eliot's Waste Land uses countless fragmented quotations and references because one of the ideas he's exploring is the loss of a stable and coherent culture (destroyed by war, technology, lefties and so on), from which he pillages the references. You, on the other hand, nicking paragraphs from essays on 'cheatmate.com' isn't a witty and philosophical redefinition of the nature of scholarship, authority and the ownership of ideas…

Don't take the soup, do send your money

Haiti was hardly a natural disaster. Other countries in the area have survived recent disasters in far better shape - such as Cuba and Dominica, the country which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Haiti has been an international football for basically all its existence, colonised by France and Spain, punished for its wonderful slave rebellion, occupied by the US, and toyed with during the Cold War, then abandoned when it was no longer useful. It has never had a stable, altruistic government, enduring a litany of dictators who ravaged the place for personal gain while following orders from the nearby superpower, or self-styled saviours who, failing to make any headway with a society that filled the void where government should be with gangs, ended up selfish or incompetent. If Haiti was a Muslim country ripe for 'radicalisation', or it had oil, then it would never have reached this condition. Experts in all areas would have been dispatched to help, food would have appeared, elections would have been held. Instead, we get a token UN force and medical aid from Cuba, which is on a major diplomatic mission to South America and its neighbours.

The earthquake was bad, but the massive death toll and damage are entirely caused by historical conditions. Without stable government, Haiti never had the money or inclination to develop boring institutions like an Inland Revenue, a Forestry Commission, a Trade Ministry, or a Buildings Inspectorate. Without managed trade, the Haitians had little access to hard currency, and therefore taxation was difficult. No tax = no importation of fuel for cooking. No fuel = massive deforestation: I saw a picture the other day of the Haiti/Dominica border. The Haitian side was totally denuded of trees, whereas the Dominican side was thickly wooded.

Without trees, topsoil is eroded and land is destabilised. Without town planners and buildings inspectors, Port-au-Prince became a jungle of flimsy concrete buildings sited on destabilised, deforested land. When the earthquake hit, the hills collapsed and the buildings fell down on top of each other, leading to the horrendous death toll we have.

Pat Robertson saw the disaster as God's punishment, and plenty of people would like to see it as an unforeseeable Act of God. It wasn't. We caused it, through neglect. Boring organisations like the Department for International Development fund botanists, architects and infrastructure experts to do this kind of thing, but their budgets are too low because we hate paying tax, and their attention is diverted to whatever country we've invaded most recently. No doubt their budgets will be cut even further under whichever government we're getting next.

Meanwhile, what to do with your money. Haunted by racial memories of 'taking the soup' (the British habit, in Famine Ireland, of feeding the starving only if they converted to Protestantism), I'm wary of religious aid. Even if their motivation is getting to heaven by doing good works, I'd rather give to secular charities. Richard Dawkins has made it easy: send your money here and every penny will be given to the International Red Cross and/or Médècins Sans Frontières. He'll even cover the administration costs if you use PayPal.

Send your money, and ask hard questions of your politicians.

Day 93 of the marking marathon

Still slogging through massive piles of essays. As usual, there are excellent ones, good ones and, well, others, though often lightened with hilarious comments which I'm not going to share with you.

I ran away from marking yesterday to go for a local walk with Dan and Emma. We struck out west of Penkridge and mostly squelched through muddy fields, meeting nobody. The animal life had returned - kestrels, yellowhammers, reed-buntings and best of all, a pair of hares, not too far from us. They even had a perfunctory go at boxing. If only I'd had my camera… Hares are great - they're quite rare (and apparently very tasty), they have massive ears and back legs, and run very, very fast.

And now for something completely different

A slice of pure pop genius:

Don't mention the war

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



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

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

Iris Robinson: the truth finally emerges

1. She's involved in a sex scandal with a young boy.
2. The government covered it up.

Clearly, she's an Irish Catholic priest.

Case closed.

More fun than marking!

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

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

How to do real populism

The UK government announced that it would tax the pool of bankers' bonuses above £25,000 at a rate of 50%, a sensible move and one I'd like to see extended past this year. But in political terms, they downplayed it - even suggesting that it would raise only £500m, when it appears that around £2bn will result.

Over in the US, where Obama hasn't even got an election to fight (unlike here), the President is instituting another tax on bankers, but he's taking a very different approach, and one which Brown might learn from if he wants to win power. This is how to do real hardball politics.

He:

told Americans that he was determined to recover "every single dime" of the scheme unveiled in the dying days of the Bush administration.

"My determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people, who have not been made whole, and who continue to face real hardship in this recession," Obama said.

Instead of setting a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I'd suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibility."

"If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers". 

One for Dan

As an almost-graduate of Hull, he'll appreciate this headline:

'Hull Could Be Transformed into a Venice-like waterworld' (when sea levels rise). Mmm, gondolas pushing through a sea of used syringes and emptied rusting cans of Skol Super. Hull, despite an historic core, was once voted Crap Town of Britain No. 1. Dan assures me that it's worse than Wolverhampton. It certainly shares no characteristics with Venice.

Must grow a beard…

Despite being snowed under by marking, I'm feeling very relaxed and happy. Anita and I went to see Spiers and Boden last night, at the New Victoria theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme. It was the first night on a tour consisting of… one night. Folk gigs are odd anyway - you never know whether the crowd will sing and dance or not, but this was in a round theatre, which was polite but very intimate. Every proper folk beard in Staffordshire was present and correct.

Folkies are also immune from record company shenanigans - usually releasing their own stuff or being signed to sympathetic labels. This was never more clear than last night. Neither musical genius had been pressured to smarten up: they're clearly familiar with the changing rooms at Oxfam (though they're dressed up in this clip).

I liked the echoes of rock gigs: instead of ranks of spare guitars, Mr. Spiers was surrounded by different melodeons, and Mr. Boden had a couple of violins, a guitar, and an amplified plank to stand and dance on. They were great.

Except for the banter. In folk tradition, the origin of each song and an explanation of what it was about seemed to be compulsory. Sometimes, a terrible joke accompanied the context. However, there was some wit involved. One anecdote was followed by this comment: 'That's a traditional English joke, collected by Cecil Sharp and it's now in the Cecil Sharp Library' (sorry, obscure folk music joke. Perhaps you had to be there).

Anyway, it was a wonderful night, aided perhaps by the Zubrowka and apple juice cocktails…

Better uses for a riot shield part 1

I've been pressed up against a wall of riot shields, so I'm all for the alternative use demonstrated in this video. How sad that these larking coppers have been disciplined. To maintain policing by consent, we need to see that cops do have a human side - something they've increasingly forgotten over recent years. Which is why I can't find any reason to condemn these guys.

Filling the remaining gaps on my shelves

A few more books appear in my pigeonhole today: Jean Hegland's teen post-apocalypse novel The Forest, Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, which sounds like a teen version of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and Alex Preston's The Bleeding City. This last is an advance review copy and the novel's about a hedge fund trader and the city's excess, by a guy who is a merchant banker with creative impulses. It'll be interesting to see what his insider take is (clearly he hasn't 'repented'), and I assume that it's one of the early texts in what will become a flood of Crash Fiction.

Also received: a CD of Morten Lauridsen's choral music, including O Magnum Mysterium - he's the post-minimalist composer currently reviving the genre. Not convinced yet, but it's good stuff. Don't worry about the lack of visuals - the quality of the piece and choir are what matters.

Who killed Haiti?

It was God.

At least, if you listen to tele-evangelist and former US Presidential candidate Pat Robertson (6 minutes into the video). He's one of the most influential religious and political figures in the US. Apparently the Haitians struck a deal with the devil to achieve independence from the French (back in reality, it was a brilliantly organised slave uprising).

"They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it’s a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another." 

Presumably Robertson thinks the the American Revolution was also a diabolic plot against God's Anointed Empire (the British). Presumably he endorses slavery too… You can read a list of his stupidest opinions here. I particularly like this one, which I have on a postcard:

"the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Iris Robinson's crimes against English

One of the things that's annoyed me about Iris Robinson (apart from the bigotry and corruption) is her contempt for a decent language. The fundamentalist sect she leads is the Light 'n' Life Free Methodist connexion (I gather that actual Methodists aren't too keen on bigotry).

Why Iris? What's wrong with Light AND Life? Why must you make your church sound like a coffee sweetener? Emma's brilliant suggestion is that your church is so Old Testament that you had to take out the words AD!

Perhaps there's a linguistic aspect to her fundamentalism too. When you're a loyalist fundamentalist whose main political belief is hating Irish Catholics, having a name only one letter removed from Irish must be uncomfortable. She's got a lot to prove…

Ich bin Frankfurter

If you're not familiar with Melvyn Bragg, he's a soi-disant public intellectual with massive hair and a smug air of false humility. To me, he rivals Jools (Julian really) Holland in the slappability stakes.

However, his Radio 4 show about the history of ideas, In Our Time, sometimes comes up trumps. Today's discussion was about the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and others), from whose ideas my own critical theory approach is descended. They were a bunch of radical post-Marxist Germans in the 1930s who tried to work out why the proletariat couldn't see they obvious oppressiveness of capitalism (they weren't keen on the Soviet Union either). They were horrified by the uses to which popular culture could be put (having observed Nazi propaganda) and by the popular culture they found when they fled to the US: to them, popular culture (the Culture Industry as they called it) generated false consciousness, leading the proletariat to consider their lives under capitalism perfect, or at least natural.

They despised pop culture because it wasn't oppositional: true art, they believed, should remind us what's missing, what life could be like. So they were connected with Freud on regression and to the avant-garde literary and musical movements. Like those creative groups, they believed that 'pretty' or sentimental art was conservative and dishonest: how could a composer write pretty tunes after the Somme, or Auschwitz? To do so was to deny reality on a cultural and personal level.

It's a hard message. It suggests that we should never settle for comforting or relaxing cultural products: no It's a Wonderful Life, no Notting Hill (no great loss), no Clueless, no Elgar nor Gilbert and Sullivan. They were for 'high' culture: Berg, modern art and the like. I confess to being an unrigorous Frankfurtian: I'm postmodern enough to enjoy popular culture in some of its forms, but I'm uncomfortable enough to distrust the lazy assertion that pop culture = democracy and high culture = reactionary. I'll certainly be taking a Frankfurt approach for my upcoming Anne of Green Gables paper.

If you're still with me: you can see what they're on about if you consider 'celebrity' culture. The Frankfurters had come from Germany, where film was the primary mode of propaganda, creating an idealised image of a dictator who would solve all Germans' problems. Arriving in Hollywood, they found an art form which wasn't oppositional but seemed to be a conformist dream factory. Central to this was the creation of 'stars' from fairly ordinary people - stars who persuaded audiences to endorse the values of conventional consumerism.

What would the Frankfurters make of Big Brother, Pop Idol or any of the other 'reality' shows (and the papers and magazines which make a living amplifying these shows)? They'd be both unsurprised and horrified. They'd be unsurprised by the dominance of 'celebrity' (is there a single issue which hasn't had a 'celebrity' slapped on top of it and a TV show created?) and they'd be horrified by the extension of 'celebrity' culture to the populace via Big Brother and the like. There's no room for opposition, but there's also no room in popular culture for difference of any kind: we're all assumed to want the same things as 'celebrities' and we know how to get there - by acting the idiot for the amusement of the nation. Even the sporadic bursts of resistance are manufactured: so-called oppositional voices in the media use the same tactics of hype and outrage to get their points over, thus becoming part of the system rather than standing outside it.

Doomed, I tell you, we're all doomed. Just keep reading Heat and I'll go away. Or read Baudrillard, who thinks it's all a game and there's nothing we can (or should) do about it. You could listen to In Our Time though - the podcast will be available in a few days.

Aural Balm…

I'm a fan of Cara Dillon. She doesn't do anything spectacularly innovative with her brand of Irish folk (unlike, say, Kila), but sometimes a soothing voice, elegant arrangements and some melancholy lyrics are all you want. This is a live version of 'False, False'.

I've been in a folk and classical mood all week. Apart from listening to Anjali's The World of Lady A (corking), it's been all Tosca, Media Vita and Unthanks. I'm off to see Spiers and Boden with Anita tomorrow. It's not all work, work, work!

Do massive executive pay deals and bonuses improve company performance?

That's the standard justification.

The answer is… er, no. Company directors now earn around 250-350 times more than their employees. Meanwhile, the bonuses for some banks (the season's starting this week) are now equivalent to the billions poured in by taxpayers to keep said banks open.

Since 2000, stock market valuation by the FTSE 100 has declined 25% while relevant executive pay has risen 85%, and bonuses by 350%. 

Google: fearless defender of civil liberties?

I think not.

Google has announced that it's thinking about withdrawing the censorship it agreed to when it started in China. Chinese searches on certain sensitive topics (politics, sex, religion) return no results, as the result of an agreement between the company and the Chinese authorities.

Google has announced that, because sophisticated hackers (implication: the Chinese government) have accessed individuals' e-mail accounts, it's going to uncensor its operations, or leave China.

So: instituting censorship in pursuit of profit = absolutely fine. Hacking, on the other hand, is a no-no. It's not exactly a principled stand from the company, whose motto is 'Don't Be Evil'. I think this is the relevant point:

Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the political effects of the internet and a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, questioned why Google had made the decision after four years.

"They knew pretty well what they were getting into. Now it seems they are playing the innocence card ... It's like they thought they were dealing with the government of Switzerland and suddenly realised it was China," he said.

Snow joke

I'm happy today. Despite the fact that the Ultimate Authority of the Hegemon got a 7% pay rise (from £213,000 to £228,000) while lots of us lost our jobs and the institution was fined several million pounds by the government, and there's still lots of marking to do, it's snowing, which always makes me happy. I've also received the latest Stile Antico recording (John Sheppard's Media Vita and other music), and new albums by The Imagined Village and Spiers and Boden.

Another happy man is Pharyngula, the militant atheist and biologist, who's come up with a cunning plan. Institute a state religion in the US by means of a game show like Pop Idol. One of the rounds involves giving each faith a terminally ill child: to win, you have to get said child to recover through prayer! More fiendish details here.

Meanwhile, here's some Morton Feldman, in honour of his birth 84 years ago today.

The worm turns!

My MP, Rob Marris, is an excellent constituency MP. He answers letters, fights for his constituents and works hard. He's also an ultra-loyalist New Labour clone. He voted to cut benefits, go to war, to introduce ID cards and all the other terrible ideas introduced by the clique which captured the Labour Party.

Until now. He takes an interest in educational affairs, and is mightily (and rightly) infuriated with the government's decision to cut funding to institutions like mine. This is his letter to the Minister of State (who is also a local MP):

Dear Pat,

Funding for Universities

I understand that the government is proposing to cut funding for universities by £135 million. I do not have the details because, it seems, the Secretary of State rudely chose to make the announcement at a time when Parliament is not in session, apparently thereby seeking to evade Parliamentary scrutiny. That will not do, and it will not succeed. 

Realistically, our economy and our society cannot compete with low wage, low skills economies such as China and India. We must compete in an increasingly globalised world as a high wage, high skills economy. For the development of those skills, we rely massively on universities. Similarly with the funding of research, without discoveries and innovation, we will be in a weakened position in the world economy. 

We need those skills, and that research, to help us out of the recession, and to build for the future. The Prime Minister has repeatedly stressed this point, yet your department seems to be going in the opposite direction. I should be grateful if you, or one of your colleagues could explain to me what on earth is going on.

Yours,

Rob.

Basically, this is the parliamentary equivalent of calling the minister a wanker and inviting him outside. Well done Rob.

Just for Kate

As she's the only one as obsessed with politics as I am (though she gets a partner - that's not fair), another politics post. Everyone else can look away now.

Stop and Search has been banned by the European Court of Justice. Yet again, it took the EU to point out to this government and the police that stopping and searching people without reasonable grounds is oppressive. Under UK law, the cops can take you aside and go through your pockets without even having to suspect that you're up to anything.

In the 1970s, this behaviour was known as the 'suspicion of being black' law, as black youths were targeted out of all proportion. The laws were changed in the 1980s, then changed back in the 2000s under the Terrorism Act. Lo and behold, the cops started harassing ethnic minorities again. Then they turned their attention to anyone planning to hold a legal demonstration, and photographers - a very useful tool to prevent democracy.

The sole condition was that the search had to look for articles used in connection with terrorism – but this covered many things commonly carried by people in the street. Police did not even have to have grounds for suspecting such articles were present.

The judges said that, because of this, there was a "clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion" to a police officer.

Their concerns were compounded by the fact that black and Asian people were four times more likely to be stopped under section 44 and there was a risk that the power could be misused against demonstrators.

"The absence of any obligation on the part of the officer to show a reasonable suspicion made it almost impossible to prove that the power had been improperly exercised," the judges said in describing the lack of judicial checks.

This lightens my mood even more. Poetry marking is going well (congratulations, students) and Alastair Campbell is coming out with some corking BS to the Iraq war inquiry.

Once again, 3 cheers for the European Union. Now we just need to make it socialist.

Educashon news

Apparently, it's not just academic staff who are constantly stressed. We only have to deal with management, government cuts and students.

Leicester University, keen to get a student's eye view of life at university, gave video cameras to 40 students and asked for five minutes of footage per week. The results suggested that exam stress, the rhythms of the academic year and various personal challenges contribute to stress.

I can sympathise. My undergraduate years were a mix of excitement and adventure (demonstrations, run-ins with the fuzz, student politics and journalism, bad housing, great - and terrible - lectures) and pressure (no girlfriend for the vast majority of my time, exams, looming joblessness and an inability to relax about anything). The actual academic content was too much fun to feel like work, and I hardly ever had to do an essay. It was fantastic to spend three years reading about books, then arguing about them.

But at least I'm not female: women students experience more stress than male ones. This can be beneficial: pressured female students gain slightly more first-class degrees, but too much stress leads to serious problems.

Freedom of speech. Islamic fundamentalists need not apply.

Nutcase irritants Islam4UK and al-Muhajiroun are to be banned from Thursday. Hooray, many of you may be thinking: they're opposed to everything that the UK currently appears to represent - sexual equality, religious freedom, liberal values.

But. These tiny groupuscules aren't terrorist organisations. They utterly reject and despise so-called Western values, and want to found a European Caliphate. So what? I can think of a much larger political party which rejects liberal values and often uses violence and confrontation to achieve its ends. It's called the British National Party.

I don't understand the difference in the way they're treated. Either you're pro-free speech in which case both these organisations should be legal (the argument that bad policies wither under scrutiny is a persuasive one - and proscribed organisations can get away with more than an open one can) or neither of them should be. Both are potential gateways to violent extremism, and both are hostile to mainstream values. Neither, however, are terrorist organisations. I worry about the arbitrary nature of this decision, which seems to rely on the Daily Mail readership's inherent racism and the group's tiny membership for justification.

Al-Muhajiroun, rightfully, have few friends: but this means that none of the usual liberal voices will stand up for their right to be as offensive as they like. The BNP has a couple of elected MEPs, and so there will be voices raised in their defence if proscription is suggested (this government's disgraceful way out of that particular Gordian knot was to pressure the BBC to refuse access to the airwaves for Nick Griffin while not banning the party).

I guess all this means that I'm actually a liberal. If I were a proper Trotskyist, as I often fondly imagine I am, I'd be all for the arbitrary exercise of power. Only liberals worry about equal rights and freedom of speech. Damn.

You spin me right round

Morning all. It's marking hell for me again today. I've finished Communications Studies Pile 1, and now I'm moving on to Poetry. 40 down, 190 to go…

By way of distraction, I'm keeping an eye on Alastair Campbell's examination at the Iraq war inquiry. True to form, instead of answering questions reflectively, Blair's spin doctor is behaving strategically, obfuscating and blocking like a pro. Apparently Blair is a big fan of the UN, didn't do whatever George Bush wanted, and never wanted a war at all. Well, well, well.

Inconveniently, the Dutch released their report on the war today (they offered the US 'political and (defensive) military support'). They've concluded that it was an illegal war (paragraphs 18 and 20) and that reports made public were significantly less nuanced than those provided by the intelligence services to government departments and parliament (30, 32) - just like the 'dodgy dossier' here, because the government preferred to rely on US and UK claims.

What does Rupert Murdoch's son-in-law think of Pop's TV Station?

Er… not a lot. It comes to something when a celebrated PR agent is our guide through the jungle of untruth, but he's right:

Freud told the New York Times he was "ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to" and prefaced his comment by saying he was "by no means alone within the family or the company" in holding such hostile views of Fox News.

Daily (and Sunday) Mail in climate change distortion shocker!

I know, it's hard to imagine such an upstanding publication behaving badly, but even the most virtuous amongst us have our weaknesses, and the Mail never lets the facts get in the way of its beliefs, particularly if those facts are complicated.

It said that Professor Mojib Latif's research into ocean temperatures showed that we're entering a period of global cooling rather than warming, that our current cold weather proves a move towards warming, and that the research undermined the 'most cherished beliefs' of climate change scientists.

What did Professor Latif say? He says that ocean temperatures may make more of a difference to temperatures than other researchers, but he's not out of line on the major challenges facing us. Well done, Mail.

 "What we are experiencing now is a weather phenomenon, while we talked about the mean temperature over the next 10 years. You can't compare the two."

It comes as a surprise to me that people would try to use my statements to try to dispute the nature of global warming. I believe in manmade global warming. I have said that if my name was not Mojib Latif it would be global warming."

He added: "There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

 "There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention," he said. "We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein's theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem."

Mrs Robinson! Mrs Robinson!

I don't know how often you think of Northern Ireland, or what your perception of it is. Perhaps you remember it as a place of violent sectarianism, as a relic of Empire, as the lost piece in the 32-county jigsaw, or as a place like any other.

It isn't. It's a deeply strange place, damaged by centuries of imperialism, conflict, religious antagonism and discrimination. Amongst its oddities is the dominance of fundamentalist Protestantism of a kind which died out in Britain after the civil war (1660) except in tiny pockets. Northern Ireland's Catholics are pretty reactionary, but its Protestants are authentic Old Testament hellfire-and-damnation types - and unionist politics is inextricably linked to these sects.

The current First Minister of Northern Ireland is Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by Ian Paisley, who also founded the Free Presbyterian church because the existing ones weren't hardline enough for him. Hardline unionism, loyalism and fundamentalist religious beliefs are bound up in Mr. Robinson, and his wife, Iris, who is simultaneously an MP in the British parliament, a member of the Northern Ireland assembly, and a local councillor. Lucratively, the couple earn over £500,000 from the state through managing to hold down all these full-time jobs, and by paying family members to assist them.

So far, so normal (they say they're British, so why shouldn't they behave like British politicians). But now Mr. Robinson has had to stand aside while an investigation is carried out. In a perfect political storm, it's emerged that Iris (the woman who described homosexuality as worse than child rape: '“There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children.”) had a 19 year-old lover, for whom she secretly procured loans from businessmen she helped through her day jobs, arranging a kickback of £5000 for herself. When her husband found out, she tried to kill herself. It's a wonderful story: sex, money, corruption in high places, drama…

I'm torn here. Normally, I'd revel in the misery of a bigoted loyalist politician, and they certainly deserve it. Clearly, criminal acts have been committed, by her and possibly by her husband, who didn't inform the authorities of what he'd found out. But - fundamentalism has a strict moral code in which forgiveness is alien. I feel genuinely sorry for someone driven to suicide, however awful they are. I've seen enough of the misery that exists behind the closed doors of a family home not to wish this kind of torment on anyone. I can understand the depths of pain reached when people break their self-imposed moral codes: it's worse because they're so rigid (me: I'm an ex-Catholic. I already feel guilty about everything, so one more sin isn't going to make any difference).

Damn. Having morals spoils all the fun.

Do not pass go. Do not collect £200

The government here placed a temporary 50% tax on financial bonuses above £25,000 to encourage responsible behaviour: the signs are that banks are either going to carry on regardless, or find ways to avoid it, but it's a good start. The investment banks and their friends have bankrupted the country and yet seem totally reluctant to make amends or change their behaviour, despite us saving them at huge cost to ourselves.

Over in the US, the Americans are facing similar problems: the taxpayer saved the banks, yet the economy is unreformed and bonuses are back. However, Obama seems to have decided that a bonus tax is just too easily avoided, and plans to introduce some other form of charge which can't be easily passed on, while rejecting a transactions tax. It'll be interesting to see if he can come up with something that the world's tax lawyers can't get round, but I'd support a transaction charge (a 'Tobin tax') - 0.005% of the value of each transaction would raise massive amounts of money (hundreds of billions) without limiting the bankers' freedom to conduct their business. It would be complicated, but it would be just and lucrative.

Cultural Cringe

This is very unfair on Mr Holland, but…

I've just finished his medieval history, Millennium. It's wide-ranging, thought-provoking and works well because it has a strong narrative sweep. Yet two things stick in my brain about it. Firstly (as I said before), Wales is stamped 'England', which is ignorant. Secondly, every phrase is expressed in American English, such as 'meet with'.

I've no objection to American English. Many of my books are written by Americans and published there. I don't expect them to publish UK-English editions because I respect the cultural context of the book's origin. However, Tom Holland is a British historian, published in Britain by a British publisher. So the presence of Americanism's suggests that the publisher's ideal audience is the American market, and that American readers are so stupid that they won't understand even the minor variations of UK English.

I know this is trivial, but it's really annoying. Why not respect your home audience and your American one? Unless Mr. Holland is so cosmopolitan that he writes in American…

Transfer news… transfer news… transfer news…

Stoke City are being linked with the Real Madrid outcast Ruud van Nistelrooy, who has clearly impressed Tony Pulis with his efforts in the 13 minutes of Primera División football he's played this season. 

This from the Guardian's Rumour Mill. The only sane response is 'as if'. No doubt Tony Pulis has also lined up Maradona, Ferenc Puskas, Pele (who has been to Stoke City), Lineker and George Best.

Football transfer rumours are usually utter crap, and this is the worst of the lot. If anything, Pulis has made a silly enquiry simply to persuade people he might be able to sign that Stoke is a serious team going somewhere. We all know that the Kenwyne Jones's, Zamoras etc. of this world (i.e 2nd rank players) won't come to Stoke, and that we'll sign another central defender from League Two or (if Tony can get over his distrust of foreigners) the Belgian second division.

Meanwhile, Emma's back from New Zealand, where she's been hiding from Manchester United's return to mortality. Feel free to express any anti-Red sentiments you've been holding back in her absence.

What we're up against (first in an occasional series)

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a very well-funded organisation dedicated to the destruction of collective government, taxation, trades unions, regulation and the environmental movement (you can probably guess which industries fund them).

As I've mentioned before, 98% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide imbalances (i.e. since the industrial revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen inexorably, causing global warming).

The CEI has a very different take - one that draws on the discourses of American individualism, the family and all the other touchstones of the American right, rather than on… er… science. They're a prime example of what happens when ideology trumps reality.

Finally, postmodernism reaches Big Media

About a million years ago, literary, critical and cultural theorists accepted the philosophical point that 'truth' is not an objective category, but a subjective one: the same event attracts multiple viewpoints derived from the witnesses' cultural contexts. There is no truth, there are truths. This doesn't mean that some positions aren't plain wrong, of course.

It's finally struck Andrew Hayward, head of CBS news in the US that this will make a difference to how news is reported. There's an interesting discussion here.

The danger in wild cultural relativism is that all voices are given equal weight in a free-for-all regulated only by who has the wittiest spiel or loudest voice. We already see this on Fox News (where any anti-Democrat/anti-environment/anti-health care ranter is treated as the Metatron) and even on the BBC, where climate change deniers are treated as equals despite representing 2% of scientists, and many of whom have no scientific credentials. Truth should fend for itself, says Heyward. OK, but how is the intelligent but non-specialist viewer meant to discriminate? Big Media has a role, like it or not, as a gatekeeper and referee.

A brief respite

Lunch with Christine is always a delight, despite us swapping details of recent devastations. After that - back to the office to find my new copy of The World of Anjali, something Cynical Ben prompted me to acquire, and my West Midlands Fencing hoodie, with the slogan 'Bend Sinister' emblazoned on the back.

Why, you may ask? It's a triple intertext. Bend Sinister is the title of a 1947 Nabokov novel, of my favourite album by The Fall, and I set my blade to the left. Wonder how many fencers will spot any of these…

So much for the fearsome Islamic Republic

Google and all the other search engines have voluntarily censored their results in oppressive regimes.

And yet some doughty freedom fighter in Tehran, Iran, has managed to find my blog by searching for 'twat pictures'. I sincerely hope that he isn't too disappointed to find only photographs of some hapless walkers (the Map Twats). At least I've saved him from an eternity in hell.

Meanwhile, Iranian readers: stop searching for porn and expend your energies in overthrowing your political leaders. Or at least get them a decent tailor. Ahmedinajad's suits are appalling.

I wish I was in…

Fargo, North Dakota

Meanwhile, here's some academic advice. If a book is titled AS Media Studies: The Essential Introduction, then it's meant for 17 year old children starting AS-level Media Studies, and not second-year university students.

On the Ketamine…

Awful Library Books (run by rebel librarians) is fast becoming an addiction. Head over there to see today's work of genius, Latawyna, the Naughty Horse Learns to Say "No" to Drugs, in which said equine weans itself off smoking, drinking and drugs. It's illustrated too!

Can't help thinking that the author and publisher were on drugs themselves…

Oceans of red

Good morning. Marking is providing an oasis of calm in the midst of the maelstrom, though I'm on my second red pen of the day.

The soundtrack to this herculean effort was Maddy Prior and Tim Hart. Now it's the complete works of Can, donated by Zoot Horn. Interminable, twisting, meandering German experimental rock works very well in tandem with interminable, meandering and incomprehensible essays…

Homage or theft?

Fans of Blade Runner (based on the short story 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale') may recall that the evil Androids are the Nexus-6 model. Google's new phone is the Nexus One, running the Android OS. Philip K Dick's estate is suing, while Google claim it's pure coincidence…

Their corporate motto ('Don't Be Evil') has been quietly redefined to allow censorship so that they can operate in China (along with Apple and every other US company), but associating themselves with killer robots is a bit much. No doubt some geek at headquarters thought that the name was a witty homage to Dick - why not admit it and laugh off the lawsuit?

Is anyone a fan of Phil's work? I must admit to being frequently baffled by the devotion of his fans. Some of his books are stunning - I particularly admire The Man In The High Castle, but others are gibberish or junk churned out for the money.

Hello Herman

According to my stat porn, I now have a reader from the European Commission headquarters in Brussels. I am going to assume that it's the new EU president, Herman van Rompuy, and he's looking for political advice. Advice I am only too happy to provide.

Too much marking make Vole angry

I'm marking, and it's not going well. FYI, nicking a couple of paragraphs from the web or Google Books doesn't count as research, and stating the obvious (I have just been told, literally, that white is white because it isn't black) doesn't garner you many marks.

We have a good library. It's not far. Use it.

SF corner

I've just finished reading Paul McAuley's Gardens of the Sun. It's science fiction. No! Come back! It's a mix of hard SF (i.e. heavily oriented towards science), space opera and politics, which suits me perfectly. Good science fiction does one thing well: it explores the connotations and consequences of our current conditions through extension and supposition. It is always about us, now, though often disguised as space adventures, the future, or whatever.


Gardens of the Sun is part of the wave which explores the political possibilities of astronomy, environmentalism and climate change, genetic modification, of human modification (including extreme longevity), and of the very shallow commitment to democracy currently present in most of the world. It's a bit like Ken MacLeod's work: committedly left-libertarian (not me, I'm left-authoritarian, as you'll discover when I'm in charge and you're out in the fields picking my organic lettuces).

Now I'm on to Tom Holland's Millennium, an exploration of the rather interesting tenth century in Europe. The opening chapters are bold and provocative, though I'm deeply unimpressed by Holland's maps. He can't resist stamping 'England' across Wales, despite Wales being a patchwork of independent states at this point, united (and divided) by blood ties and a shared language. Ignoramus.

Airbrushed airhead

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

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

Lizelle Colesky

All hail Lizelle Colesky.

As you know, I'm an idiot with the memory of a goldfish which suffers from dementia. I left my wallet on a train - money, christmas cheque, bank card, university ID card, the lot. Ms. Colesky found it, hunted out my e-mail address, and is posting it back to me.

If any of you are in Bristol, buy her a drink, she's clearly lovely.

Unfortunate headline of the week

First Shots Fired in General Election Fight.

OK, it's only unfortunate because of its source: this comes from the Belfast Telegraph, which should really be more careful with its clichés. It's not too long since this would have been literally true.

With friends like these

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joined-up thinking

'School System "Shameful" Says CBI Boss'. The Confederation of British Industries is basically all the overpaid Tory scum you might imagine. They mostly went to private schools, and those who didn't are inordinately proud of the selfishness and greed which elevated them into the company of those who did. They certainly don't send their kids to state schools, so have no commitment to improving it.

Their latest report says that the education system is rubbish. I'd certainly say it has problems, but most of those problems are derived from decades of governments grovelling to employers who want us to produce docile work units willing to accept poor treatment and low pay.

However, the CBI is an important body. Its members are presumable intelligent and successful. They must know what they're talking about, mustn't they? They've written a report and it's on nice shiny paper.

Er, up to a point, Lord Copper. Amidst details on how businesses aren't recruiting graduates at the moment (sorry, student readers) from another report, is this little gem:

The survey also revealed that some firms did not understand the differences between A-levels and degrees. Thousands of graduates may be being overlooked, the poll showed, as almost a third – 29% – of businesses think A-levels are graduate-level qualifications, while 18% think GCSEs are equivalent to a degree.

How media work…

Hello all. I'm sort-of back. I'm not sick, and I haven't been sacked (they'll have to prize the whiteboard marker out of my cold, dead hands) but life happens even when you're trying to read.

This doesn't mean that I've ceased to consume cultural, political and sporting trivia to fill the gaping void where my soul should be. One of the things that enervated me this morning was the Daily Express, which rather modestly calls itself The World's Greatest Newspaper. I actually don't know why it exists. The Daily Mail has a niche: there are plenty of bitter, selfish people out there to be catered for, whereas the Express is a shrill mini-Mail (horribly, the Daily Telegraph's becoming the Maily Telegraph too).

By 'they', I presume the paper means the world's climate scientists - reducing them to a threatening, faceless pronoun is a desperate attempt to imply some sort of conspiracy, while 'claim' attempts to relegate hard science to some sort of saloon-bar nonsense.

As it happens, the weather we're experiencing is an effect of global warming. Some scientists prefer the term 'climate change' to hint that anything can happen, but the basic fact is that we've heated up the atmosphere. Weather systems are incredibly complex. Our normal winter is mild because of the sea and wind currents which warm the sea and air (look West: we're level with North American cities which habitually experience -20ºC), and our geographical position. That warm air is now over the Mediterranean, meaning that Western Europe is experiencing colder weather than usual, and the Med is warmer than usual.

If things get really extreme, we'll lose the warm sea currents which keep Britain mild, thanks to polar melting. Then, global warming will make Britain a much colder place.

If you don't believe me, try Southampton University, UEA, hell, if you're a proper nutter, try Fox News!

But then, paradoxes are probably a bit too complex for the Express.

Update: useful 'idiot's guide to snow and climate change' here.

Ursine Arboreal Fertilisation Shocker

I know this is very hard to believe, but bear with me.

According to the International Monetary Fund, which seems to be having a quick break from bullying poor countries, banks and associated financial organisations which spend tons of money lobbying governments to tilt the playing field in their favour, aren't very good at their core business (i.e. making money). Even more shocking, they behave more recklessly with other peoples' money than organisations which don't spend their time trying to rig the market!

The study, entitled A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis, published by the IMF, reveals a stark correlation between lobbying by lenders and high loan-to-income loans.

The paper, written by a trio of high-profile IMF economists, established that firms who spend more on buying access to politicians are more likely to engage in risky securitisation of their loan books, have faster-growing mortgage loan portfolios as well as poorer share performance and larger loan defaults.

Highlighting 33 pieces of federal legislation that would have tamed predatory lending or introduced more responsible banking but were the target of intense lobbying, the IMF found that the efforts by banks to resist the legislation overwhelmingly succeeded. 

Who'd have thought that a bunch of tricky short-term buck-chasers could behave in such a way?

Man hands on misery to man

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Larkin may have been a repulsive individual, but he knew his onions.

Normal transmission to resume in due course. Any students wanting to see me: try the module leader, or other teaching staff if I'm the module leader (e.g. poetry and CO2004), or the head of English. Not sure when I'll be back.

Ewar - you'll get your books soon, I promise. They're in the office, and I will be again.

Mother was a fascist

Not mine. Adam tipped me off about a fascinating Radio 4 documentary about the women who supported Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (the Blackshirts), the biggest (c. 50,000 members) British nazi group of the 1930s and early 40s. I know a fair amount about the many members of the aristocracy who were fascists, and plenty about the working- and middle-class men, but the women's stories have been overlooked.

Turns out that the BUF's forerunners, such as the Fascisti, were founded by women, often politicised by the suffrage movement, which split between socialists, liberals and conservatives fairly early on.

Ewar - collect your free mountain bike from the basement

Whacking Day was one of my favourite Simpsons episodes (the schools inspector is due, so Skinner tempts Bart and his delinquent friends down to the basement to 'collect the mountain bikes' they'd 'won', in which he locks them for the duration).

However: Ewar, there's a parcel of books for you, a present from Cynical Ben. I'm in for most of tomorrow, and the rest of my life.

I also loved Lisa's Substitute, because I was once a substitute (supply) teacher, and inspired precisely nobody. Though I did learn a host of new swearwords and saw more drugs than a pharmacist.

No video because Mr Murdoch has a lot of expensive lawyers and men with guns. Allegedly. He definitely has open access to Downing Street (also here, here, here, here, here and, well you get the message), which is more than we residents and voters can claim.

That's the problem with being middle-class.
Anybody who really cares will abandon you for those who need it more.
   -- Mr. Bergstrom's parting remarks
Hey, just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
   -- Homer tries to understand Lisa

Everybody's free to feel…bad!

I'm a grumpy, Eeyoreish chap, with a lot to be grumpy and Eeyoreish about. One of my pet hates is the group of people who ascribe any sort of physical or emotional problems to 'negative thinking' or 'negative energy' and other associated lunacies. I want to beat them to death with a bust of Einstein, or lock them in a room with Ben Goldacre. Forever.

But I thought this was just me being grumpy. Then I read Barbara Ehrenreich's piece in the Guardian a couple of days ago. Barbara (a wonderful writer), contracted breast cancer. She entered a world in which charlatans from established religions and other weirdo groups encouraged her to embrace cancer. If she wasn't enjoying it, they seemed to feel, she was missing out on some kind of spiritual adventure.

It's a particularly twisted form of emotional bullying and imperialism. Developing potentially-fatal cancer isn't an opportunity to acquire lunatic spiritual values. It shouldn't be a come-hither to charlatans. We shouldn't be forced to adopt the values of kooks and purveyors of 'woo' when we're ill or miserable. It's time to resist these dubious, ideologically -motivated tricksters. It's OK to be sad, unhappy or sick.

Reading - the downside.

There are drawbacks to being a reader. I've read many thousands of books. I've watched endless TV dramas, films and plays. This means that there's no scene I haven't vicariously experienced, no event I haven't explored imaginatively.

So when these things happen to me - they're overly familiar. Every word, every impulse is a quotation or a cliché, and yet i find myself incapable of dealing with them on a human, emotional level.

All hail Intelliwench

I ranted about apostrophe abuse in a recent post.

Intelliwench has crafted a magnificent and witty cri de coeur on the subject. It's much better than mine. Go there!

''''''''''''s's''''''''''''itsit'sits'

I admit to being a grammar snob. An apostrophe means something. The absence of an apostrophe also means something. Something else. Learn what these things mean here, and tell all your friends, especially if they're handing in essays to me!

I've just watched Corpse Bride. Wonderful.

Let's move to Bridgnorth…

'Let's Move To…' is a regular feature in the Saturday Guardian magazine. It rivals, in its smugness, bourgeois insularity and moneyed hatefulness, the fashion pages.

And yet… today's feature is Bridgnorth, one of my favourite places, and one I'd move to like a shot, had it a train station or more than 4 buses a day (and had I the many hundreds of thousands of pounds needed to afford a cardboard box there). It's built on a dramatic sandstone outcrop falling sharply down to the River Severn. It has a steam railway line, a funicular railway, formerly inhabited caves (in one of which was born Francis Moore, of Old Moore's Almanack, a ruined castle, a town hall on stilts underneath which the market is held, and winding cobbled streets packed with cottages of the kind Lou (of The Quiet Life) would love (lots of pictures here). The rolling Shropshire countryside stretches for miles - it would be idyllic, were it not for the presence of thousands of Tory bastards.

Ho hum. Another reason to search for a rich heiress. My teacher's wage will never stretch to the humblest of abodes in deepest Shropshire. Though Christine seems to have wangled it - she and James have an idyllic abode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the nerdzone

Cynical Ben didn't like the first episode of the two-part finale to David Tennant's tenancy of Doctor Who, objecting to the two-part set-up, amongst other things I can't be bothered to go and check.

I do like the scope achieved by taking the time and (relative dimensions in) space to explore the nuances. Ben's a short story fan though, so I understand his point. However, I did enjoy these episodes. Yes, the first one was preparatory, but they both worked. I agree with Ben that Russell T. Davies has probably run out of steam, but he, and Tennant, deserved their indulgent, emotion-wringing farewell.

The last episode was backed with nods to the canon, flashbacks to previous episodes, and constant references to Hamlet, a play which has exerted considerable influence on this incarnation of the Doctor, faced as he has so often been by difficult choices - and in which Tennant has been performing to great acclaim recently.

I've enjoyed Davies's nerdy but passionate take on Who - but Stephen Moffat's got the dramatic skills needed to keep each episode gripping: he wrote my favourite one of all, Blink. The future's bright. Though so is the past, given that a time machine is involved.

Licence fee: vindicated.

A musical interlude.

Mmm... Welsh shoegaze. I like.


Very relaxing New Year. Not looking forward to returning to marking.