Recipe for a riot

I don't know, take one measly holiday and the social fabric falls apart. But people of Tottenham, looting ALDI? Have some ambition, for Christ's sake.

Last year, a lot of people expressed their disquiet at the police tactic of 'kettling' student protesters - confining them for long periods, in poor conditions, for no apparent reason - leading to anger and mindless violence. 

What have we done if not 'kettled' our urban poor and ethnic minorities? Insane property prices, low pay, racial discrimination, poor education and political failure have concentrated those denied a stake in society in desolate quarters, kept in place by a racist or (at best) disconnected police force, neglected by the institutions meant to improve their lot. Regardless of your view of what they've done this week, it's not unexpected. 

OK, how do these things happen? Well, there's always a strong dash of opportunism: the element that likes a) free stuff and b) a bit of violence, though they're likely to be at the back of the queue for a truncheon sandwich. Along with the political opportunists and the 'community leaders' who always emerge on these occasions.

But below the surface, all the ingredients are there. At a really basic level, long hot summers produce tense situations that can easily turn violent - New York in the 1970s was a classic set of circumstances.

At the risk of reinforcing my reputation for being a wet liberal (undeserved: I'm a hardline lefty), I will say that institutional contempt and deprivation lead to riots. The specific cause is bad enough - a young man shot dead by the police. But if the police had a reputation for talking before they fired, for treating the poor and brown the same as they treat the rich and white, this riot would never have got off the ground. It's largely not what the police did this time - we don't yet even know what that was - it's what they've done with Menezes and with all the ethnic kids who get stopped whenever they leave their homes.

Add to this the government's withdrawal of youth services in the name of 'austerity': thousands of school kids, often lacking social restraints provided by structured communities, on the streets with nothing to do for 3 months, are likely to find themselves in trouble. To them, government isn't a provider of services: it's simply oppressive bodies such as the police - aggressive and not looking very like their community.

Does this mean I think it's OK to trash the place? No, obviously not - apart from anything else, it's totally unfocussed. Aldi and Carpetright aren't the primary element, unless someone's going to claim that this was an anti-capitalist uprising. I wish it were, but it isn't.

Funnily enough, I've been reading Butterworth's The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents. The problem facing the 19th-century anarchists as they sat in London slums working out the future was the split between 'positive' anarchists, who looked forward to a (possibly violent revolution) and the 'individual' anarchists, who seemed to use the doctrine as an excuse for the worst kinds of terrorist outrages.

To some, outbursts of the most savage violence were natural consequences of the way the underclass were treated - an argument which you might well hear in the coming days. To others, individual murders or bombings became indelibly associated with violence: a great shame given the wonderful premise of anarchism (that without institutional oppression, humanity was capable of altruism, leading to a co-operative paradise).

I'm somewhere in-between. Some of these rioters are the people who'll trash anything, for fun. Some are freelance capitalists, taking their opportunities wherever they can. Some will be politically motivated, though lacking the intellectual skills for concerted, directed action, and despairing at politicians' inability to articulate the needs of a community which has largely been abandoned by the state: just like 19th-Century London

In other respects, the situation is quite different. Malato wrote this of London in The Delights of Exile:

Oh, great metropolis of Albion, your atmosphere is sometimes foggier than reason allows, your ale insipid and your cooking in general quite execrable, but you show respect of for individuality and are welcoming to the émigrés. Be proud of these two qualities and keep them.

Ah well. The beer and food have certainly improved, but we've been conditioned to hate and fear émigrés - leading to the kind of social decay we see this week.

My solution? Not the 'infantile Leftism' Lenin described, which sees immediate violence as the solution to everything. Instead, we need William Morris's formula: 'Agitate. Educate. Organise'.

Here's some John Henry Mackay, cited in Butterworth's book:

Like and enormous black, motionless, giant Kraken, the poverty of London lies there in lurking silence and encircles with its tentacles the life and wealth of the City and of the West End'

and here's Morris himself:

Affluent London was 'so terrified of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight'. 

This is what we've done: created massive areas of our cities left to rot. In them, the low-paid (the majority of officially poor people are in paid employment) and the unemployed. Next to them, vanity projects, 'iconic' buildings, gated 'communities' (they're not really). It's Ballard's airport landscape writ large: shiny surfaces, anti-crowd architecture, fast transport from investment bank to gated bourgeois ghetto with no smelly, sticky contact with the poor in-between. The bankers don't even see their cleaners: daylight is for the rich, midnight for the poor.

Last year, a lot of people expressed their disquiet at the police tactic of 'kettling' student protesters - confining them for long periods, in poor conditions, for no apparent reason - leading to anger and violence.

One more thing: the EDL smash things up wherever they go, without the kind of coverage this riot is getting. Why? Because the media laps up pictures of angry black folk. It fits with the framing they've acquired from history: they always present black people as naturally violent, inarticulate and so on, whereas white rioters are always 'bad apples'. Like Breivik being insane while Islamic killers are 'ruthless/organised etc.'

Don't feed this prejudice. Don't riot. Demonstrate. If you must use violence (and I'm not advocating it), target your anger. You know how these pictures are used by media and politicians. Don't give them easy targets.

What I Reckon

You might have noticed that I contributed a piece to the Guardian's HE pages: my summer diary.

What have I learned?
1. Humour doesn't translate to the web very well unless you're very witty indeed. Obviously I'm not.
2. Internet commenters are very tedious. I should know: I am one. But it certainly feels different being on the receiving end.
3. Although, this one in response to what I said about capital punishment is a brilliantly-observed parody. I hope.

What have I been up to since last I blogged? A day in Dublin and a few days in wonderful, wet Kerry: mountains, herons, the sea. In a few days, Puck Fair begins and debauchery will reign. Until they let the goat go. This is not a joke. Though the goat is unharmed.

Some pictures of the pre-fair excitement. I'll post the occasional shot here, but the full set will have to wait: I'm not on a mega-fast academic connection and would like to leave the house occasionally. Click on them to enlarge.

The mayor's face is a delight.

She has better teeth than me.

Another waster idling his summer away sunning himself

We're not in the West Midlands any more, Toto!

Oops… I've just been radicalised

A lot of very smart, sophisticated people - perhaps people like you - roll their eyes when you raise the subject of Tony Blair's war crimes. There have indeed been far too many silly posters and internet comments along the lines of 'Bliar', and comments about his wife, and they are indeed very boring. They're mostly from Tories who didn't necessarily disagree with his master plan of bombing every Muslim country on earth, but resented a (technically) Labour PM doing it. 


But sometimes, we need to remember just how evil Blair and his New Labour (i.e. Not Labour) friends were. How about this?

A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian.

The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK's role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer.

What? But the government - including one David Milliband, Foreign Secretary, kept saying things like this:

MI5 and MI6 do not "participate in, encourage or condone" either torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.

Which obviously isn't true. 

…government ministers' use of a controversial power that permits them to "disapply" UK criminal and civil law in order to offer a degree of protection to British intelligence officers committing crimes overseas… It was operated by the British government for almost a decade.

So you can torture - in breach of domestic and international human rights laws - as long as you really want to. 


It shouldn't be much of a surprise that secret services commit torture all the time. Any citizen of a country trading with Saudi Arabia, to pick a random example, has abetted torture. But what's particularly awful about this is that the security services have been corrupted by this New Labour clique. There's no recognition that torture a) doesn't work: people will say anything, b) is immoral and c) makes it more likely that your own people will be tortured if they're captured. 


Instead, the briefing is worried about being caught:

…such a revelation could result in further radicalisation, leading to an increase in the threat from terrorism."The policy adds that such a disclosure "could result in damage to the reputation of the agencies", and that this could undermine their effectiveness.

Well, it's certainly radicalised me. Though admittedly, I was already rather radical in an armchair kind of way. But in all seriousness, how can any Western government persuade any other country that it's operating fairly, that human rights should be taken seriously, that international agreements mean anything? 

Bring Back Hanging… For Everyone

Some stupid Tory scum are doing what they always do when they're bored and want to please the stupid papers: agitating to bring back capital punishment.

I always thought the point of being in a society was that together, we behave better than the individuals who commit appalling crimes. I'm also liberal enough to believe that irrational crimes are a marker of mental illness rather than 'evil'. Which means that we don't kill people, whatever they do. We try to cure them, or keep everyone else safe from them.

Luckily, John Cooper Clarke has a rather good song about this. He stayed in my friend Mark's house, y'know!

The sybaritic life…

I'm sitting in my office eating ripe plums and cherries. Rain is dripping down my window, and I'm surrounded by lovely hifi equipment (apart from the pre-amp needed to link the turntable and amp, and cables). Surely this is the definition of paradise.

I've not done much academic work. Instead, I've done my bit to keep the peace with my colleagues by starting on my semi-annual cleanup of my quarter of the office. Their desks are clear. Their walls are bare. My desk is buried in books, papers, mugs, devices and various unidentifiable things. But I've made a start. I've restacked all the framed posters and prints so they're out of the way a bit. They should be on my walls at home, but I don't have wall space, only bookshelves. So now visitors can see my psychedelic Angela Davis poster, the David Jones 'Cara Wallia Deserta' Welsh and Latin engraving, the Danish Litteraturtraeet and Renaessancen tree, and the four grammar and spelling ones, which will come in very useful.

I'm off on holiday tomorrow, so you'll have to fend largely without me for ten days. I might post the occasional photo, but I'm intending to be out over 'the far-famed Kerry mountains'/swimming in the wine-dark Atlantic/drunk and incapable for most of the time.

If you're really in need of a fix of Vole, you might check this site tomorrow: the Guardian Higher Education network asked for my 'summer diary'. Who could turn down the opportunity to spread the misery? Not me…

Why you shouldn't blame Christianity for Anders Breivik

"This guy isn't a serious Christian. He's a devoted New York Times reader, and he's an extremely well-read guy." (Mark Steyn)

Mark Steyn is a prominent conservative journalist and commentator. I'm not sure he quite understands what he's saying. But that doesn't make it untrue.

Requiem for a city

I hate car culture: it's turned our cities into machines for crushing communities. But this kinetic sculpture makes all that movement beautiful. Though perhaps that's the secret: movement is pretty rare for urban drivers. Cars promise independence, individuality, escape and self-expression. What you get is isolation, selfishness and confinement. Mike Davies's wonderful history of LA, City of Quartz charts that metropolis's descent into vehicle hell, including the disgusting story of how a cartel of car and tyre maker successfully bought the local railway system solely to close it down - and were fined $1 for their crimes.

I don't drive, though if I had cash and space, I'd have a row of cars as sculpture: 1940s/50s Citröens, a Morris Minor convertible, big curvy American 1940s gangsters' cars.



The Mayor of Vilnius (Lithuania), one of the most beautiful places I've ever been, has a simple way to deal with selfish drivers:

Blind luck

I was messing around with my camera this morning and snapped these - I quite like their abstract look.

Suggested soundtrack: the North Sea Radio Orchestra.

Praise where it's due

I ordered various separates for a new HiFi system yesterday. I got the DAB/FM tuner from 1stAudioVisual: it's already arrived, less than 24 hours since I ordered it. I haven't had a chance to connect it to check the sound, but all the lights and dials work!

Top work, those people.

Essential office décor

I've just received a packet of posters to grace the walls in my office. They're all grammar and spelling-related.

The idea is that I can save my vocal cords by silently pointing to the appropriate poster(s). In extremis I can photograph the relevant bit and mail the snaps to the student… or colleague.

It's a shame that we have to spend so much time on basic literacy: clearly some schools are failing. It's not just pedantry - English is a stunningly flexible and subtle language, so an inability to utilise it well limits intelligent people to a horrendous degree. Get the basics right, then move on to the complex ideas you're trying to express.

New Stratagems, the radiant Lock to gain…

The Peer now spreads the glitt'ring Forfex wide,T'inclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.Ev'n then, before the fatal Engine clos'd,A wretched Sylph too fondly interpos'd;Fate urg'd the Sheers, and cut the Sylph in twain,(But Airy Substance soon unites again)The meeting Points that sacred Hair disseverFrom the fair Head, for ever and for ever! Then flash'd the living Lightnings from her Eyes,And Screams of Horror rend th' affrighted Skies.Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast,When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breath their last,Or when rich China Vessels, fal'n from high,In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie!

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I submitted to the barber's scythe today. Every time I go, the 19-year old inside me screams blue murder. Even as a teen, I knew that time and circumstance changes one's perspective,  and wondered what the older me would make of the younger one, and vice versa.

In the case of hair, my inner teen is in mourning. It was OK to have a mane of jet-black hair most of the way down my back when I had the build of an anorexic whippet and wore only black. Whether or not it suited me I have no idea, but it was a justified reaction against year's of my mother's brutal, and distinctly unartistic basin haircuts. All six of us - regardless of gender - received the same utilitarian treatment. For someone trained in surgery, she was remarkably clumsy with the scissors too - my ears were almost Spock-shaped by the time I was 18.

As the years and pounds accumulated, the hair got shorter, thinner and less distributed: I've seen the balding pony-tailed future and its name is Rossi. By now, I've got a position on hairstyles: I'm agin 'em. These days I just want some hair, mostly on my head, to avoid sunburn. But as a marker of passing time, my enlarging forehead is a fine sundial for the progress of the decades.

(The quotation is from Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock': it's very good).

Degrees'R'Us

A selection of quotations on the modern university:

The model for the university is now the factory. The factory mass-produces qualified students, thus adding value to the raw material. The academics, the workers on the shop floor, are there merely to operate the mechanical procedures which have been approved by the management and checked by the inspectorate. Since they are mere operatives, they can of course be paid accordingly’ (Gombrich 2000).

If this guy's dead, he'd be turning in his grave over what John Major's successors have done:

‘However, what is probably the most debilitating characteristic of academe in Britain today is a sense of loss. For much of that a philistine’s government with a barbarian’s manners must take plenty of blame’ (Eustace 1994: 115).

f

‘I do not know why we university teachers never said – “that is not what we do” when all this started. I suspect it was insecurity about our own professionalism and a (rather childish) wish to be given a gold star as validation from outside authorities and a bigger gold star than our rivals. Well, we have certainly reaped the whirlwind and had the vestiges of independent professionalism stripped from us’ (Parker 2003: 530)

(Because there are plenty of starving PhD students ready to do our jobs.

Finally, my colleague Penny's suggestion for humanising the campus:

We all have faults, weaknesses, annoying habits. But we all respond positively to being understood and accepted, to being treated kindly. Kindness is a seriously under-rated virtue in the marketised public sector we work in. It’s not SMART, it’s not thrusting or dynamic or penetrating or ahead of the curve or whatever the current jargon is, but making kindness a key principle alongside fairness could really improve the texture of our daily lives. If we tried to do all these things, it would put us in a better position to reclaim some of our professional autonomy and reassert our right to make a serious contribution to institutional decision-making.

The People Speak…

Just for fun, there's a Rate My Thesis: Hot or Not page. Go there, vote on my PhD, which was titled

‘Constructions of Masculinity in Four 1930s Welsh Novels in English: Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy and We Live, Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley and Gwyn Thomas’s Sorrow For Thy Sons’.

I say hot.
Society at large thinks not.

Pimp My Schoolgirl

We're all wearily waiting for the annual pictures in the Mail, Telegraph and (last year) even the Guardian of fruity blonde girls celebrating their A-level results, as though ugly, male and minority people never get good grades.

It's lazy journalism, right? Well, not entirely: the fee-paying schools responsible are actually pimping their students to the newspapers for advertising purposes.

"Last year, I received an unsolicited voicemail from the press liaison at Badminton School in Bristol...'wanting to give ...some details of some absolutely beyootiful girls we've got here who are getting their A-level results tomorrow'..."
Meanwhile Cook adds that "Bedales School in Hampshire... supplies photos..."

In one case, the school actually invited journalists to watch a sports match for the purpose of scouting out the prettiest ones ready for results day.

"Most alarmingly, another (very grand) private school invited the FT... to an end-of-year sports event [and] said that watching the girls playing sports would have given... a unique opportunity to pick out promising candidates for A-level day pictures."

That sure feels wrong. Wonder what the parents have to say.

The internal market… FFS

The insane and discredited idea of 'internal markets' has reached us. If you're not sure what it is, here's how it works. Different departments in an organisation no longer work together, but are given budgets to spend within the organisation. 


So in the NHS, a dermatology department would 'pay' a ward for a patient's bed. It was imaginary of course - the hospital's money stayed in the bank the whole time. The idea was that these virtual budgets would make departments efficient, e.g. by not booking a bed for a dermatology patient if there was any way around it. The virtual nature of the system only lasted until the dermatologists wanted an emergency bed for an extra patient, and was told to get lost by the ward, even though the beds, nurses and buildings were all there.


It's insane. It replaces institutional planning with a free-for-all based on a concept ('efficiency') which may well have nothing to do with the organisation's - or user's - needs. 


Now it's being applied to the university's timetable:

This year the School will be subject to a fine for each module change made after the 15^th of August (even if we are giving rooms back).  Therefore, please check your timetable carefully, and read the two attached PDF documents together with P. T’s email which explains in more detail about potential fines and the reasoning behind the new system.

As part of the drive to change behaviour at the planning stage of timetabling, financial penalties will be applied to Schools that cancel teaching events after the publication of the timetable.

The following penalties will be applied where rooms are booked to modules pre-publication, and later cancelled.

Lecture theatres and PC Labs: £200 per hour

Other spaces: £100 per hour

PENALTIES FOR OBSERVED NON-USE OF A BOOKED TEACHING ROOM WILL BE APPLIED IN ALL CASES IDENTIFIED. THERE WILL BE NO EXCEPTIONS. 

Bonkers. It's not my money, so I won't care about one part of the university 'fining' another part of the university. If they fine us for offering back rooms we find we don't need, I'll just keep the room unused, leading to a loss of amenity. If I decide that a class needs to walk outside to illustrate a point, we'll be fined. 

Some decisions show us where the institution's priorities lie:

Learning Pod 2 will be opened up as social learning space to encourage students to stay within the building between teaching events and to improve use of the Go Eat facility 

Nice. So classes are now 'teaching events' and students are now captive customers. We lure them in with degrees and sell them fizzy drinks. 

Emergencies will be chargeable too:

If notification of the cancellation is received via the helpdesk at least two working hours before the event is due to take place, a 20% discount will be applied if any cancellation penalty is to be incurred. 

Fascinating. So some money is moved from the school's budget to… where, exactly? What's it spent on? Will it benefit the students? Will departments charge staff? How do I avoid the 2 hour cutoff if I'm teaching at 9? There certainly won't be anyone in their office at 7 a.m. What's the point anyway? It's not as if another class can be given that room - there aren't crowds of lecturers and students cruising the campus in the hope of commandeering a classroom for guerrilla teaching.

I see. So we're to be subject to discipline, rather than offered guidance and explanation (or indeed more - and more suitable - classrooms so that we can cater for the huge number of students we recruit. 

This, readers, is the way that universities will all be coping from next year: reduced space, increased class sizes, fewer staff, managerial pressure on academic standards, and 'retail opportunities' deployed to capture whatever spare cash the students have. 

This is management gone mad: they've forgotten that we're people, not work units to be moved around on a chess board.

To those who have, shall be given more

Wow. I thought that the government's White Paper on Higher Education was a naked piece of class politics mixed with a massive dollop of hard-right shock-capitalism.

Now it seems like a bit of fluff compared to their latest wheeze: allowing universities to 'buy' high-achieving A-level students by giving them loads of extra cash (alongside the plan to allow low-cost universities to recruit more, directly leading to pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap degrees for the paupers).

So: taxpayers money is to be spent on bribing students.

Who are these high-achieving kids?

Well, they're the rich kids. The vast majority of AAA/AAB students go to fee-paying schools or selective grammar schools. That is, their parents buy them into exclusive catchment areas, small class sizes, lots of nice equipment, warm, dry buildings, school trips to exotic and informative places, extra one-to-one tuition, and provide them with everything they might ever need.

When they get to university, research shows that these privileged kids don't get the top grades: when the playing field is levelled, the poor kids show that intellect isn't linked to class.

But of course, the poor kids don't get to the élite universities, because their secondary education achievements aren't as high. This is why Oxford and Cambridge take state money and admit 50% of their intake from fee-paying schools. Now the plan is to allow the middle-ranking universities to grab their share of economically-privileged AAB students using money which could be spent on supporting poorer students. Never mind the rest of us, quietly providing a brilliant education in particular subjects. Never mind the needs of those students who'll blossom at university regardless of their A-levels. It's too late: your future is set the minute you turn up at primary school. The state doesn't care about you: it only cares about those who play the system before they're old enough to smoke.

So this new scam is actually taking money from the poor to give to the rich. Who put the Sheriff of Nottingham in charge of education?

I've got a better idea. Let's stop rating universities by A-level intake. Let's rate them on the improvement between intake and graduation. It can't be hard to get an AAA student to a first-class degree (surely they're all capable of it - what's going wrong, Oxford?), but it must be harder for one of my CDD students to get there.

(Disclosure - I did badly at my A-levels, except for an A in English. I went to Bangor on the Clearing system, took a 1st, three prizes and an MA, then did a PhD elsewhere).

Nerd heaven…

Morning all. How are you today? I've had a very exciting morning. Breakfast with Neal before he returns to labour on Mark's plantation (we've taken over a friends abandoned garden: last night I hacked at it for hours, then dined on our first produce, a fine marrow). Then some actual academic work.

But the high point was rewarding myself with a new hi-fi system. The one I have is a 1985 Sony designed to look like a separates system, but it isn't really, and it's dying: blown speakers, skippy CD player, knacked turntable, broken cassette players. So I've been wandering round the web, looking for all the bits and pieces I need, while pretending to know about amps, pre-amps, drivers, woofers and tweeters. I'm sure I've got it all wrong, and I'll definitely need more cables, but for now I'm happy.

I went for a TEAC DAB tuner, Cambridge Audio CD player and amplifier, a Soundlab pre-amp (apparently needed to get a turntable going), a ProJect Essential turntable, and Q Acoustics bookshelf speakers. Any post hoc advice?

Ironically, I've been asked by a certain national newspaper's website to submit a diary of the academic's summer. Having been asked numerous times recently what I do with my '3-month holiday', I'm about ready to snap, so I said yes.

Here's an illustration, from one of the best scenes in that wonderful film, Office Space:



And with that: TO THE LIBRARY! If you're bored, read this very interesting piece on social media usage in academia.

Quiet Is the New Loud

You might remember the title of this post as the Kings of Convenience's first album title. They're a duo from Bergen, Norway, who slot in between the simple folk-pop of Simon and Garfunkel, and the baroque chamber-pop of the Pale Fountains.

They come to mind because, over the days since the Utøya massacre, I've been musing, in an uninformed way, on Norwegian culture. I may have mentioned before that I think it all went wrong for the British Isles when Harold Godwinsson resisted Harald Hardrada and his armies in 1066. OK, there'd have been a little light pillaging, but we'd have ended up in a lovely left-wing paradise, with liveable cities, good pensions and unprepossessing international respect.

Brevik hasn't changed my mind about this. To me, Scandinavian culture is one of respect: for each other as citizens, for other cultures, for the environment. This is hopelessly naive, of course: the existence of Norwegian death metal is the natural concomitant of a general culture of tolerance. The murder of Swedish PM Olaf Palme in the 80s, Norway's presence in Afghanistan, the rise of the fascist right in several Scandinavian countries and the wave of dark crime thrillers all point to an obverse to the tolerant wonderlands you see in tourist ads, and I'm certainly romanticising them as civilised alternatives to the greedy, shrill, selfish, consumerist, cheap, short-termist hell that the UK has become (characteristics that have affected me, however much I'd like to deny it).

And yet… can you imagine the response of a British government to an atrocity such as Breivik's? In a sense, we don't need to. There have been plenty here, and the response is always the same: war, covert surveillance of entire communities, internment without charge, shrieking headlines and above all, politicians fuelling the hysteria with harsher, dumber, more sweeping attacks on anyone who might be a little different. We saw it all last week: the Sun immediately blamed the killings on 'Al-Qaeda', while the Prime Minister wheeled out the same tired old rubbish about security crackdowns ad infinitum.

But in Norway - still reeling - the tone was different. They could be forgiven for going on the rampage, banning this and burning down that. But they didn't. Their politicians made the kind of speeches that would have ended their careers in Britain, once the Sun and the Daily Mail had their say. They called for reflection, for thought, for research, for debate. They pointed out that curtailing a free, tolerant, liberal society in response to a man who hated free, tolerant, liberal societies would be to give in.

Scandinavian societies might be a little bit dull (as some Norwegians told me!), but they still have a public discourse which isn't dominated by vicious extremist tabloids and the venal, short-sighted politicians who make their careers by pandering to their know-nothing instincts. Instinct is the key to this: Scandinavian societies don't jump to their instincts, whereas we seem only too happy to abandon our intellects in favour of jerking our knees in mindless unison.

Which brings me back to the Kings of Convenience and their slow, calm, thoughtful songs. Rather than giving in to the shrieking of our newspapers, rather than bombing and bullying our way round a world which thinks we owe it a living, how about we adopt the Kings' motto and agree with Norway that Quiet is indeed the New Loud?

Paul Uppal MP, meet Paul Farrelly MP

As you know, I'm compelled here at Vole Towers to occasionally take issue with Mr Paul Uppal, supposedly my MP, for his self-centred and uninformed approach to political affairs. More in sadness than in anger, as I'm sure you recognise from my occasional discussions of his intellectual and moral failures.

But I'm happy to report that not all MPs are dishonest, lazy and dumb. I've been in correspondence with Paul Farrelly, Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme. It's a nice place, occupied by Mrs. Bouquets who all claim they're not from Stoke. Well you are.

But I digress. Mr Farrelly - not a firebrand socialist by anyone's standards, but a decent and principled man - is a member of the Culture/Media Select Committee. That's right, the one that roasted Rupert Murdoch and Pals recently. This is his approach, and I think it's the right one:

For all the easy press comment, though, from my time as a journalist, most press conferences are hardly disciplined or forensic. 

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times other hacks allowed those who knew their stuff to ask all the questions needed, and to back each other up, to get a better story for everyone. 

With Select Committees (unlike press conferences), the great ally is time, so you get your turn eventually to pursue the trails that need following. We had the Murdochs there for three hours, not just an hour. 

What I wanted to do was to follow the evidence their lot had given previously - and to get them to blame people for misleading us, and for the cover-up since. Murdoch Senior duly did that - and their lawyers and former Head of Legal, who were dumped in it, are now starting to sing in their own defence. 

I also wanted them to admit, for the first time, to still paying the legal fees of the private eye at the heart of this Glenn Mulcaire (which they were doing, despite the apology to Milly Dowler's family). The intention there was to get them to stop - which they now have = so he ends up cutting a deal and singing as well. 

This now looks to have worked. The edifice is cracking and they are fighting like rats in a sack.

More power to him.

Are you, or have you ever been…?

One very disturbing report today highlights a Metropolitan Police briefing that members of the public should report anyone they think harbours 'anarchist' beliefs.

We'll leave aside that fact that anarchists haven't committed any notable crimes since 1910, and that was dubious: the Siege of Sidney Street featured some politically connected men - the most notorious of whom may never have existed - but they were essentially burglars.

In fact, it strikes me that most of the political and terrorist crimes committed in the history of humanity have been in the name of organised ideologies of left or right. Despite the evasions of Melanie Phillips, Fox News and Co., the Norwegian massacre was committed by a man with an internally consistent rightwing ideology nurtured by their hysteria.

Anarchism - the concept that humanity is naturally co-operative, and therefore does not need states and governments (there are left and right versions) - might be simplistic and idealistic, but it's rarely violent. All the anarchists I've met have resorted to the method of plying me with nasty cider and bad weed, in corners of student parties. Rarely have I felt the social structure to be under threat.

It's also not illegal. Nor is fascism, communism, or extreme religious world-views. That is - or rather was - the point of freedom. You can think what you want. It's when you impose that position on others using coercive methods that you become a criminal. Obviously there are real-world limits on this: the UK is currently bombing Libya's government for being oppressive while selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to help it behave oppressively, but that's an argument for another day.

The basic idea is this: you can't legislate for thought, though you can educate. But now the police have decided that anarchists are a threat and should be investigated simply for their thoughts. Who's next? We know that environmentalists are already spied on. Socialists? Liberals? Meanwhile, Breivik and his British allies - who view violence as a cleansing, healthy thing per se - carry on bombing.

I know who I think is more fundamentally threatening to democracy: a police force, lacking responsible oversight, which arbitrarily sets limits on political thought. Perhaps that's what comes of dining too often with the News of the World.

Ironically, the sight of the cops singling out anarchists for thought-crime neatly demonstrates one anarchism's central tenets: that states always become oppressive, whatever their intentions. I don't entirely agree: only capitalist and pseudo-communist states inevitably degenerate in this way, but the Metropolitan Police are doing their best to make it certain.