The End Is Nigh?

I own an awful lot of dystopian and post-apocalypse fiction. Partly because I read SF indiscriminately when I was a teenager, and partly because - even though the sun is shining outside - humanity has been living under the shadow of self-destruction for pretty much a century. We've developed weapons of mass destruction and used them. We set up political systems which deliberately starve some, work others to death, and leave a minority free to drive SUVs, buy islands and jet about the place in search of cooler sunglasses or higher heels.

We've poisoned the earth, the air and the waters. We're baking ourselves to death because we don't want to share transport with strangers and we want to lie on a patch of sand a bit further than the patches of sand we used to lie on.

We are, in fact, stupid.

Which explains why there's so much disaster literature, and why so much of it is for teenagers. Teens have it easy. Yes, there's the acne, self-loathing, self-harming, exam pressure, rioting, constant surveillance and distrust, paedo-paranoia and below-the-bum trousers, but it's also the last opportunity to actually care about the big issues before you're forced into selfish capitalist consumerism as an alienated individual. The pressures on adults are so huge that it's hard work caring about what we're doing collectively.

That and the fact that disaster lit chimes with each teenager's secret belief that s/he is the culmination of evolutionary perfection. Unappreciated, apres-ils le deluge (or other catastrophe). We like to shock ourselves, and disaster-lit is ideal because we can feel that although we have the answers, we can't actually do anything to stop it: it's too big. Wallow in the horror.

Which is why disaster book sales peak at times of communal stress.

See the original here or click to enlarge.

Solving pollution through visual shame

Can't remember if I've mentioned this idea before. Apologies if I have.

Most of our most disgusting, polluting and selfish behaviour doesn't look that damaging at first glance. It's easy to ignore. This is certainly the case with motor vehicles. The roads are packed with unnecessarily massive vehicles powered by inefficient, oversized engines designed solely to make inadequate men and women feel important. They pump out huge amounts of poisonous fumes and lead directly to illness and early deaths.

But of course the driver thinks that he or she is unaffected. The air conditioning is on, and there's no obvious sign of the fumes. My first solution to this would probably be impractical: route just enough of the exhaust back into the vehicle's cabin so that the driver and passengers are left with impaired breathing and skin that permanently reeks of burning fuel.

As a poor second choice, how's this? Add a harmless coloured and fragranced dye to the exhaust outlet. A 4x4 would pump out thick clouds of black smoke, stinking of toxic substances. Or perhaps dog shit. A mid-efficiency car would produce greyer, slightly less voluminous clouds flavoured with brussels sprouts, chip fat, kippers or something equally unpleasant. Highly efficient cars would produce gentle blue or pink clouds fragranced with pine or apple scent. Emissions-free cars would merely exude an air of smugness. And perhaps recorded applause.

This way, drivers would be forced to see the consequences of their behaviour in an immediate fashion, and we'd all know which people and vehicles to avoid. It would work because most of the beautiful cars are also the most poisonous - Rolls, Ferrari, Range Rover, Porsche, Aston Martin. If we add smoke and stench, the drivers are forced to confront the hypocrisy of cocooning themselves in luxury while making others suffer.

(Another road-safety plan I have is to make anyone with points on their licences display large stickers of small children in crosshairs, like fighter pilot aces had tallies on their planes. One for each point as a public service warning). And Jeremy Clarkson should just have a photo of him on the bonnet so we all know he's around.

Call that a bike?

THIS is a bike!

I went down to Oxford yesterday to pick up this little beauty. While gazing out of the window at the gentle green beauty of the Oxfordshire countryside, I spied four figures on horseback crossing the fields. Looking more closely I realised that they were David Cameron, Rebekah Brooks, George Osborne and Jeremy Clarkson. Hunting pensioners.

It's a good job I was going to Oxford anyway - being an absolute spanner, I'd left the free book I'm reviewing for the LSE Review of Books on a train. The only copy I could find in the country was at Blackwell's, a divine book shop. I couldn't even buy one online, thanks to my bank card being defrauded and blocked within a week of arriving. I really resent having to spend actual money on it, as it's one of the most dishonest and unpleasant books I've ever read - and I've read Martin Amis.

Obviously I couldn't buy just the one book: I came away with Sowell's Intellectuals and Society (the one I'm reviewing - watch this space), a really beautiful second-hand copy of C. Day Lewis's Selected Poems (in the 1951 Penguin Poets edition):

…a classic 1962 orange Penguin copy of Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Josipovici's What Ever Happened To Modernism (looks flawed but pungent), Stefan Collini's feisty What Are Universities For? and a cheap used copy of Trollope's gargantuan The Prime Minister, mostly to hold doors open. Despite his misogyny and dubious politics, I'm on a Trollope kick at the moment. But if you think that Foster Wallace and Rowling needed a stern editor, you should try Trollope. Good for self-defence, I guess.

But the actual purpose of my jaunt was to collect my new/old bike. It's a mid-1960s Moulton F-frame (that video is wonderful). Stiff, heavy steel frame, the first bike to have suspension (front and rear) and a bit of an icon in its day. They're still made, but as the entry level one is about £3000 stretching to £15,000, I'll be content with my old one.

It's a beauty. Paul - who restored it then realised that his young family has more bikes than people and space - added a lighter seat post, racing saddle, a light headset with racing bars and decent modern brakes, a 7-speed internal hub gear, and Schwalbe Kojak tyres (i.e. bald, for speed). It's enamelled in stove-grey, and looks absolutely stunning. It sure doesn't look or ride like a 40-50 year old bike.

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you The Midnight Vole.

Look: no logos!

Minor annoyances that really get to me

Ben Cynical really knows me very well: he's found a blog by someone who could be a soulmate. It's Meaningless T-Shirts, and it's a delight. The author collects photos of clothing with pointless or non-existent references, and subjects them to sarcastic analysis.

I would like to shower him or her with kisses and riches. I've never understood why one would want the label on the outside of one's clothes. I remove labels from my clothes and certainly wouldn't buy any advertising made-up things like the 'San Francisco Track Dept 1969' one I saw a couple of days ago. Suspiciously similar to this one:

If you were an adult in the nonexistent athletics department in 1976, you'd be 54 at a minimum. Nobody will remember your 4th place in the San Francisco speed-walking semi-finals. Give it up.

I mean seriously, what is the point? Does it persuade people that you spend your time in American thrift stores hunting for 'vintage' clothes? Or that you're an athlete or American? Or just kooky. While we're on the subject: baseball caps. If you're playing baseball - fine. If not, don't. And especially don't wear baseball caps relating to actual baseball teams if you don't actually support them. Or even like baseball.

This is why I'm not a postmodernist. I'm just to unhip. These logos and symbols are signifiers, in structuralist terms. They're postmodern because they don't have 'real' signifieds, things to which they refer. They appear to have some relationship to actual places/things/events but it's made up. A proper postmodernist would think this amusing, if a little played out - the baseball cap doesn't really say 'baseball fan' any more: it says that you're into American culture, perhaps hiphop culture in particular. But not me. I just think that if you wear these things, you're a dick. And if you pay extra to have a clothing manufacturer's name on the outside, in big letters, you're a stupid, shallow dick and you've paid to become a brand advert.

This has been a public service message from reality. Do call in.

Horatio Clare

I've just come back from a lecture to Myth and Creative Writing students by Horatio Clare, author of the excellent novel The Prince's Pen, part of Seren Books' series of modern retellings of Mabinogion stories by hip Welsh authors.

Most of them have chosen non-realist, often SF or fantasy-style genres - one of the discussions we had was whether there's any other way to reintroduce myth, and why realism has come to dominate English literature. In Clare's novel, the Lludd and Llyfelys story (royal brothers battle three plagues: (little people, an infertility curse and a resources crisis) is recast as a Britain in which the Welsh are Taliban-style religious absolutists battling an invading force of technologically-superior imperialists - it's clearly an Afghanistan novel, and part of the Welsh tradition of identifying with subaltern groups: I'm thinking of Wiliam Owen Roberts' Y Pla (Pestilence) and Meredith's Griffri - Clare added Minhinnick's new collection The Keys of Babylon to the Welsh internationalist canon.

As a speaker, Clare's one of the best who's been here: fluent, learned, funny, very good at taking his audience seriously. Aperçus flowed fast: 'myths are always true' he said - 'it's truth that's the problem'. This was his major point. As man of faith himself, he sees myth as a way of providing perspective on the world's complexity. I think this is related to the turn away from realism: we don't live in a realist world of cause and effect. Pretending we do is comfortable, but dishonest. Instead, Clare says, 'myth is a dance between fact and truth', and 'our fate is to be made by myths'.

I don't mean to make him sound ponderous. Clare was refreshingly direct about the process of writing. He talked about his heroes, quoted a surprisingly long and funny chunk of Moby Dick to explain why he's spent the past few months as writer-in-residence on container ships, and recommended Auden's writing method ('to write a poem, go for a walk and a pint'). Writing, said Clare, should be hard, but a compulsion, citing in support Beckett's 'fail again, fail better'. If you don't struggle and have self-doubt, he claimed, you're 'a hack'.

The questions from students and colleagues were excellent, and answered very openly. He accepted that women ended up second-best in his novel, though defended by claiming that Islamic women he'd taken as models tended to be officially inferior but actually very influential - not particularly progressive.

Clare was particularly moving when he discussed the recent death of his sister. Explaining that absence in some ways made her more present to him, he told us about visiting the Greek cave which is said to be the entrance to Hades: the space between the myth of Orpheus bringing Eurydice back through the cave into life and the explorer's assertion that the cave is impassable gave him some hope through uncertainty.

All in all, a stimulating and fascinating event. Time for lunch with the author.

What have we done to our children?

You might imagine that I'd be opposed to selective education, particularly selective state education. And you'd be right. It infuriates me that schools can claim to be 'good' if they take rich, motivated, supported kids from stable, privileged backgrounds and manage to produce high exam passes. Good schools take deprived children and improve their lives, their opportunities and their achievements. Interestingly, privately educated children fare less well at university than state school kids: it's the small classes, brilliant resources and encouragement which buy them high A-levels. Left to themselves at university, they revert to the norm and even slip behind because they're not equipped for independent learning.

That's the rational stuff.

Emotionally, hearing a 10-year old of my acquaintance describe himself as 'a failure' because he didn't get into a notoriously ruthless school in the region has to rank as one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever heard.

It's a 'city technology college' paid for by us taxpayers but run by a couple of revolting corporations. It famously weeds out the poor, the difficult and the different, then specialises in finding dubious 'alternative qualifications' for the weaker students to sit so that its league table position looks good. Various methods are used to weed out any student who threatens its position at the top.

I'm sickened by an education system so vicious that a young child can label himself a failure. We've forgotten who and what education is for. To my mind, a good school is one open to all, and which does its best to give each child what he and she needs to thrive, and develops whatever potential they have - whether that shows up on a league table or not.

Art meets the Iron Curtain

I came across this cartoon today. Not sure the punch line does much except to me a bit snobbish about LS Lowry and British art in general, but it's historically accurate.

The Soviet Union had a 'workerist' attitude towards art and culture. The products of bourgeois pre-revolutionary cultures were admired and preserved - architecture, ballet, music, paintings, literature, but contemporary work was judged according to whether it fitted the state's concept of progressive values. So all workers had to be heroic, all employers damnable, all social problems soluble through revolution. What literature would be once the Revolution had liberated everybody was hard to say - boring, I suspect. Certainly the 'proletarian literature' authorised by the Soviet state was bloody awful, though some of the visual art was stunning. Architecture swung between jaw-droppingly science-fiction amazing and soul-crushingly terrible.

In the UK, plenty of bad writers were published because they were workers or pro-Communist, but many worker-authors of high skill were discovered: amongst them Lewis Jones, whose novels Cwmardy and We Live were presented as orthodox Communist propaganda. Actually, my PhD argues that they're actually a very subtle and intelligent critique of Stalinist Communism as well as of capitalism. They're stuffed with odd sex-and-death stuff too - not the kind of thing tolerated by the Culture Commissars.

Anyway, I digress. The cartoon is interesting because it refers to the Cultural Cold War, in which the CIA founded and funded lots of cultural bodies and magazines, such as Encounter, a very popular English-language current affairs/arts magazine. They used front groups and charities to put on touring art shows and concerts, all designed to show socialists inside and out of the Soviet Union that Western artists were free to do whatever weird stuff they wanted - Jackson Pollock was one unwitting tool of this policy. The Soviets had bagged realism, the CIA seemed to think, and so abstract expressionism must necessarily be the property of capitalism. Needless to say, lots of the artists promoted by the CIA weren't very good: just useful.

If you'd like to read more about this weird element of the Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid The Piper? is an excellent and readable introduction, as is Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. As they both used musical metaphors, I'll just point out that both the American and Soviet security services thought the Beatles were subversives.

New Economics With The Tories

I've made this poster to explain why the poor get their benefits cut, middle-earners pay more tax (yes, this includes me) and millionaires get a tax cut.

Make your own here.

Amidst the maelstrom

OK, the budget is as depressing as we imagined - massive cuts to public services and attacks on the old, the young and the poor to fund tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Ed Miliband managed a good line - inviting those members of the Cabinet lined up in front of him to raise their hands if they were getting a tax cut. Personally, although my pay has gone down by 10% in real terms over the past two years (thanks to inflation), I'll be paying more tax after this budget, while George Osborne - who is an inherited multimillionaire - will be paying less. Every little helps, eh George?

But away from the misery, I've had a rather good day. An excellent seminar on Paradise Lost and the intellectual context of the Civil War and Commonwealth preceded a visiting speaker's paper on 1930s Communism and the BBC. According to Ben Harker, the BBC employed plenty of leftists and communists, but worked very hard to exclude leftwing ideas and voices from the airwaves. The Communist Party of Great Britain was too slavishly Stalinist to come up with a considered cultural strategy except during the flowering of the Popular Front, and couldn't do much about the BBC's monopoly in any case, whereas their sister parties in Germany, Holland, the USA and elsewhere were able to set up their own radio stations. The Party saw new media as an opportunity, but the BBC as a reactionary weapon wielded by the ruling élite - with good reason.

The most interesting element was Harker's discussion of individual socialists' grasp of form being ideological. People like Archie Harding felt that the established use of a radio as a lecture was backward looking and overly dependent on the conventions of other media. So he used mobile recording studios and the like to go out and record ordinary people talking about their lives. He held studio debates and experimented with form to generate radio-only conventions - much to the horror of his superiors.

Sadly, the Party and the BBC shared some cultural fears. Echoing the Frankfurt School's suspicion of popular culture, they both insisted on the primacy of 'high' culture: the CP later led the battle against American comics and pop music, preferring 'serious' books, classical music and folk, which the presented as 'authentic', despite very little of it actually originating in the fields and factories.

All this and much more in 45 short minutes. Anyway, back to the marking…

Floppy the Monster and Genuine Evil

Gaining Twitter followers is an odd process. Some are friends, others colleagues, people in the same field, and others are simply folk who've enjoyed my endless stream of outraged sarcasm.

But there's a further category of followers - those who completely baffle me. Today I've picked up Floppy the Monster, which appears not to be a Viagra-selling spam machine, but some kind of educational resource:

Education Resources for 4-6 year olds. Floppy the Monster belongs to Emily. They do everything together. After all monsters and young children can be friends. 

Which does sound - hopefully unintentionally - like a grooming exercise. But if it's legitimate, I do wonder what attracted them to my feed. I usually tweet politics, teaching, literary theory and sarcasm. Admittedly I have a childish sense of humour, but that's about it.

It's even more baffling when I look at another recent follower, Giovanni di Stefano. Once John di Stefano, he claims to be an international lawyer, though the Irish courts declined to recognise him. He was personal friends with Slobodan Milosevic and Arkan, the genocidal murderer who made di Stefano an honorary general in his murderous Tigers, and claimed to defend Saddam Hussein, Nicholas van Hoogstraten and an assortment of the most disgusting, often evil men on the planet. What does di Stefano get from following me?

What have we learned from this? That Plashing Vole is a broad church. That - through me - 'monsters and young children can be friends'. Giovanni: meet Emily. Play nicely.

The dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud

What does 21st March 2012 hold?

On the plus side - a Milton seminar with a bubbly, bright set of students, followed by a visiting speaker (Ben Harker, who works on exactly my period and interests) on Interwar Communists on the BBC. If you didn't know that a) the 1930s was a period in which the literary cutting-edge was pro-Communist and that the sainted Lord Reith turned the BBC into a propaganda arm of the State, then you should come along. MC315, 1245. Reith put the BBC into the government's hands for the 1926 General Strike, and instituted a blacklist which endured well into the 1980s, at least. One BBC office was in fact occupied by an MI5 agent tasked with weeding out leftwing employees - fairly successfully from what I see on our screens. Perhaps if there had been more Communists at the Beeb, we wouldn't have been cursed with a Homes Under The Hammer, Flog It, Cash In The Attic, Escape to the Country and a thousand other 'sell your granny' shows.

Unless, of course, these programmes were a Communist plot to discredit capitalism by showing its proponents up for the garish, greedy, selfish scum that they are. An alternative interpretation might suggest that they were Communist programmes designed to bring about the collapse of capitalism by pushing consumerism to the point of collapse, as Marx predicted would happen. If so, I'd have to acknowledge that the plan was a total success.

Anyway, the rest of the day is going to be deeply grim: it's Budget Day. George Osborne is going to toss the quite poor a few bones, utterly screw the very poor (who won't be affected by tax changes because they're too poor to pay any as it is), squeeze the middle earners, utterly screw people foolish enough to work in the public sector, help out the banks again (because that's really worked well so far), and massively reduce tax for the richest in society.

Let's not forget that George is the heir to a Baronetcy, and received a 21st birthday present of £3m from a tax-avoiding family trust. Need I say more?

What infuriates me about this government is that it's behaving as though it was elected by a landslide in the midst of a social flight towards pure capitalism. Everything they do is straight out of the Chicago Boys 1980s playbook: the destruction of public services, privatisation, monetarism, small state, low taxes for the rich. Did people vote for the privatisation of the NHS, education and roads? The Tories promised 'no top-down reorganisation of the NHS'. The Lib Dems campaigned against student tuition fees. Nobody mentioned privatising the school system. And yet this is what we've got.

Right, now I'm angry, it's time to do some marking.

Your tax dollars at work?

The government's announced that we're all going to get a detailed breakdown of what our taxes are being spent on. Brilliant. Radical openness. Just what government needs to end the days of paternalism and secrecy.

Or is it? I can't help noticing that the government wouldn't release its own 'risk report' into what will happen to the NHS when their reforms go through - despite the House of Commons and House of Lords voting on the bill. Would you jump out of a plane without checking the parachute? It seems fundamentally undemocratic to pass laws while refusing to allow legislators to consider the most important piece of evidence available.

So clearly openness is a weapon to be wielded rather than a general principle. The tax statement stinks, quite frankly, of the kind of thing the Taxpayers' Alliance (a Tory front group, many of whom are actually tax evaders) propose. Firstly, let's not forget that many people in this country aren't taxpayers, at least of the direct taxes covered by this statement. The young, the unemployed, the poor, the old and the sick. By focussing on taxpayers, the government is implying that they are first-class citizens, whereas the non-taxpayers are freeloaders. Secondly, how the statements are constructed will be of prime importance. I have a very strong hunch that social security will be in massive type so that Daily Mail readers will be encouraged to see said poor/young/old/sick/unemployed as disgusting scroungers beggaring us all, whereas the £80bn to be spent on new nuclear missiles (while benefits for disabled children are cut) won't make it onto the sums at all.

It's a strategy using selective openness to move the political debate onto American terms. Over there, 'small government' activists lobby for less education, less environmental and work protection, no minimum wage or healthcare funding, fewer public services, except for more war and more legislation involving women's vaginas and homosexual gentlemen's bottoms. We're being softened up for a campaign against government as a public good - something to which we NHS fans are fairly resistant. It's not that the Tories want less government per se: like their American friends, they like governments which give them tax breaks and buy big guns - they just don't want us to see government as a service to the masses.

I pay a fair amount of tax. After next week's budget, I'll be paying a lot more, to fund Osborne's reduction in the top rate for those on £150,000. I don't resent paying taxes at all. But I do resent paying for nuclear weapons, pollution, more roads etc. when child benefit's being cut, universities privatised and libraries closed. However, that's how democracy works: you bastards voted Lib Dem and Tory, so I have to accept for now that your leaders prefer war to books. When the tax statements come, millions of people will be looking at the bits they don't like and getting angry - sundering society even further.

I know these tax statements sound like a nice idea, but I'm saying right now: they'll be designed to stir up resentment and mean spirits. Don't be fooled.

Picking the right Miliband

When the Labour Party election came along, I voted for Ed Miliband as the least worst option. My friend Ben holds that David Miliband was much more electable and voted for him.

When David came to the university recently, he seemed quite thoughtful, very human and approachable and trustworthy, even though I knew he'd authorised torture and kidnapping, including to Libya. A couple of days later, his apparent saintliness was exposed as a sham by his acceptance of £25,000 from the government of the United Arab Emirates to make a speech on East-West relations to 'business leaders and opinion formers' in the Emirate.

No doubt human rights and democracy went unmentioned: the UAE is not a democracy. The rights to assembly and free speech are not recognised. Torture is frequently practised and the jails are full of people arrested but never charged. The 80% of the population who aren't native lack any kind of rights, and exist in a state of indentured labour - and are never glimpsed from the luxury skyscrapers beloved of British tax evaders. The press is censored, and the UAE has never signed any of the international human rights treaties, such as the International Convention Against Torture.

Sheik Issa bin Zayed, a member of the ruling family, filmed himself torturing and murdering a former business partner: he was acquitted because he claimed his servants had got him drunk. The Ministry of the Interior agreed that justice had been done: it's a mere coincidence that the Minister was bin Zayed's cousin, and it's certainly a coincidence that my university then gave him an honorary degree in recognition of his services to law and order.

But I digress. When David Miliband tweets that he's

Honoured to speak at the @OneVoice Gala Dinner last night. Vital work to build coalition for peace in Middle East. 

we should keep in mind his political background. No doubt he would like a peaceful resolution to the Palestine/Israel situation. But like his mentor Blair - another man who's friends with anyone waving a cheque - his actual role in the region is to dispense platitudes while hobnobbing with a gang of torturers and despots. Israel is an illegal nuclear weapons state which illegally annexed huge areas of land, conducts collective punishments and discriminates against Palestinians in every walk of life. Most Arab states are ruled by tame royals appointed by the British at the end of empire on the basis that they can do what they want as long as the oil keeps flowing.

One Voice looks, on the surface, to be a decent organisation which calls for a two-state solution based on 1967 borders. It's not going to happen because both sides want victory rather than peace, and because Israel is in such a position of strength that it has no reason to negotiate, but well--meaning pressure groups doubtless make everybody feel good to pretend it will.

Like Blair, Miliband can have no credibility as an independent broker: he's tainted by his time in office - leading to the deaths of untold numbers of Arabs at the hands of Western forces and their own governments - and by his readiness to take cash from despots. Underneath the saintly exterior, there's a man more comfortable kow-towing to power than in challenging it.

Occasional spelling tips for students.

I get the manner/manor mistake frequently in student essays. I also got it in an email from Wiggle Cycles today:

and all manor of other material manipulation to build the sexiest frame designs possible. 

They want me to spend £4000 on a bike. A: bikes are good, or bad, not 'sexy' or 'unsexy'. B: Why would I trust them to put together a bike if they can't put together a sentence?

Happily for Wiggle and my students, I have a handy illustration designed to aid differentiation between 'manner' and 'manor'. It's by 14 year-old artist Freya VanEvery of Canada, to whom I owe my thanks.

Privatised roads? Bring Back Rebecca

Some of you young folk may not be aware that this country has had privatised or pay-as-you-go roads before: hence the sprinkling of rather pretty toll-houses around the country. Just like this week, it didn't go down very well with the public (or public finance and transport experts).

My favourite anti-privatisation group was the Rebecca Rioters. Taking their name from a verse in Genesis ('possess the gates of those who hate them'), the poor of South Wales dressed up as women (even before rugby and stag night entertainments were heard of) and demolished turnpike gates and toll houses in the early 1840s, about the same time as the Chartists were agitating for democracy. 

The turnpikes were hated because the peasantry was being onerously taxed for bringing goods to market, especially during a period of low prices and high taxation - forced off the land, the peasantry feared the prison-labour of the Workhouses, designed just like now, to punish unemployment as though the individual was personally, morally responsible for his situation. 

Time to bring them back.

In summary: the NHS

As you may have noticed, brevity is not one of my strong points. In my defence, the world's much more complicated than Tories and associated know-nothings believe, and so I require more space to explain why.

But on the NHS, Charlie Brooker sums up my feelings in one sweeping paragraph:

What is it about Lansley that makes human beings hate him so much? It might have something to do with the suspicion that he's hell-bent on turning the NHS into a commercial free-for-all, which for some reason isn't going down well at a time when terrifying nightly warnings about the worst excesses of capitalism are broadcast in the guise of news bulletins. The theory is that introducing an element of competition will improve the level of quality and range of choice for patients. And it doubtless would, if businesses behaved like selfless nuns, which they don't. Any business that wants to succeed has to cut corners somewhere to turn a profit. It also has to juggle a strange set of priorities, which means if you entrust your health to a corporation, the cost of your kidneys could end up being weighed against the spiralling cost of the CGI budgerigar voiced by Joan Collins they want for their new TV commercial.

'Choice' is a mirage. Nobody wants to dial 999 and be presented with a menu of ambulance companies, police services or hospitals. All we want is to know that the local hospital is excellent, and that our taxes are being spent on incontinence pads, NMRI scanners and nurses' salaries rather than off-shored bonuses. Introduce a profit motive and you'll be sitting opposite your doctor wondering if s/he's on commission for that particular drug, got a free holiday (sorry, 'conference trip') from that hip manufacturer, or is on a tight schedule to see X number of patients to make it all worthwhile. And that's before we worry about the masonic and old-boy networks rife in medicine (disclosure: both my parents were NHS doctors).

The other problem with 'choice' is that it can't be informed. Unless you happen to be an oncologist, you won't have a clue which cancer treatments are best, for example. It's bad enough for doctors: the pharmaceutical firms never publish negative results, always publish papers carefully drawn to accentuate often minor gains, and constantly fiddle with treatments not to innovate, but to renew copyrights: the professionals find it almost impossible to make clear judgements. So how the hell is Joe Fatbloke meant to 'choose' his doctor and medication?

What the Tories want is the American situation, in which pharmaceutical companies spend 13.3% of their turnover on research, and 25% of their cash on advertising: $35 billion, or $61,000 per doctor. Yes, you read that right. Money isn't in medical innovation, it's in sales. Which leads to this (and this is only a mild example):

What the hell do I believe?

I wrote a piece a couple of days ago on why the resigning Goldman Sachs manager was wrong to claim that a good system was being damaged by immoral people. In short, my position is that an immoral system is damaging good people.

The piece seemed to strike a chord - it got Tweeted a lot, including by a man with 1.5m followers, and I've had some interesting conversations with some readers. One in particular was interested in my assertion that I'm a Marxist. I explained that I accept Marx's view that underlying economic structures determine cultural forms, but that while I am anti-capitalist, I don't entirely accept Marx's political solutions. She replied with the perfectly reasonable question - what do I believe?

What a thing to ask! But here goes - though I'll stick to economics and government: if I tried to cover everything, your eyeballs would be bleeding by the time we stop.

As well as Marx's cultural analysis, I accept his position that the workforce is always exploited because under capitalism there's always a gap between the value of its labour and the price charged for the product, namely profit. Profit increases as wages decline, and the gap leads to poverty, debt and economic instability. This is bad for the worker, and bad for the global economy.

The first place I'd like to go is 1930s Italy. Sitting in prison thanks to Mussolini's fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci tried to work out why the proletariat (Marx's mass of exploited industrial workers) hadn't started the revolution, despite the obvious economic injustices caused by capitalism. His explanation is that all the cultural forces of the state and society have been captured by the capitalist over-class: education, politics, religion, the media, and so on. Of course it's more complicated and messy than this, but the basic outcome is that culture limits what's 'reasonable', by making the perspectives of those at the top of the tree seem 'natural', permanent and universal.

So the challenges facing a socialist such as myself are:

1. How do we run an economy which is fair, humane and sustainable?
2. How do we persuade people to assent to this?
3. Are there ways in which capitalism's strengths (such as the capacity to innovate) can be retained while abolishing its inherent weaknesses (such as profit-taking diverting money from wages and innovation)?

Taking this last point first, I think it's possible. Modern capitalism relies on creating every more complex financial instruments to generate money from what's essentially betting, using real companies as the chips. Take 'naked short selling'. You sell some shares you don't actually possess. You hope the stock market assumes you know something they don't, so the price plummets. Then you buy the shares you claimed to have - at a much lower price than you 'sold' them - and pocket the change. If you're unlucky, you don't cause panic and have to buy the shares at the same or higher price to conclude the deal. If you're lucky, the chosen company's shares are worthless and it can't issue new shares to raise money for more staff, new machinery or whatever. But you don't care because the underlying value of the company isn't your problem: overnight price fluctuations are what makes you money.

So if I wanted to reform capitalism, I'd simply end the trade in shares and related financial products. You could buy them from the company and collect the dividends, but you could only sell them back to the company. Result: slow, stable, boring and predictable investment market.

Going further, I'd make it clear that the 'free market' is not and never has been such a thing. Capitalism leads to monopolies, enforced through law. Microsoft is one such example: its only competitors are enthusiasts producing Linux distros for free. Microsoft is dominant and hardly has to innovate - enthusiasts do it for fun. Capitalist companies do not believe in competition, nor in free markets: not a single bank accepted that it was at fault in the crash. Instead, they demanded tax-payer's assistance by threatening global economic disaster if refused. Once paid, they carried on avoiding paying their fair share of taxes, paid lobbyists to argue against regulation, and proceeded to bankrupt governments who'd spent all our money on bailing out the banks.

Establishing state investment banks and breaking up mega-banks so that they can't destabilise the economy is essential. Governments need to rediscover their purposes: to support their citizens, not to hold the ring for corporate interests. If we've learned one thing from the crash, it's that what's good for business is very definitely not good for the country.

'Free market capitalism' claims that it is efficient because possessing information leads to rational decisions. It operates through the absence of information. Getting there first is what leads to profit. Misleading investors (see Goldman Sachs, who sold their clients products it privately referred to as 'junk') leads to profit. Individuals can never have enough information to make rational choices - and are always therefore easy marks for those with privileged access. While we're on the subject of rationality, the crash was caused by several million bankers behaving rationally. They weren't, as Greg Smith said, 'immoral'. They were paid bonuses to generate quick profits. To do so, they took millions of short-term profitable decisions which collectively lead to absolute devastation. Take the sub-prime scandal. A mortgage-broker had no reason to refuse a mortgage to a poor person, because he knew that his employer wouldn't own the mortgage for long enough to be affected by a default. So it's rational to sell an unaffordable mortgage and collect his bonus. His bank packaged up bundles of mortgages in financial instruments and flogged them off to buyers who hoped (but couldn't know), that the mortgages would be repaid. Each sale led to more commissions. Looking too closely at the contents of the bundles was irrational. When the crash came and people stopped paying their mortgages, we were presented with the irrational result of millions of personally-rational decisions.

I'd end this. I'd institute state investment banks that distribute QE cash to companies which a) are co-operatives b) innovate c) operate sustainably with regard to investment and environment. I'd ban companies from operating offshore tax evasion schemes (in the UK, the government's Inland Revenue arm sold its own buildings to Mapeley Steps - a company hidden in a tax haven). The state uses our money to provide services tax-avoiding companies rely on: transport, defence, legal structures, education, health, transport and social services which produce and support its workforce. No state = no business. No tax paid - no access to policymakers.

If I were an American, I'd overturn the Supreme Court ruling which held that corporations are to be treated as individuals, which has led to massive corporate political donations to tame politicians. Democracies are for its citizens: only citizens - and their mutual organisations such as trades unions - should be allowed to fund parties and campaigns, and vote. I'd also institute radical openness: every politician and civil servant would be compelled to publish minutes of all communications from pressure groups, corporations and lobbyists.

On pay, it's clear to me that highly-paid workers benefit the economy. Barclays paid its CEO Bob Diamond £17m this year, despite the bank performing poorly. From a capitalist perspective, this is poisonous: shareholder dividends suffer because élite employees are blackmailing them while not actually performing well. Rationality doesn't apply: it's an arms race based on macho pride.

Can we have a fair, sustainable and humane capitalism? I think it's possible, but unlikely. If ownership and labour are divided, exploitation is the inevitable result. Profit is simply wages and investment diverted to largely unproductive shareholders and owners. Co-operatives and collectives redistribute earnings fairly, and keep economies going: your CEO will hide his money off-shore, rather than circulating it round. Well-paid, secure workers spend their cash, creating demand. Investment in companies according to their prospects will produce innovation and stability, rather than - as is current - all our pension funds boosting and bankrupting companies overnight without any sense of responsibility.

I'd sweep all that away. I'd institute a Scandinavian model of high taxes and generous public services, allied to egalitarian social policies. No private medicine, no private education, no subsidies for the rich, no stick for the poor. Military neutrality and nuclear disarmament would divert taxes back to public services. Taxes would be reduced for the poor and for sustainable industry: polluting behaviour would be highly taxed (and that would include exporting dirty industry to developing nations). I'd end the use of property as a piggy bank, because it leads to speculative bubbles and inequality. I'd institute an economic model which doesn't require enrichment at the expense of another's freedom, dinner or environment: ever-increasing growth in a finite world is literally impossible. It leads inexorably to a tiny elite defending a single mountain against the hungry, the thirsty and the deprived on an exhausted, poisonous rock.

Governments would be agile, responsive but also intellectually responsible. I have no idea how I'd bring it about, but I'd like a government which isn't afraid to rely on science, for example, rather than pandering to the prejudices of a Daily Mail-infected vocal minority.

How would life change? We'd have to be a little more thoughtful. Cheap flights and fast fashion would disappear. Just like Norway - the world's richest country, by the way - we wouldn't compete to drive the newest car, nor display logos on our clothes. I'd promote a sense of communal responsibility for each other. We'd have fewer people in prison and perhaps more in mental hospitals. Britain would accept responsibility for the after-effects of Empire and see overseas aid as reparation. No more crusades or military escapades designed to retain the illusion of being a world power. If your credibility depends on possessing the means to turn the world to cinders, it's not moral credibility. Our state investment banks would promote green energy, clean transport and green jobs.

Would there be an economy at all under the leadership of a democratic state? Yes, of course. It just wouldn't look like the one we have. All the hedge fund traders, the futures brokers, the derivative jobbers would go, and we wouldn't miss them, because their activities at best are unproductive and at worst destructive of wealth (hence the crash) and of the social fabric. Our brightest graduates wouldn't rush to the merchant banks in search of multimillion pound bonuses: they'd do PhDs in Welsh literature, become primary school teachers, scientists or manufacturing innovators - secure in the knowledge that they'd be rewarded well for useful work, rather than a few detached sociopaths being massively rewarded for antisocial selfishness. Overseas investment would flood in, once it was realised that a stable, educated society led to productive, future-proofed industry.

Obviously, this is all very idealistic. I'm enough of a syndicalist/Trotskyist/Chartist to know that governments attract power-seekers and empire-builders, and that often they don't move fast enough - but I'm confident that an informed public holding to account a transparent, accountable legislature (which means proportional representation abolishing safe seats, term limits, an elected upper house, a republic, fewer powers for the executive and more for the legislature) would transform any state.

I'm not anti-democratic in the way many of my neocommunist comrades are. It's obvious that having a single party in permanent government just leads to covert fictionalisation in place of overt party oppositions. I understand and sympathise with the claim that parliamentary democracy is a means to divert the citizens from the real and undemocratic centres of power, but once speculation is ended, corporate power curbed and the Daily Mail banned, I believe that the population will become critical, spiky and less prone to the racist, misogynist hysteria to which they're subjected. What we need is confident citizens enforcing their democratic rights: voting every few years (if at all), isn't democracy. Using the social media tools at our disposal to track, bother and bully our representatives on any issue that catches our eyes is the way forward. I am genuinely saddened that my local MP, Paul Uppal and his friends genuinely seem to believe that government is a prize to be won for his side, rather than a tool for the benefit of all: he spends his time advocating tax breaks for property developers, of which he is one. A legislature under constant surveillance by the electorate (rather than a population under the constant surveillance of the security forces, who exist to propagate elite rule) is sadly necessary: as The Miner's Next Step enunciates so well, power corrupts even the most well-meaning representative.

What of education? Easy. Free education open to all at any stage, generously supported from our bulging collective coffers. At the moment, our education system is a tool of the élites. The law, medicine and the more delightful humanities subjects are the preserve of the children of the rich and powerful. Our richest and most famous universities are finishing schools for the rich kids. There's hardly a judge, a journalist or a surgeon in the country who didn't go to private school and then Oxbridge (and isn't white and male) - hardly the conditions for an engaged and democratic system. What of the rest? They attend poorly-funded universities in huge numbers, are encouraged to take courses designed to make them uncritical, obedient consumers and workers. Under my regime, the élite universities will be compelled to take the students with the worst grades. If they're so good, they'll transform those students' lives. Courses will be designed to encourage radical, subversive thinking: it's those students who transform their fields, whether it's Welsh or wind-turbine design. We'll truly believe that education and health are public benefits, not private goods. Nobody will be able to buy their way into privilege, to jump the queue at the doctor's or avoid sharing the riches with those on whom they look down.

Conformity, in all spheres of live, will be disdained. We'll encourage risk-taking and community enterprise. We won't see the sick, the poor and the criminal as potential profit-centres. Instead, we'll take responsibility for them as citizens, not threats to our private comfort. I believe that 'market efficiency' simply cuts corners and disposes of complex problems - look at the American healthcare system. Some things cost money. Pay it and stop moaning.

To some extent, states would wither away. We'd understand humanity as a collective and disperse our goods equally. Did you know there's never been a shortage of food, water or shelter? Yet millions have starved - in Ireland, in Africa, in Russia and elsewhere. The problem has always been one of distribution. We westerners eat more, burn more, consume more because we've constructed states and economies which depend on depriving others. I'm typing this on an Apple Mac - knowing that Apple's 50% profit margin depends on denying its own workers the chance ever to need, let alone own, one of its own products. People die digging up the minerals to make it, people exhaust themselves for a pittance to put the parts together and may even commit suicide for Apple to make a fat profit from me wanting to look stylish. It's not Apple's fault entirely: the corporation exists in a moral, legal and cultural context which encourages us to outsource labour, hunger and pain to obscure factories out of sight. In my world, Apple's profits would be shared amongst its workers and states would compete for the highest standards, not the lowest. I know too that my cheap books from Amazon depend on personal friends accepting long shifts at minimum wage levels in a dangerous, paranoid, non-unionised shed, denied representation, respect and rights. Sorry, DP.

It's time to accept that some of the things we think are inalienable rights depend on the suffering of others. You don't have the right to drive a 4x4: it poisons your neighbours, sinks islands, starves distant masses and enriches some of the most savagely repressive dictatorships on the planet. You don't have the right to pile your plate high then chuck it away. You don't have the right to burn coal or hoover the seas empty because you feel like a cod steak for dinner. You don't deserve a bonus because you foreclosed on some Detroit inhabitant's shack. Your kids haven't earned that Oxford place: you bought it for them. That £5 t-shirt poisoned its maker's drinking water and kept her hungry. Your office is clean because someone poorer than you was in there at 4 a.m. for low pay on a temporary contract. Your Wii wrecks the environment because you don't feel you should pay for cleaner generation or more efficient (or less) technology. GTA 3 is not a human right.

Just one question remains: how we persuade people to want a fairer, more equal society which might require individual sacrifices - a smaller car, fewer cheap flights, higher taxes. I don't know. I'll keep blogging, but (much to my disappointment), more people read the Mail than Plashing Vole. Are we hard-wired for selfishness? No - but we're scared of the alternative.

My Utopia would be quieter, slower, gentler. It would have more genuine public space, fewer adverts, fewer channels, better houses. We'd eat less, but better. We'd have more blazing rows about big ideas, but we'd respect each other afterwards (OK, Clarkson and Jeremy Kyle might have to be liquidated to sort this one out). We'd walk more, talk more, watch and eat less. We'd accept our limitations, but we'd also envisage society as something more than the Rand/Hayek concept of millions of temporary contractual relationships in which one wins and one loses. We'd pay people to do non-commercial science or understand Medieval Latin texts without moaning. We'd be utterly, gloriously indifferent to skin colour, sexuality or any of the other distinctions we currently make. We'd have fewer illusions. We'd all be Foucauldians, alive to social pressures and tensions, ready to resist power in all its forms, yet equally ready to wield it in the pursuit of fairness.

We'd be happier.

Welcome to my world. Obviously it's idealist, confused, partial and naive. It involves fewer mass executions and re-education camps than I'd like, perhaps because underneath my misanthropic crust, I do actually believe that most people are capable of working towards a brighter collective future. Those who don't can visit any of the 'small government' paradises they like: Somalia, anyone?

I don't know quite where I'd locate my politics. I'm not a liberal: I genuinely believe that the underlying structures of modern society need to be overthrown. Nor, however, am I entirely in favour of gulags. I admire the optimism and decentralised openness of Occupy, BoingBoing and the techno-utopianists, but I'm old-fashioned enough to know that enthusiasm isn't enough to make a new world. I like the libertarian-Trotskyism of Ken McLeod and co - but know very well that industrial interests never lead to proletarian liberation. I'm very Green - but know that that alone won't liberate the masses of China and Africa. I'd like to colonise space, but recognise that we can't even feed us all adequately.

OK - comments are open. I'm not dumb: some of this is impractical, most of it unlikely. There are huge gaps in my economic and political knowledge: that's because I'm a bloke with a blog, not a political scientist or an economist. Educate me.

The pogonophobes claim another scalp

Yes, bearded Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has stepped down, and is to take up the Master's post at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't intrude on private grief, not being Christian, let alone a member of the Church of England. However, Rowan's an interesting guy, and symptomatic of the crisis of faith and more specifically of mainstream Anglicanism. Before that, of course, I knew of him through his very fine, sensitive work as a Welsh literary critic. That's why I've maintained an interest in him: he's a leftwing, cultured, Welsh-speaking intellectual who through some bizarre twist of fate found himself at the head of a church which distrusts intellectuals, left-wingers, and exists locked in a fatal embrace with government and the crown. Visit any Cathedral and you'll see monarchical symbols and the flags of various army regiments celebrating their heroic victories against - as Blackadder  put it - pygmies armed with sharpened fruit.

Christianity went wrong very early: when the church got into bed with the Roman Empire, and the C of E is no different - formed because a king wanted a new wife rather than for theological reasons (though those debates were bloodily raging), the C of E made its accommodation with power early on, and lost some of its raison d'être in the process. Torn between competing factions (conservatives, radicals, Low Church, High Church, homophobes and progressives, misogynists and feminists, Rowan Williams inherited a sect at war, and his 'why can't we all get along?' message was drowned out amidst the internecine bloodletting.

That's why he's interesting: he's a gentle intellectual amongst barbarians. Despite not sharing an iota of his beliefs, I respected his essential kindness and moderation: I felt his moral compass pointed in the right direction, even though he thought God was the lodestone and I think human decency is reason enough. He was a civilising influence on British society, and I suspect his retirement will be detrimental both to his church and the public sphere. The C of E will get some Tory-friendly git who will abandon Jesus's tedious social justice nonsense and concentrate on what's really important: bashing gays and grovelling to the queen. Just like the old days.

There's only one thing I object to about his retirement. He's off to a classic Establishment job, as head of a Cambridge college. It feels a bit predictable. With his interests and his radical politics (he referred to himself as a 'bearded lefty'), I'm a bit disappointed that he's taken his talents off to serve another privileged élite. If I remember correctly, Jesus ministered to the prostitutes, the sick and the outcast - not the sons and daughters of the gentry. Rowan's certainly earned a rest - but did it have to be so tediously English?

Still, if he needs some cash, he could put on a tour with his mates Philip Pullman and Richard Dawkins. LIVE! BARE KNUCKLE TAG-TEAM DEBATING! HE'S GOT GOD ON HIS SIDE! THEY'VE GOT SCIENCE AND REASON! WHO'LL PREVAIL? ONLY ON RADIO 4 AND PAY PER VIEW!

Time for a Plan B, Mr Cameron

I'm not a huge rap fan, to be honest. In fact Ben says my music collection is the whitest in the country. My sum total of rap and hip-hop records is: 1 Credit to the Nation CD, some album Ben bought me as a satirical gesture, and a couple of Tystion albums. If you haven't come across them, they're white and Welsh. You might laugh, but the Welsh language lends itself to rap very impressively.

So you might be surprised to learn that I'm quite a fan of this track - Plan B's Ill Manor - a real return to the lamented protest song genre. Can't say the music does a hell of a lot for me, but I hugely appreciate the sentiment. He's angry and he's been reading Owen Jones's Chavs. Sorry about the ad at the start: Plan B may be advocating social revolution, but Warners Music doesn't see why they shouldn't make money from it. Don't buy the single. Send Plan B a fiver instead.



Of course back in the early days, protest and proto-rap were made for each other: here's a couple of old favourites which some of you will know very well, but others may not have discovered.

Great teenage musical errors part 1

When I was a teen (and perhaps well into my twenties), I assumed that everything NME said was right. Even when last week's Great New Hope was this week's Down The Dumper. Being a moron, I'd rush to Cob Records in Bangor and order basically everything reviewed that week.

Gradually, however, poverty and experience taught me a degree of discrimination and I started to realise that just because something was in print didn't make it true. As an example, let's talk about Spiritualized. I really liked Jason Pierce's previous band, Spacemen 3, which took the basic Velvet Underground drone-rock template and added more minimalist structures. I bought all the Spiritualized albums, really getting into the huge, long crescendi, the gospel choirs, the repetition, the drug imagery, the glow-in-the-dark packaging. This, I felt, was primal, raw, rock and roll. These guys were spiritual adventurers, voyaging into the darker reaches of the human psyche and reporting back to us timid types.

Then about four years ago, I went to a Spiritualized Acoustic gig. On stage, J. Spaceman (as Pierce called himself) and a few gospel singers. In the (seated) audience: serried ranks of balding men wearing worn, carefully-ironed t-shirts from the first album (to prove that they'd always been fans). What followed was the most boring hours of my life. Honestly, proof-reading a PhD thesis on Czech modal verbs, which had been my week's activity, proved to be much more stimulating and far less tedious. The audience collectively hissed at anybody who breathed too loudly, lest it disturb the Great Man. And the songs… beneath the thrilling massive noise of the albums and electric gigs, was revealed a man with three things to say:

1. My girlfriend's left me.



2. I've run out of lovely drugs.





3. There's no god.



I've experienced all these things, and I've never felt compelled to make several albums about them. But dear old Jason just moaned the same three tedious 'insights' over and over again as though self-pity for money conferred profundity while the balding groupies quietly massaged their gentlemen's areas.

Now I can't even listen to the electric albums any more, despite the stunning arrangements and beautiful noise, because I know that terrible clichés are being flogged to death, resurrected as zombies and set to work all over again. There are plenty of singers who can write well about heartache, spiritual isolation and My Drug Hell: I'd suggest Nick Cave, the Go-Betweens or the Triffids.

And with that, I expect to receive notification that I'm hitherto expelled from the League of Record Nerds. Hipsters with comedy moustaches, clear-lens glasses and Elefant t-shirts will be knocking politely at my door and muttering mildly sarcastic comments through my letterbox.

Trollop(e)s

I'm thirty pages away from finishing Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, the covert motto of all bloggers, in my experience. To be honest, it's been a mixed experience: hundreds of pages of beautifully written, thoughtful stuff, interspersed with rather dyspeptic bigotry and a plot which entirely depends on a psychological quirk.

Mrs. Trevelyan is friendly with an ageing Tory MP who likes to appear slightly scandalous. Mr. Trevelyan forbids further contact but keeps changing his mind. They battle over whether a promise to stay clear is a public affirmation that she's actually committed adultery. She won't compromise. He won't compromise. They separate, though they say they love each other. He goes mad. It's none too convincing, considering its driving the plot of a realist novel.

On the other hand, there are lots of other good things, particularly Jemima Stanbury, the ogreish aunt with a heart of gold, and Wallachia Petrie, the abrasive American nationalist and feminist who's repeatedly satirised as a bore, a termagant and a woman lacking emotional facility. Which is also one of the problems with Trollope. He clearly doesn't like independent women, opinionated women, Americans and feminists. OK - his privilege. But he can't stop editorialising and it gets a bit weary.

Which is why I like the Death of the Author theory. Trollope's dead. Even if you read the book in 1869, he wouldn't have been in the room with you. His opinions and the ways in which he communicates them, can be noted, then ignored. I can 'read against' Trollope's reactionary attitudes by preferring Wallachia to Caroline, who throws in her lot with the inherited peerage, much to the horror of Wallachia. Trollope's ideal woman is sensitive, intelligent and obedient:

He was so strong that he treated her almost as a child;– and yet she loved him infinitely the better for so treating her… she was powerless to contradict him in anything… "Be good to me, he said, "and tell me that I am right".
     "You must be master, I suppose, whether you are right or wrong". 

I do like Trollope's humour and the way in which his characters are minutely enunciated. Naive but nice Nora, for instance, fantasises about living alone (!) in lodgings (!) for a while before she gets married. It is, to her, the epitome of the 'Bohemian' life, in which dissipation reaches the extremes of 'making her own bed'. The rebel!

PS: Karl Marx died on this date in 1889, though he is of course undergoing a form of resurrection.

First horse, then cart

Today's Twitter sensation is this article in the New York Times, in which a Goldman Sachs equity trader explains to his company why he is leaving.

The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients.

I can sympathise with him, of course. No doubt his colleagues are scum-sucking con-men bent on enriching themselves at the expense of clients (Smith seems to have no conception of a society beyond Goldman Sachs and their customers).

But amidst the general electronic rejoicing at the Prodigal Son's redemption, the liberals have missed the major point. Greg Smith's major assertion is that a culture of greed has damaged Goldman Sachs as a company. Bad people have wrecked a good system.

He's utterly wrong. A bad system has produced damaged, greedy, amoral people. Speculative capitalism isn't an honourable and sustainable enterprise occasionally besmirched by greedy individuals. Speculative capitalism assumes that individuals are driven by greed and self-interest and turns those characteristics into the engines of economic growth. By legitimising selfishness (such as destroying a company's value overnight to enrich Goldman Sachs through short-selling - deliberately engineering panic-selling of its shares), Goldman Sachs and similar companies deliberately turn human failings into structural features of the economy.

What's missing from Greg Smith's mea culpa is any understanding of economies and human society as a structure. To him, individual motivations and behaviours significantly affect structures. To us marxists, structures dictate human behaviour: culture is part of what Marx called the 'superstructure', while economics is part of the underlying structure. His disgusting colleagues aren't bad apples: they're behaving rationally and logically within the paradigm of speculative capitalism. It might offend Smith's personal code of conduct, but for 12 years he has enthusiastically participated in an economic activity which has impoverished massive swathes of the planet's population.

For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

He neither comprehends nor regrets this. Instead, he's shifted attention to the attitudes and sharp practices of a few individuals within an inevitably corrupting system. Smith's a cog in a machine, and he has no critique at all of the mechanism - he's merely personally offended by local difficulties.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

A careful reading reveals not a radical, but a conservative. He wants the system to survive. He wants Goldman Sachs, one of the most destructive and predatory corporations on the planet, to survive. He has no concept of speculative capitalism's destructive impact on the human condition.

Greg: yes, many of the trees are falling down, but you need to realise that the wood itself is rotten.

PS: there's a much funnier take on the piece here. 
PS2: so what's my solution? Here's my naive and confused first steps.

Separated at birth? Leveson edition

Here's Dick Fedorcio, suspended head of press relations for the Metropolitan Police. He employed a vast number of News of the World journalists in his office. He wined and dined several serving ones. He let a NotW hack write an article on his office computer. He got his son a work experience job on the Sun. The son then moved from The Sun to the Metropolitan Police. Other officers hint that he leaked and briefed. He of course says that he's never even heard a breath of scandal ever.

But never mind that. Play this clip of the intrepid Fedorcio.



Then play this one, of Baron Greenback from Danger Mouse:



Separated at birth.

Wenlock's got his eye on you…

Despite being part of the Olympics organisation (better not give too many details or I'll be thrown out), I've already expressed misgivings about the cultural, architectural and commercial aspects of the games - I'm with Iain Sinclair and Will Self on the way mega-projects erase local communities in the name of sterile regeneration.

So I'm overjoyed by London 2012s honesty when it comes to its choice of mascots. In particular, Wenlock, named after the Wenlock Olympian Games in Shropshire: I've won medals in that competition several times. Most impressively, the latest edition of Wenlock gets to the heart of my fears about the Games:

Yes, that's right. They've dressed up a Cyclops as a Metropolitan Police Officer (and other 'cuddly' versions of the Security State. The all-seeing Eye, the Panopticon of surveillance, the implicit threat of Total Security - lots of special laws have been passed for the Olympics, not all of them giving tax-free status to the IOC and its sponsors - packaged up as a cuddly toy. With thousands of soldiers, cops and rentacops being drafted in, along with riot control gear, an aircraft carrier, drones, armed FBI and other American forces (why?) and ground-to-air missiles, this is going to be the most paranoid and repressive Games ever… and once awarded, those powers aren't going to be handed back. All that public space is handed over to private corporations - as you'll discover if you produce the 'wrong' debit card, drinks container, packed lunch or t-shirt.

Still, beneath the cuddly toys, an awful lot of security companies will make £billions from turning East London into something like the Gaza strip.

Uppal: drearily predictable

As readers of Plashing Vole, you'll be a connoisseur of Boring Issues. So you won't be particularly surprised that our favourite MP is launching a Boring attack on the BBC. Warning:  Boring material coming. Do not operate heavy machinery while reading. 


It all started innocuously enough:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office
(1) what discussions the UK Statistics Authority have had with representatives of the BBC on the issue of Homes and Communities Agency statistics during 2011;
(2) what media briefings the UK Statistics Authority gave to the BBC on the issue of Homes and Communities Agency statistics.

What an odd - and Boring - question, I thought. Wonder what it's all about. It struck me that Boris Johnson recently called Sir Michael Scholar, the head of the UKSA, 'a Labour stooge' for ticking the government off for using dubious and unverified statistics. With this in mind, and knowing the Tories' hatred for the BBC, I suspect that Uppal is suffering a persecution complex at the hands of proper mathematics and what Tory MPs used to call the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation in the 1980s. 


So - and this is where it gets really Boring, I looked up the story and the correspondence between Sir Michael and the HCA. It turns out that the statistics for building affordable homes (the HCA's job) are a) awful and b) thoroughly massaged by the HCA to make themselves look better in press releases. The BBC established that the total number of houses built came to 454. In the whole country. Then Mark Easton started to look into the HCA's communications strategy and smelled several rats around the use and strategic release of statistics. 


Enter Sir Michael Scholar, whose entire job it is to ensure that whenever the government quotes figures, those statistics are reliable and mathematically significant - no touching up for PR and political purposes. Thankfully, the Statistics Agency post all their correspondence on the internet. No doubt much to Paul Uppal's conspiracy-minded disappointment, there's no documentation linking him to a BBC plot against the government - but there is a chillingly polite letter from Scholar to the Housing Minister Grant Shapps demanding to know why Housing and Communities Agency statistics aren't sufficiently rigorous ('National Statistics') and when he might expect them to be so. This, you should understand, is the Civil Service equivalent of taking Shapps down a dark alley and administering several sharp blows to tender parts of his anatomy, before delivering a warning about future conduct. 


According to the Cabinet Office, 

The UK Statistics Authority received one telephone enquiry from a representative of the BBC asking for an Authority view on the release of statistics produced by the Homes and Communities Agency on 22 November 2011. The Authority responded by confirming that it would wish to review any particular statistical issues or concerns that were raised before commenting further.

…the Minister, as the appropriate authority, is required to provide the Statistics Authority with a statement as to whether he intends to make a request for such an assessment. No reply has yet been received.

So despite Uppal's tedious whinging, he's actually exposed a plot to discredit an independent and impartial government agency, attacked the BBC and revealed himself - yet again - as a small, mean, partisan and untrustworthy individual happy to perform his duty as part of a propaganda machine. Far from the BBC persecuting the government, Grant Shapps is refusing to commit himself to making sure that the statistics he's been using in press releases and interviews will ever be accurate or impartial. 


A good morning's work. 

Out of the mouths of babes…

No, not that kind of babes. Merely young people - two rather talented young writer/actors starting with Shakespeare and going off in interesting directions. Sent to me by a colleague:



a rather cynical (i.e. accurate) analysis of what it takes to win an Oscar:



And finally the apotheosis of culture: Frasier meets Star Trek: Voyager. How have I lived without this?

Mischief managed

What a successful seminar we had this afternoon. I don't want to be all 'Your Free Mountain Bikes Are Waiting To Be Collected From The Basement' (in the classic 'Whacking Day'), but I was being peer-observed today, and only the talkative students turned up. Most of them even had copies of the book, and all of them had read it. I'm sorry the rest weren't there - turnout has been really good on this module - but it was great to discuss narrative structure, the link between syntactical oddities, modernism and the parallel between Vile Bodies John Dos Passos's USA (not a link often made, I suspect), and they noticed some really interesting bits I'd overlooked.

I kept meaning to go back to ideas but they were coming up with them faster than we could talk about them. For some stretches, I had the pleasure of just being the referee while the students talked to each other, which is definitely the sign of a successful class. One thing that came up was Waugh's presentation of women: one student felt that Waugh wrote women very well, while another thought that he drew on pre-existing stereotypes. It's a tricky novel: the implied reader is hard to identify, and Waugh balances his standard misanthropy and snobbery with a hard-eyed critique of aristocratic Modernism which he soon sadly lost.

Cwmardy next week - set in the same period, but in South Wales mining slums rather than hotels, palaces, Downing Street and dirigibles. Hope you can see where I'm going with this one.

Here's a clip from the film adaptation of Vile Bodies, renamed Bright Young Things. Don't watch any more of it - it's one of the worst films ever made. Down there with Drop Dead Fred, The Last Airbender and Howard the Duck.

Back to the forest clearances

Normal service is resumed in terms of book deliveries - 5 today. Four of them are minor Keith Roberts novels and short stories, some of them quite disturbing. A cursory glance makes it clear that - like Robert Heinlein and Brian Aldiss - Roberts' response to the 70s/80s was more technology + less political freedom: no democrat he.

'The Shack At Great Cross Halt' presents a Britain made dystopian by motorways and consumerism, but 'The Ministry of Children' presents comprehensive schools as hellholes of savagery. In 'The Big Fans', wind farms cause the apocalypse (it's as though Roberts was writing Telegraph and Mail headlines 40 years in advance). 'Our Lady of Desperation' presents a Stalinist Britain which taxes artists at 100% (my guess is that Roberts had just received a tax bill), while 'Missa Privata' pitches a heroic opera singer against Communist Britain… all very tedious, and not very perceptive: the UK voted in Thatcher the same year this collection appeared.

Also appeared: Martin Johnes's Wales Since 1939, which looks really good, and comes with a complementary website full of extra resources. Talking of Wales, here's Welsh avant-gardist Jane Arden's Anti-Clock.



Also in today - the Berlin Philharmonic's 1964 recording of The Magic Flute. Weirdo masonic-occult text, amazing music.

The wisdom of Mitt

This pretty much sums up the Republican Party:

"If the federal government were run more like the government here in Mississippi," he told the inhabitants of America's poorest state where infant mortality is on a par with Botswana, "the whole country would be a lot better off".

From this article by Gary Younge in today's Guardian.

Relative radio silence from me today: English department meeting in seven minutes, and an intense session on Proletkult in Welsh literature with my darling third-years. Which reminds me - I need to catch up with the project students.