The glamorous life of the academic

Hi everybody. It's late afternoon and I'm only just posting something here. I must have an outrage gland deficiency or something.

The truth is that I've been suffering academic overload. Literally everything I deal with has come up today. There's the marking of course - dissertations first, particularly the discussions with the other marker to agree a grade. Then there's consoling distraught students – postgrads this time, trying to solve completely understandable dilemmas without causing offence or treading on people's toes. I've had several calls for union help, and I've received the readers' reports on two papers I wrote. Oh, and arranging visiting speakers for next year's research sessions. Plus the usual routine of gossip and meetings: last night the deputy head of the Quality Assurance Agency gave a very enlightening lecture. Amongst other things, he said that the posh universities tried to claim that inspection is really only for proletarian hellholes like The Hegemon, and that the Tories are pushing through their education-wrecking plans through quangos rather than face the scrutiny which comes from passing Higher Education legislation. I paraphrase, of course, but it's pretty clear that not having any mandate won't stop them behaving like North Korean Dear Leaders.

If you don't know how the system works, it's like this. You write a paper and submit it to the editors. They send an anonymised copy out to two readers who recommend whether or not to publish it, and if so, whether any revisions need making. Then you do the necessary and send it back, alongside a response detailing whether you ignored or accepted the recommendations.

Luckily, my papers were very well-received, but there's still work to do. The readers made some really useful observations about factual stuff, emphasis and structure: it's exactly how peer review is meant to work. But of course a lot of the alterations are time-consuming. For instance: I thought I'd got the right referencing system. Turns out I haven't. So I've got to go through every quote, footnote and endnote changing them. The guidance is 39 pages long. My eyes are bleeding… and the marking is staring at me balefully.

The soundtrack for the day has been Low - all 14 albums in reverse chronological order. Restful, beautiful but also deeply melancholy. Ideal for grading dissertations and theoretically dictating the course of students' lives. Tomorrow it's an early meeting supporting a colleague through a disciplinary hearing (let's face it: I'll be facing one myself if I keep blogging the way I am, so I need the practice), then more marking and in the evening, at long last, I'll go fencing again. I always find that the antidote to a big pile of marking is to spend an evening viciously attacking people with bladed weapons. Don't you?

Here are some of Low's songs.







and for melancholic fun, Galaxie 500's cover of the Rutles' Beatles parody 'Cheese and Onions'.

Plashing Vole's Cultural Capers

Hi everybody. Monday going well for you all I trust? I'm marking dissertations. Well, I'm meant to be marking dissertations… I'm not entirely goofing off: lots of people have been coming in looking for help or helping me with things. And I overslept, thanks to a protracted nightmare which involved an alarm clock which wouldn't switch off even after I'd disassembled it. I think that counts as irony.

I had a rather magnificent weekend. Apart from marking some dissertations, I went to a recording of Any Questions, the Radio 4 predecessor of TV's Question Time, saw the new Star Trek film, and saw Athlete's final gig on their 10-year anniversary tour.

Question Time was rather good fun. It didn't start well: I had my own personalised monsoon, which lasted for precisely the time it took to get from the bus to the Keele University bar where I met my friends. I'm not sure I have ever been so wet. The rain was heavier than it's ever been, and my very expensive Montane waterproof jacket seems to have been designed to channel all the water directly to the crotch of my not-at-all waterproof trousers. My question to the panel should have been 'does anyone have any dry clothes please?', or given that I had a couple of scoops, 'would the panel fancy a kebab?'. However, despite steaming and chafing throughout the recording, it was fun. The guests were the awful Christine Hamilton (who seemed to imply that all immigrants are free-loading criminals and tax-avoiders: to an audience of overseas teachers and students); Patrick McLoughlin, a ponderously dull Tory government minister whose only claim to fame is that as a former miner, he's betrayed his class, the walking organ-donor Stephen Twigg, meant to defend public education against the depredations of Michael Gove, though I've never met anyone who knows who he is, and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, the rather excellent, witty and thoughtful journalist whose work I never read because it's in the Independent. 

We had a good heckle, which encouraged the students around us to do the same, clapped the progressive points and roundly booed the xenophobic and reactionary ones. I'd planned to ask the panel whether modern politics has enough room for humility and self-doubt, because as far as I can see, it doesn't, to its detriment. I posed the same question to David Miliband, who signally failed to understand it. However, my question wasn't chosen. The panel discussed transport, Europe, immigration and several other topics, and the audience seemed split between a UKIP minority and a liberal-left majority. All in all: good clean fun. Get it here, if you're in the UK: listen to me heckle Christine Hamilton for unselfconsciously blaming crime on immigrants, despite her husband taking bribes to ask questions in Parliament.

And then to Star Trek: Into Darkness. My, what a glorious caper. It looks great, the action sequences are brilliant, it's paced well, the slightly lame ST humour is intact, the performances are excellent - a great popcorn movie. Plus all the 'uneasy lies the crown' stuff, the homosocial bonding etc etc. And we get the original music back at the end. Heaven



But there's more to it. For the Trek fans – of which I'm one, though not as dedicated as the couple who turned up in Starfleet uniform – the movie plays affectionately fast and loose with the canon. The film is effectively a prequel to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which as we all know is about Khan's revenge on Kirk and ends with Spock's death (don't worry: the rather weak but lovely Star Trek III: The Search for Spock regenerates him). Into Darkness introduces characters central to the earlier films' plots, is spattered with lovely references to episodes to the original series and stages an astonishing reversal of the final homosocially heart-breaking scene of The Wrath of Khan. Audacious, yes, though it somewhat strips Spock of agency - you'll know what I mean when you see it.

Into Darkness is also an explicitly political film too. Kirk is sent off by the supreme commander of Starfleet to murder a terrorist using torpedoes: no trial, no warning. His plan, it becomes clear, is to provoke a war and turn Starfleet into a military organisation rather than an exploratory one. In the grand Star Trek tradition then, the film takes on Iraq, Afghanistan, the death of Bin Laden and Obama's policy of preferring drone attacks to trials, even of American citizens. It's also an interesting film culturally. While a chunk of London is blown up at the start (American filmmakers like blowing up London and Paris: far away enough for American audiences not to mind, yet still recognisable even by Texans), it's rare for films to trash American cities since 9/11. And yet here we have the renegade villain (Benedict Cumberbatch) demolishing half of San Francisco. Clearly Americans are ready for this stuff, though I suspect the conservative viewer wouldn't mind so much: Starfleet's HQ is there in honour of that city's famous commitment to peace, love and understanding - San Francisco is a byword for liberalism in conservative circles.

Finally in this hectic weekend, I was given a guest list ticket to see Athlete, celebrating the 10th anniversary of their début album Vehicles and Animals. I have one of their LPs somewhere, but I have to confess to not knowing much about them: there's a gap in my musical library between about 2002-2008 when I was a) broke and b) mostly buying experimental classical stuff and folk. So I knew Athlete are nice chaps with good tunes: anthemic and upbeat. Well, seeing them live was rather a revelation: their quite pretty songs came with a lot of muscle, and the crowd really made a difference. I had no idea they had such a devoted cult - but this crowd (young and old, mixed sex, mostly white) sang every single word. For someone like me, lacking emotional commitment to the band, it was hugely enjoyable to watch 1500 people united in song. Oh yes: great theremin playing too.

Here's 'Out of Nowhere' - the one with the theremin.



and 'Black Swan'.



Right. Back to the marking.

A blogger yearns to care about banal junk once more

Hi everybody, new readers and old. It's been a weird few days. I'm snowed under by work, but kept getting distracted by the antics of Michael Gove and the popular response to the piece I wrote about him yesterday. I normally get around 200 readers daily: yesterday that one piece attracted nearly 4000 of you, for which you have my thanks and apologies. The driver of all this traffic was Twitter, particularly the Re-Tweets of two of my favourite people, Graham Linehan (the TV writer) and Cory Doctorow, hero of the Utopian Techno-age.

I'm heartened to learn that a) a lot of people feel the same way as I do and b) that my jokes occasionally hit the target: the people I interact with in meatspace usually respond to my humorous forays with groans, grimaces and occasionally sharp objects delivered at considerable velocity. Perhaps Blogger is the new Reader's Digest funnies page. I also want to thank those of you who commented. I really care about blogging as a way of extending a conversation: I link as much as possible and I take comments seriously, learning a lot from support and criticism alike. Apologies too for the length of the post: I kept thinking about more stuff to put in - I'd be an editor's nightmare. Another joy of blogging: no editors.

Against my higher instincts, it was also fascinating and gratifying to sit watching the readership increase, minute by minute. Despite cherishing you all for your unique characteristics and abilities, there's something ego-fuelling about watching numbers tick upwards on a screen. I know really that these figures are arbitrary and in isolation meaningless, but I now also fully understand why they call it 'stat porn'.

However, it's back to normality today. My 15 minutes are over and despite the gratification, I'm also relieved. My regular readers will know how inconsequential my writing usually is, and you new folks will soon pick it up (or leave). That said, I gather that my piece about the university's uncritical promotion of entrepreneurial discourse, and its links to frankly unimpressive salesmen, has attracted a complaint to my superiors. I will of course, keep you posted. I see this as a matter of free speech and academic freedom. I made justifiable intellectual points: the disciplinary process is not the appropriate forum to explore them. That's what the comments box is for!

And so to today's duties. You know when I said I'd be an editor's nightmare? Well I've just submitted a grossly extended review of RS Thomas: Uncollected Poems and RS Thomas's Poems to Elsi to Poetry Wales. In my defence, they approached me to do it, and they're paying me, so I reckon they're getting value for money, at least in terms of volume: my work comes out at 2p per word. Let's not talk about quality: I've told the editors to be as blunt as they need.

Poetry's Marvin the Paranoid Android greets the day with his customary good cheer

I won't repeat my review here, but I'll say this: buy the books unless you've never read any of his work, in which case you should started with the Collected Poems. They're great works of scholarship and they deepened my understanding of RS Thomas's work and method. Thomas was a fierce Welsh nationalist, a campaigner for the language who learned Welsh late and wrote poetry only in English. He was an agnostic vicar and a hater of technology who remained fascinated by quantum physics, through which he detected a space for the God he hoped existed. He was cold, rude, searching, misanthropic and also (I think) loving and very funny. One of things I say in the review is that lines like 'the incorrigibly human / with their dogs and their fags and children… the smut and the crap re-begin' ('Thoughts by the Sea') and 'Went to the sea; stared / at the birds. Did they / stare back?' (Excursion) surely deliberately play up grumpy Thomas's reputation to comic effect.

Anyway, if you want to read more, you'll have to buy Poetry Wales. It's a great and beautifully-designed magazine, so buy it anyway.

So it's back to marking and the quiet life. Lots of dissertations and essays to read, but some fun stuff too. I'm going to a recording of Radio 4's Any Questions tonight. Not as brutally unintelligent as Question Time, but still potentially infuriating. I lead a sedentary existence, so cold fury is the only cardio-vascular exercise I get. After that, I'm off to see the Star Trek film – I've never warmed to Star Wars, and on Sunday, I've been put on the guest list for Athlete, which should be a lot of fun.

It's not all work work work. See you next week, if I haven't been sacked.

The educational fish rots from the head

I've got two book reviews to write today, so I need to get my brain working and my typing finger warmed up. What better way than to have a pop at Michael Gove?

(This is going to get text-heavy and ranty. If you fancy the funny, beautifully-pitched graphic version, Paul Bernal's got it right here). 

If you think I need a reason, let's start with this. Yesterday, I excoriated my own university for its uncritical acceptance of entrepreneurial discourse, and the way it falls over itself to pay shysters for their snake-oil. 

A little later yesterday I chanced upon a Freedom of Information request by one Janet Downs, to whom a statue should be erected by public subscription, preferably outside the Department for Education. Intrigued by Mr Gove's assertion (in the Mail on Sunday, naturally) that:

"Survey after survey has revealed disturbing historical ignorance,with one teenager in five believing Winston Churchill was a fictional character while 58 per cent think Sherlock Holmes was real."

I should be grateful if you could give me details of these surveys: who ran them, what questions were asked, when the surveys took place, and size and make-up of samples. 

she pressed the DFE for details. After all, the Government's education minister must be drawing on the talents and research skills of the very best academics and civil servants in the land, right? These surveys will be rigorous, extensive, statistically-significant and representative. Won't they? After all, Mr Gove is continually telling us that standards must be raised. 

Back came the reply, revealing that Mr Gove's commitment to 'outsourcing' and small government reaches the parts other ministers cannot reach:

Dear Ms Downs 

Thank you for your email of 26 March, requesting details of a survey about teenagers’ lack of historical knowledge.
Unfortunately, I am not able to provide you with the details of the survey as it was commissioned and conducted by UKTV Gold.  I would advise thatyou contact UKTV Gold direct, as they should be able to assist you on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Emma Seymour, Curriculum Policy Division

That's right. The Secretary of State for Education, the scourge of lazy thinking, relies on surveys conducted for promotional purposes by a TV repeats channel. What's on today? Multiple episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, Only Fools and Horses and (curiously for a channel seemingly shocked by historical inaccuracy), Goodnight Sweetheart, whose central device is a time machine used by a chap to conduct romances both in the present and in 1940s Britain (and about which I've often been tempted to write an academic paper or two).  

But at least we can rely on the accuracy and rigour of UKTV Gold's research, can't we? Er… apparently not. Grahame Whitfield kindly pointed me towards the Local Schools Network's analysis. Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie me. They unearthed the actual poll, which dates back to 2008, and found a few teensy, weeny problems. Firstly, it didn't test 'teenagers' specifically, but 3000 'people'. Which might lead one to think that Mr Gove is rather disingenuous. Or lazy. One could further assume that many of those adults were educated during his own party's 18 years in office from 1979-1997. 

And that's not all. Poor UKTV Gold seems to be labouring under some historical misapprehensions of its own. As the LSN points out, 

the survey listed Lady Godiva as fictional and said 12% believed she was real. But the 12% were right – Lady Godiva endowed monasteries at Stow and Coventry. And the 47% who thought “fictional” Eleanor Rigby was real were no doubt thinking of Paul McCartney’s anecdote that he found the name on a gravestone.

Looking at the company's PR-driven report, it becomes clear that they really don't know very much about history, or indeed historiography. 

most people believe that fictional figures such as King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby really existed. 

King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood top the list of fictional characters that Brits are most likely to confuse with fact 

Now it's true that there's no archaeological evidence for Robin Hood and King Arthur, but there's no shortage of cultural artefacts, such as the 6th century Welsh poem Y Gododdin. No doubt the 'real' Arthur and Robin (there were several possible Robin models) are nothing like the representations purveyed by UKTV Gold, but they aren't exactly fictional. For a bracingly sceptical Arthur survey, I recommend Guy Halsall's Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages (OUP 2013). For Robin, start with Stephen Knight's Robin Hood: a Mythic Biography. 

Let's look at UKTV's Top Ten:

Top ten fictional characters that the British public thinks are real

• 1) King Arthur – 65%

• 2) Sherlock Holmes – 58%

• 3) Robin Hood – 51%

• 4) Eleanor Rigby – 47%

• 5) Mona Lisa -35%

• 6) Dick Turpin – 34%

• 7) Biggles – 33%

• 8) The Three Musketeers – 17%

• 9) Lady Godiva – 12%

• 10) Robinson Crusoe – 5%

So: Arthur (dubious); Holmes (fictional); Robin (dubious, and yet UKTV Gold has shown Robin TV series, contributing to our ignorance); Eleanor Rigby (definitely real); Mona Lisa (a portrait with several strong candidates); Dick Turpin (real), Biggles (fictional) the Musketeers (a real military formation, with whom d'Artagnan really fought in the 17th century), Lady Godiva (real) and Robinson Crusoe who, though fictional, was closely based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk.

The whole thing is rather incoherent:

Nearly half of us (47%) have no idea who Richard the Lionheart was; even though the historical figure has featured in numerous films throughout the 21st Century. 

Perhaps, UKTV Gold, people don't watch these films much. When was the last film about Richard? Are you subtly suggesting both that a) fictionalised films are reliable history and that b) we're thick because we watch too much TV? Better switch off UKTV Gold then!

And one more thing. In your Top Ten Real People Britons Think Are Mythical:

10) Charles Dickins - 3%

Suddenly UKTV Gold is looking thicker than its survey participants. 


But Ms Downs was not satisfied by the DfE's reply (one curiously unashamed that its positions are unsupported by substantive research). She went back for more:

Thank you for your reply saying that one survey about teenagers'lack of historical knowledge was done by UKGold.
I should be grateful if you could let me know when the survey was undertaken.
Michael Gove referred to "survey after survey". This indicates that there was more than just one. But you have given me the name of only one.
Would it be fair to say that there was actually only one survey and not several as Mr Gove said?

And we're very grateful for her tenacity, because the DfE reply moved from UKTV Gold to purest Comedy Gold:

As advised previously, you would need to contact UKTV Gold to find out details of their survey, including when it was undertaken.
The other survey’s the Secretary of State referred to include:
·        a survey of 2000 11 to 16 year olds by Premier Inn;
·        a study commissioned by Lord Ashcroft of 1000 children aged 11 to 18 to mark the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial in London;
·        a report by Professor Robert Tombs for think-tank Politeia;
·        an article by London Mums Magazine[1] http://londonmumsmagazine.com/2013/with-...
·        research carried out by the Sea Cadets to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/edu...

Let us pass over the apostrophe abuse lightly: there are bigger fish to fry. For lo! Mr Gove's instinctive fear that the kids are being thickened rests on more than a TV company's PR stunt. Why, a budget hotel chain ran a survey. Sadly, they won't tell us who did the research, how they selected their participants, what the question were or anything else: their Facebook page links only to the Independent's space-filling summary, an article clearly written by PI's PR team, and which uses the (new to me) word 'cruelness', which makes the adults look more stupid than the kids. What Premier Inn's motivation is, beyond cheap publicity, is beyond me – but I hope they're proud to contribute to official government policy. 

What of the other 'research'? Well, Lord Ashcroft is the very strange, tax-evading billionaire who ran his survey as a publicity stunt for his memorial to the men who flattened Dresden and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. His memorial is notable for a) its terrible architecture and b) the prominence of its donors' names, not a notable feature of previous war memorials: also engraved on the wall is the name of Bee Gee Robin Gibb, someone else who has translated childhood war games into adult triumphalism. At least the actual data is available, though again, it hasn't been contextualised in any way and he uses it to promote Gove's 1950s Greyfriars fantasy. 

Moving on. Robert Tombs (Prof in French Political History) and Politeia. Well, let's just say that Politeia is a political think-tank which exists solely to justify any given Conservative policy initiative. Its work is not peer-reviewed or published in academic journals, and is therefore not reliably rigorous. The good Professor's co-authors are interesting: one teaches history in private boarding school (qualifications unknown) and the other has a PhD in the history of history teaching but appears not to have any further public presence or job. The report insists that 'British history' must be taught from Hadrian onwards, as though 'British' is a meaningful term that far back.  It happily cites 'newspaper reports' as evidence for serious accusations about the integrity of the exam system, and claims that because other countries have a narrowly nationalist curriculum, the UK should too! 

The report is certainly dubious, but it makes some points which Mr Gove could usefully digest:

emphasize the academic values rooted in each subject. These can only be properly understood by those versed in the subject: the teachers, who should be allowed to teach in accord with their judgement, and the academic subject specialists, whose lifetime of study qualifies them to propose the curricula and set the examinations 

Especially given that several reports suggest that Mr Gove wrote the entire proposed history curriculum himself (that's according to the distinguished historian Richard Evans who, though Gove praises him, describes the new curriculum as a 'pub quiz'), having discarded the suggestions his own Tory friends gave him. Certainly not my idea of academic freedom. But this paragraph implies that Prof Tombs and Co should rather disapprove of a Minister who bases his assumptions on cheap TV channel PR stunts. 

As to the rest: a magazine article and a newspaper report? No disrespect to London Mums, the Sea Cadets and the Telegraph (amusingly, the first comment attacks American ignorance while spelling 'Runnymede' incorrectly), but really. The London Mums article claims that 63% of children can't spell 'achievement', and lists several other howlers. Their source? A commercial exam revision website which just might have an interest in persuading parents to part with extra cash by making stark claims about their kids' ignorance. Sadly, they don't provide any details about their survey: questions, sample size and collection: nothing reliable at all. It's a pub quiz dressed up as research. Ironically, the London Mums article critiquing kids' illiteracy is replete with stylistic and grammatical errors, sweeping unjustified assertions (the dates 'everyone' used to know, for example). Worst of all, the author thinks that 'mumpreneur' is a word. For which she deserves a painful and public punishment. 

I teach at a rather good, though unfashionable, university. If my students submitted work which turned out to be based on this kind of rubbish, we'd fail them. I have a big sign on my wall which reads:

THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTE IS NOT DATA

We spend a lot of time explaining to them the difference between serious research and 'stuff you can Google'. This is a whole other level. We're talking government policy which will affect the lives and opportunities of millions of children. Anecdotes based on PR stunts cannot form the basis for policy. MUST. DO. BETTER. 

What really annoys me is this. Michael Gove is an intelligent man. He knows this behaviour is wrong. That gives him a moral responsibility to behave better. But for reasons of pure cynicism, he actively chooses to distort, cheat and mislead. This isn't accidental: it's a strategy.

No wonder my university thinks it's OK to hire charlatans when this is the example set by Whitehall. 

Update: Gove has turned his attention to English, invoking the spirit of FR Leavis to attack 'narrow' curricula by calling for a return to the 'transcendent' 'Canon' of 'Great' literature, by which he means dead white British authors, which seems pretty narrow to me: if Gove had been alive in the 19th-century, he'd have moaned about junk like Dickens and advocated a return to Plato and Empedocles, in Greek of course, and to the use of the Mr Men to explore Hitler's rise and fall in history classes. 

You good people have read quite enough of my ranting, so I'll be brief on this bit. Reading doesn't always have to be 'educational'. People discover texts at different times in their lives. I was forced to read Dickens too young, and it took 15 years before I realised for myself that he had a lot of charm and profundity (still not reconciled to the supposedly comic stuff). FR Leavis, the eminence grise of Gove's worldview didn't include Dickens in his original canon, because canons are just indicators of the current hegemony's concerns, and not guides to Eternal Truths About Life, the Universe and Everything. People read for entertainment. For enlightenment about their own cultural context, not just history. People read for comfort and above all to discover themselves and others. People might start with Twilight and discover books that you and I consider better. Others might read Twilight AND 'the greats'. 

For instance, as an undergraduate, I was taught by one of the world's greatest Arthurian literary scholars, Professor PJC Field. He was, we thought, a snob. Then I met him in WHSmith's. He was buying a pile of Dick Francis novels. Spotting me sniggering in a superior fashion, he announced that 'Man cannot live by Arthurian literature alone' and departed. For a long time, because I was an insecure and uptight teenager who couldn't relax with matters cultural in case someone caught me out, I thought I'd won that exchange. It was only later, when I'd read some critical theory, got something approximating a life and matured considerably, that I realise he'd won. He wasn't ashamed or insecure of his cultural choices, and I was. I learned a lot from that. So should Mr Gove. 

The idea that literature is 'transcendent' is just embarrassing nonsense. 'Transcendent' isn't a critical term: it's an anti-critical term. If I asked my students why Shakespeare is great and they replied 'because he transcends time and cultures', that would be the end of the conversation. Whereas replying 'Shakespeare is great because he took all the concerns of his period and cultural position and made ambiguous, complex drama out of them which can be read in the following ways…' is the start of a fantastic, life-long conversation. 'Transcendent' is the product of one quite recent critical position. It's not a historical one either: Shakespeare wasn't particularly popular for a long time after his death, and the Victorians joyously tacked happy endings onto the tragedies to suit their needs (they didn't like the lack of cosmic justice involved in Cordelia's death, for instance). 

Canons are repressive concepts. They tell you what an élite thinks you should know, rather than what everybody read: Dickens was outsold by several people whose works you never hear about now. I've no problem with making value judgements - but I do object to people who disguise their value judgements as universal truths. It's dishonest and oppressive. 

What he doesn't mention – and you'll have seen this coming – is that the Mr Men example isn't some widespread, pernicious dereliction of duty committed by the Marxist Enemies of Promise he frequently evokes. It's mentioned on a lesson plan. A lesson plan made available on a commercial website. For the iGCSE, Gove's beloved semi-O-Level used by a lot of snobby private schools. 

Yet again, he's smearing all teachers by resorting to selective quotation and nonexistent attribution. 

Creator. Disruptor. Doer. Bullshitter

A few days ago, I posted a piece called Entering The Bullshit Zone, satirising my university for paying an unqualified therapist and author of That Bitch for 'facilitating' a conference promoting Entrepreneurship in Education. Briefly: serious scholars of management and business have long since laid to rest the notion of the Great Entrepreneur who'll reshape the world. For a short dismissal delivered by somebody rather more impressive than me, try Barack Obama's 'you didn't make that' speech, which reminds everybody that social advances require a society rather than a solitary genius. 



I worry that this discourse of capitalist individualism is socially destructive, not supported by any evidence at all, and promotes a model which is simply not that of the economy at large. Most of us work for medium to large businesses, who have acquired all the advantages. Promoting dubious and unscientific therapeutic or pyschological development models is merely the latest version of the dodgy ads found in the Reader's Digest, and before that, at fairgrounds. These people are snake-oil salesmen. Universities should be critiquing these discourses, not inviting the salesmen in, giving them lots of money (especially when the library and staff numbers are being cut) and leaving our students at their mercy. Instead, my university and I suspect other places are queuing up to fund these secular scientologists. Even more worryingly, our pedagogical specialists are up to their flaky necks in the therapeutic education discourse, in which it's how you feel about things that matters, rather than what you know and how keen your critical faculties are. I think it's dangerous. My colleague is writing papers on this at the moment: I watch him tear his hair out as he traces these academics' references back to nothing more substantial than airport-bookshop management texts, Deepak Chopra-style vaguely spiritual woo and the occasional motivational speech. 

And yet we're still at it. We run a competition/course for students, the Unipreneur Challenge. It's run by a guy we'll call Barry Paul McCartney for legal reasons (the chap in question doesn't believe in joining the debate, he'd rather complain about me to my boss), who rents an office on campus. What does Barry do?

Occupation
Entrepreneur with a portfolio of projects and businesses

Tell me more, Barry. 

• I dream, create and do, inspired by and inspiring others

• I help develop entrepreneurship in entrepreneurs, educators and employees

• I wish for my children to reach out and touch the vibrancy of life and all it has to offer.

I'd quite like to get into dreaming, creating, doing and inspiring. What's the money like? What do you do every day? What are the core attributes required?

Skills

Creator, disruptor, doer 

Wow. A creator! Like God? What have you created, Barry? What have you disrupted? Because as far as I can see, capitalism seems to be bumbling along from crisis to crisis without any serious creating or disrupting on your part. What have you challenged, Barry?

Employment
HOT500
Co-Founder, 2012 - present
Create, deliver and engage colleges, universities and businesses with challenges to simulate [yes, you read that right] and focus entrepreneurial skills towards a given goal 

BizBritain Finance Ltd
Director, 2013 - present
Support young startup entrepreneurs with finance, mentoring and training. Delivery partner to Start Up Loans Company having access to £1.6 million in loans in 2013 

Wist Ltd
Entrepreneur, 2012 - present
Building a suite of tools to acquire information, decide strategy and perform actions. All online and able to be integrated into start-up and development activities for business support, enterprise education and financial brokerage 

i2R Entrepreneur Services
Entrepreneur, 2010 - 2011
Mentor and consultant to micro business owners to help develop more robust entrepreneurship and sustainable business models 

Parker Hannifin, Chomerics Division
European Sales Manager, 2000 - 2003
Led a direct and indirect sales force to build relationships, grow value and profit into the electronics industry 

Ideas 2 Reality
Director, 2006 - 2010
Developed ideas with business owners to increase readiness for finance, access routes to market and speed up operations

Um. This doesn't look very creative, disruptive or inspiring to me, Barry. It looks like you sold components for a while, and ran a lot of very short-lived companies specialising in selling rather flaky pseudo-scientific self-help strategies to people. You don't seem to employ many (any?) people and mainly sell your skills to one organisation: my university, which also provides you with office space in which you operate these various companies. 

In a sense, Barry is a classic entrepreneur. He's parlayed basically no skills or qualifications into a rather successful career selling platitudes to suckers. There's something very circular about entrepreneurs whose only activity is to promote the idea of entrepreneurship. It looks rather like pyramid sales. 

We provide an inclusive ecosystem of empowerment and holistic support.

I believe that passion, humour and purpose are all that's needed to make great things happen. 

Really? All you need is some positive emotion and determination? Not substantial skills? Knowledge? Capital? Contacts? Ideas? Infrastructure? 

As the proverb goes, 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me'. I am ashamed of my university for fostering this rubbish. We have a higher calling and a social duty to explore this stuff, not to propagate and promote it. As it is, we're subverting our educational and cultural duty to the local community by uncritically allowing our students to believe that this kind of discourse is legitimate. We know better: we have a School of Business (partly) devoted to critical examination of business structures, and yet we spend students' and taxpayers' money on Barry and his friends. We should be ashamed of ourselves. 

One Ferguson Down: One More To Go

I woke up this morning to to joyful news that Ferguson has resigned. Fantastic. Another victory for reason and progressive values.

Sadly, I was mistaken. They meant Sir Alex Ferguson, enormously successful footballing tyrant and manager of Manchester United, not Niall Ferguson, Transatlantic Bigot. Master of the hairdryer treatment, of Fergie Time (a new branch of physics), of mind games and of his players, many of whom have been treated ruthlessly when they evince the slightest interest in thinking for themselves. With Ferguson gone, surely Assad can't be far behind. But one man's retirement is another's opportunity. Tony Pulis of Stoke City must be in for a shout: he's uncompromising, rude, determined and enormously gritty. The episode in which he dashed out of a shower, naked, to head-butt his striker for complaining about a Christmas party must be considered a job application in Old Trafford. The only difference between Alex and Tony is, well, success.

But that's enough about one rich Scottish Ferguson with a healthy disregard for the rules of polite society. The other Scottish Ferguson with an attitude who requires defenestration in short order is of course Niall Ferguson the Harvard economist and rather slap-dash scholar. A few days ago, he claimed that John Maynard Keynes's economic models were flawed because JMK was homosexual, married a ballerina and being childless, had no long-term stake in society. And he's done it before: this is no off-the-cuff quip.

I don't know. These gay economists. Marrying our ballerinas and advocating counter-cyclical strategies to maintain capitalist stability. Better people than me have critiqued Ferguson's reactionary attitudes and terrible books, but this outburst annoyed me. Firstly: homosexuals have children sometimes. More frequently, homosexuals have nephews and nieces, friends and loved ones, all of whose well-being they may well consider to be a stake in society. I'm childless. Should my vote be removed, my opinions discarded?

Ferguson's logic leads to the repeal of universal suffrage. In Britain and many other countries, the vote was restricted to people owning property with a minimum value: clearly an attempt to disenfranchise the vast majority of the population, the argument was that the poor had no stake in society. As well as being childless, I don't own any property. I could up sticks and leave in a heartbeat, spreading subversive poison throughout the land.

Ferguson isn't an historian or an economist. He's a freelance ideologue who abuses his academic credentials to propagate a jaundiced, backwards world-view. If his supporters at the Daily Mail want to keep buying his books, fine. But Harvard shouldn't be dignifying this rubbish with an academic post.

Blue Monday?

Yesterday was far from being a Blue Monday, unless we're talking about the azure-coloured sky. I went to a wonderful place (the Weaver Hills and their environs), walked, saw countless larks and watched an enormous hare coolly leap a high wall topped with barbed wire.

But buying Hannah Peel's music-box covers of various songs including Blue Monday reminds me of a little hobby of mine: collecting Joy Division and New Order cover versions. So here are a few of my favourite Blue Mondays and a couple of others.

Here's the original:



Here's Hannah Peel's. The EP version is actually better: layered and lovely. But this is pretty good too.



I'll never tire of the Brythoniaid Cor Meibion's version, promoting last year's Festival Number 6. It's just magisterial.



As you probably deduced, I tend towards the melancholic: under the Detroit-influenced beats, much of New Order's work is downbeat and lost - the dichotomy is what makes them work. That said, here's Nouvelle Vague's Blue Monday, which I find insultingly clodhopping. This isn't a band in love with the material. Far too ironic.



Orgy, on the other hand, are heavy but perhaps too respectful:



Kylie Minogue's mashed up Can't Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head is a slice of cheeky genius though:



Also-rans: The Enemy should be ashamed. Chancers. Thankfully not online. I'm not sure how I feel yet about the Jolly Boys' calypso version either. And although I like elements, especially the viola, the Vitamin String Quartet's cover feels a bit like attention-seeking slumming. The Gregorian Chant version is execrable. Way too mannered (and this is from somebody who rejected everything about Catholicism except for the music) and frankly beneath them. The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Country Teasers versions are jolly thrashes, but not distinctive enough to detain us. You've got to do something different for a decent cover. Otherwise, what's the point?

Which is why I have a soft spot for these other New Order covers. First up, Boo Radleys' early shoegaze/thrash attempt at True Faith:



Then there's Frente's achingly beautiful 'Bizarre Love Triangle': the original buries the lyrics deep in the mix. Nouvelle Vague do a passable version too.



Then there's Rheinallt H Rowlands' gorgeous 'Gwawr Newydd yn Cilio', his  cover of Joy Division's 'New Dawn Fades'. I'm a huge fan of RHR. He covered several JD tracks: get them (legally) here, but don't believe a word of the biography.

Gwawr newydd yn cilio

Finally, some more stately misery. Firstly, June Tabor and Oysterband's rendition. I adore Tabor, but I'm not entirely convinced by this one. After that, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's sparse, echoing version: good with the lights off.

Another satisfied reader

This delightful missive came straight to my email yesterday!

From: Burst Ovary, bofetot@hotmail.com

Subject: A really important question 

Mm. Charming address. 

Is it true that your interest in fencing lies in the appeal of using a big rapier to make up for having a thimble dick?

Yes! Yes it is! Nobody's ever realised that before. Not even my therapist, whom you'd think would have got there years ago. Judging by the lexical choice, spelling and aggression, this is either a module evaluation or one of my American readers.

Concerning Lard of the Onion Rings (Speaking of food, I bet you get back at Hormel by eating out of the rubbish bin):

Was that colon going anywhere? Have I mentioned Tolkien or onion rings recently? Do you work for Hormel? Are rhetorical questions really annoying? 

Don't flatter yourself into thinking that your shithole has any value that can be tarnished by the author inhabiting it.

This is a bit confusing. I can't work out whether it's me or my environs which are being insulted more here.  

It would benefit the world greatly that the hobbles of butt pirates like you be paved over so that others can drive to better places with less congestion to slow them down.

 Hobbles? Butt pirates? I'm sensing hostility. 

Thanks Detective Dipwit for your knee-jerk work to
ensure that universities in the United Kingdom will be little more than a circle jerk of know it alls.

There's a certain sonority in 'knee-jerk work', but the repetition of 'jerk' subverts the polemical thrust of the accusation. The lack of hyphenation in 'circle jerk' and 'know it alls' implies that the author could do with a little time in the academic circle jerk himself.  

Because names along with addresses can be forged in subversive maneuvering but gay dog porn is more interesting than computer science.

 The logic here defeats me, I must confess. Though the existence of 'gay dog porn' (is that for or about homosexual canines or 1920s bachelor socialites?) is fascinating. As it happens, I have colleagues who work on pornography, whom I shall alert to this new genre. 

On a closing note, Monty Python is a poor excuse for comedy. Bless Tranny Gagger and Maggot Puking with seven years of suck. (That's Terry Gilliams and Michael Palin if your misfiring cerebral processor under that used carpet made of donkey's pubic hair.)

It's not really a closing note: there's another sentence coming. I must inform my close friends Terry and Mike of this challenge forthwith! The very next time we chat over the fence of our Hawaiian compounds. Also, I'm not sure that donkeys have pubic hair. Don't they just have an all-over covering?

Also it would help greatly to remove that flute up your ass given how that terrible facial expression in your portrait outweighs any charm that musical flatulence might have. 

You know, I have been suffering intestinal pain recently. A musical instrument may just explain the discomfort. But the reference to my portrait may indicate a case of mistaken identity: here's the picture accompanying Plashing Vole: he's in no pain whatsoever. 

So: my first troll. A disappointing experience, I feel. The direct email meant that nobody else got to enjoy it. The polemic was disjointed, the lexical choices limited and the underlying themes (anal insertion, homosexuality as a negative, cultural disagreements) banal. Mr (or Ms) Ovary really must try harder. Come on, Burst. Have another go!

Academic publishers – morons.

I spotted what looks like a good book the other day, Biressi and Nunn's Class and Contemporary British Culture. Excellent, I thought. That'll be great for our modules on British Cultural Experiences, Positions (on which I teach a strand about social class) and various other courses spread across English, Cultural Studies, History and Politics. I'll get an inspection copy to check whether it's suitable and hopefully buy several copies for the library.

Think again.

Inspection copies are meant to go to lecturers with a view to recommendation for student purchase. As this is a monograph currently priced at £50, this text would not be suitable and therefore an inspection copy is not applicable on this occasion

Insanity. Perhaps it didn't occur to them that charging £15 per copy might lead to lots of sales. Instead, academic publishers are relying on a very small number of very expensive sales to libraries. I've paid £55 for books quite frequently, and regularly see editions sold at £125, £150, £250 and even £600.

In an era of open scholarship and democracy, this is an insult. I feel sorry for the authors, whose work is destined to be read by a tiny number of people, and I feel sorry for a readership denied access to a fascinating subject. The publishers are lazy and greedy. They've got rid of indexers, editors, proof-readers, and now they can't be arsed to promote what they publish. I'm certain that this book would appeal to enough readers to be viable at £15-20, but that's too much effort. Perhaps they'll say that ther readership is so tiny that decent pricing is impossible: a) not with this title and b) perhaps you should consider your publication choices.

This kind of pricing is a tax on scholarship: without publishing a book, publicly-funded academics don't get REF points, promotion, professional respect, funding and so on, so we're forced to hide our work away when really we want everybody to read it. It's the opposite of what we should be doing.

Nigel Farage's Ham and Eggs.

I wake up this morning to discover that the BBC is hailing UKIP's 'surprise' showing in the local elections, as if there's no connection between Nigel Farage's 14 appearances on Question Time and seeming omnipresence on programmes from The Daily Politics to Peppa Pig. This, despite not having a single MP, unlike the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, the SDLP, Respect, the DUP and the UUP.

So today the media is in a frenzy. Who are these UKIP voters? Are they 'just' a protest vote? Will they disappear again? In response, various party hacks and commentators are replying in words of one syllable. Which isn't very helpful: as I say to my students constantly, everything is more complicated and therefore more interesting than it might appear. So here in no particular order and with absolutely no evidence or justification (my degrees are in English and Welsh literature), are my reckons on the UKIP phenomenon.

1. Electorates always look for simple answers, especially in hard times. This is why conservatism thrives to the extent it does: it specialises in reductive pandering. Look at Canadian PM Stephen Harper's quote of the week: now is not the time to 'commit sociology' he said, speaking of some iffy terrorist arrests. Similarly, the anti-climate science lobby world-wide specialises in reductiveness. We had a cold winter, they say. Where's your global warming now? They conjure up images of aloof 'boffins' engaged in some kind of plot against 'business' and 'hard-working families' (and they're usually funded by big business). This is the modus operandi of the Conservative Party of course, but they're at least slightly constrained by being in government. UKIP's entire manifesto is an appeal to the electorate's desire for 'straight answers' and 'common sense': any problem is the fault of 'bureaucrats', 'Brussels', immigrants or 'Bolsheviks'. Complication is the enemy.

This is of course the discourse of hegemony: by not addressing the complexities of any given situation, the status quo is reinforced. Take crime. There's considerable evidence that lead in petrol and other substances severely damaged brain function, and the decline in crime may be partially triggered by the ban on lead (note my left-wing qualifications there). But that's too complicated for the right. They need crime to be a threat, and sanctions to be morally clear. Hang them. Flog them. Bang them up. It's the only language they understand.

Right-wingers are Manichaean. They see the world in black and white, even if their leaders quietly have  a more nuanced view. (Farage is a millionaire currency trader, so clearly has more economic insight than he lets on). This is not new: hard times produce extreme parties - most famously the Nazis but there are plenty of movements more akin to UKIP. Weighing up complexity is hard and boring. Voters don't want to do it. Politicians don't want to do it. They want to pretend that there are simple causes and easy reasons. Who ever won an election with the slogan 'It's Complicated But We'll Do Our Best'? Which leads me to:

2. UKIP might easily be considered the Tea Party of the UK. It's loud, largely supported by older people (whom I suspect split between the Telegraph and the Daily Mail) and incoherent. Famously, the Tea Party calls for the abolition of federal government, while its pensioner supporters draw heavily on federal Medicare and Medicaid to cope with the depredations of private healthcare.

Someone who really doesn't understand where Medicare comes from

It's this refusal to engage with the economic and cultural aspects of life which mark them out as reactionary and as a protest party: imagine a UKIP government trying to decide on a Public Sector Borrowing Rate, or the acceptable level of atmospheric NO2.

All the parties are rushing for the simpleton vote, but UKIP is more explicit. However, they're not the first. There will always be a section of the electorate which yearns for immediate gratification and simplicity. Apart from the Tea Party, there was the Ham and Eggs movement in California, which started off demanding federal pensions, family values and hatred of bankers (shading, unfortunately like Britain's Independent Labour Party, into anti-semitism), and became a minor hard-right lynch mob whose leader was eventually arrested for pro-Nazism as the US became embroiled in WW2.

Ham and Eggs had 'all-girl bands', pep rallies, picnics, chants and songs, as well as a plausible and important original cause. They had a clear message and a sophisticated media strategy, flooding the airwaves with catchy slogans and the message that 'they' were out to get the little man. And just like UKIP, Ham and Eggs had prominent campaigners with shady and often criminal histories. (For more on Ham and Eggs, Starr's Endangered Dreams is an excellent history of California in the Great Depression.

Ham and Eggs weren't alone. We can also look at the Know-Nothing Party, active in the middle decades of the 19th century.

They were even more like UKIP: briefly the most prominent 'nativist' party, they held that America's problem was… immigrants. In particular, Catholic immigrants, especially German and Irish ones, as this Know-Nothing cartoon demonstrates.

Like Northern Ireland's unionists, they believed that Catholicism meant obedience to the Pope and anti-democratic values: these apparently progressive beliefs quickly legitimised racial hatred and reaction. Membership was only open to white Protestant males and most supporters were middle-class. So it was a party founded on reductive, racial stereotypes and an overwhelming sense of paranoia, that 'they' are coming to subvert some apparently core American values.

Just like UKIP appears to be doing, the Know-Nothings or American Party capitalised on the political exhaustion of the established parties and captured a swathe of territory in an upsurge of what we might call protest voting. Voters came from all parties, having rejected the lethargy of established politics in the face of the most pressing political issues: slavery (many Know-Nothings were opposed) and the scourge of alcohol. Yet – and I suspect this is a problem facing UKIP – movements which expand massively in a short space of time are liable to be vulnerable. As UKIP is finding, policy is hard to define off the cuff, while a radicalised membership may produce candidates with seriously extreme views and political histories.

Like UKIP, the Know-Nothing voters were often those of the lower middle class who view the political establishment with considerable suspicion (often rightly) but from the reactionary right. UKIPs voters are social conservatives, rather than radical neoliberal capitalists. Farage is a conundrum here: his fortune is derived from neoliberal capitalism, yet his entire manifesto is a cry of pain at the damage wreaked by it upon Britain and British culture - a contradiction also facing the Conservative Party over the past few decades. He likes a fag (Americans: this means cigarette), a drink, a visit to lap-dancing clubs: he's Jeremy Clarkson's idea of a Bloody Good Bloke, while at the same time being the product of global capitalism.

UKIP's answer is to pretend that there isn't any such contradiction, as is Cameron's. As such, it's insulting: they hope the members and voters don't make the connection between, say, mass unemployment and globalisation, or economic liberalisation and social liberalism or immigration. The only solution is to campaign solely on cultural issues and ignore economics: gay marriage and school curricula press the buttons of conservative voters whereas banking stability doesn't.

My last proto-UKIP is the Poujadist movement. They won't like this one: it's French. But Poujadism is the very essence of UKIPism, expressing the fears and suspicions not of the proletariat, but of the small business classes. Pierre Poujade led the insurrection of the single trader, the small town, the backwater, against the depredations of taxation, distant governments and Big Business. For a short time, his movement was huge, appealing to the classic sense that 'real France' was essentially a France of sleepy towns, community leaders and shopkeepers, all the things being swept away by Capital and modernity. Like UKIP, Poujade appealed to nostalgic reactionaries: ruralism at home and Empire abroad were being abandoned, and his constituency regretted these losses. Yet the Poujadists fell apart because they knew only what they didn't like: modernity. They had no programme other than the magic return to the simple life (the astonishingly stupid basis of almost all post-Independence Irish politics too).

The Know-Nothings fell apart over the issue of slavery in the approach to the Civil War: like any American Party with national aspirations, the cultural and economic divide between its Southern and Northern aspects was too great to bridge. Ham and Eggs were a one-issue party which collapsed in the face of other political issues. The Poujadists only opposed the modern world.

Will this happen to UKIP? My suspicion is that – like the BNP before it – the burden of responsibility will break it to some extent. BNP councillors were manifestly unprepared for the necessary drudgery of political work. Once you're in power, you can't blame unemptied bins, budgetary tensions and bus route problems on 'Europe' or 'immigrants'. Farage et al. appeal to the Golf Club constituency: those blow-hards who repeat Daily Mail nostrums over a stiff gin-and-tonic to other people like them without the slightest concern for other perspectives, classes and values ('stand to reason' is their slogan). UKIP's older, suaver, more middle-class appeal will continue to attract conservative voters through its populist, anti-elitist politics, and I do worry that it will operate as a ginger group, perpetually forcing the Conservative Party to tack even harder right and in the process shifting the entire political spectrum.

Personally, I don't get UKIP, but I'm not in their target demographic. I'm a metropolitan liberal. I think that the EU, for all its faults, has protected the British worker against the worst instincts of British governments, Labour and Tory: working time, health and safety, rights to organise, human rights etc. etc. Which is very sad.

I'm not nostalgic for empire (my Irish passport prevents that). I don't think that the British Empire – or any other empire – was a force for good. I like the complexities of modern life. For instance, I once asked a UKIP candidate why he wasn't a Welsh or Scottish nationalist. After all, he'd explained to me that super-states were wrong, that 'Brussels' was distant and uncaring about the fringes, that a federal currency couldn't take into account local economic needs. OK, I said. Isn't the UK a 'super-state'? A single language has been imposed. A single currency and interest rates which serve the needs of the City of London aren't suitable for Tredegar or Clydeside. The UK government didn't reflect the votes cast by Scotland or Wales. Nobody in Wales or Scotland voted for the Union. The response was a confused stutter which took in a weird amalgam of something called Britishness which seemed to be unquestionable, and promoted the Empire as the fruits of these combined nations. Oh, I said. So you do like some super-states, like the Empire? You just want to be in charge of one rather than participating in one. The conversation ended without further examination of the substantive issues.

UKIP's appeal is in telling simple narratives to a constituency which really believes in a selective view of the past. It harks back to empire, to social stability, to conservative truths. Its ideal world is suburban, white, heterosexual and suspicious of change. It provides simple causes to complicated problems. Europe. Immigration. Cosmopolitan gays. (For a vision of the UKIP nation and an exploration of the neoliberal/social conservative tensions in the Tories, I strongly recommend you read Julian Barnes' wonderful novel England, England). As such, it attracts not just Conservatives and BNP voters, but conservatives from all parties and classes. Don't forget that Labour has a large anti-European streak, though its roots are in socialist suspicion that the EU is a capitalist plot. Former Labour voters disillusioned with the party's other policies may not make the distinction between left Anti-Europeanism and UKIP's version, and working-class Labourism has always been socially conservative. There's a huge constituency out there which sees Westminster politics as elitist and disconnected: they want their atavistic beliefs represented, and UKIP is the ideal vehicle. Simply put, it's Top Gear friendly, the political wing of Littlejohn's You Couldn't Make It Up reactionary suspicion. However, I do think that the burden of office will expose them and their ideas quite quickly.

That said: what happens in the meantime? The Tories will try to recover UKIP's voters by fuelling xenophobia and other dangerous far-right instincts, despite the reservations of their globalist wing. Labour, I fear will do the same, as it has at every opportunity for 30 years. New Labour is particularly guilty of this. Having never met or come from the working classes, its policies clearly assumed that they were all closet racists who required appeasement, and I don't think this has changed much, though I do think Ed Miliband's a bit cleverer than this. Instead of trying to persuade voters to change, Labour repeatedly decided to pander. It's a failure of leadership and responsibility. Yes, many voters are concerned about immigration, Europe and so on: often because cynical newspapers and parties have seen these as easy buttons to press. But I happen to think that the British electorate largely isn't racist, isn't paranoid, isn't reactionary and is capable of sophisticated responses to social and political problems.

The only problem is: which party will dare to be the first to test this theory that voters are grown-ups?

Anyway, sorry for the long rant/lecture. I'm no more politically astute than anyone else, and of course everything I say is informed by my privileged position. But I thought you might be interested in the background and history.

Speaking ill of the dead

Over the past few weeks, right-wing newspapers have made it clear that anyone who so much as murmurs objections to St Margaret Thatcher's biography (kitten-lover, washed the feet of the poor every evening, sent every miner a postal order on their birthdays, always the last to leave St. Patrick's Day ceilidhs) is a damned traitor who should be hung in Trafalgar Square and is bloody rude too.

In my ongoing attempt to point out that political discourse in modern Britain is politer than in any previous period, here's an obituary:

The subject is King George IV, spendthrift, hypocrite and bigot. He was ridiculed in life and damned in death by all and sundry. I find it hard to imagine a mainstream newspaper being quite so pungent about any royal or politician these days… even Prince Andrew or Tony Blair. 

Despite building the magnificent Royal Pavilion in Brighton (which the racist English Defence League recently mistook for a Mosque.

the only way George is at all remembered is as a foppish moron in his years as Prince Regent, memorialised so gloriously by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third. 

Down at the PFA

Imagine the scene. Somewhere in a Surrey 'gated community' (we can discuss the contradictory nature of that phrase some other time). The house is littered with Xboxes, Bentley keys, modelling agency directories (some entries ticked off and marked with ungallant comments), diamond-encrusted watches, cufflinks and belt buckles, hair products and decorative women.

Welcome to the headquarters of the Professional Footballers' Association.

Seated at the table facing a conference phone are several aristocrats of the game: Luis Suarez, John Terry, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez and several other gentlemen of impeccable reputation. They are gathered together to address a disgraceful episode in the game's history.

The telephone is answered. A deep, graceful voice reverberates around the room.

'Good morning. Reginald D Hunter at your service. How may I help you?'
'Hola, Reg. Is Luis here. Luis Suarez. I've got John, Carlos and Wayne here too'
'Hey Luis! What can I do for you guys?
'Well, Reg, we're, well, a little bit upset about your act last night at the PFA dinner.
'Oh yeah? You folks objected to my gags about your taxes and failure to operate the channels in the final third of the game?'
'Not really, Mr Hunter. It's just that all those uses of the 'n-word' really offended me as a modern cosmopolitan role model. I know John here agrees with me 110%'.
'Facking right I do! You should have seen the expression on my Chevy when I heard that stuff. There's no place for filth like that in the modern game, me old China'.
'Yeah, an' all that language la' - bang out of order. Me mam and Colleen might have been watchin' We've gorra reputation to protect la' '.
'An Reg-in-ald. We are muy unhappy about your fee for last night. That much dinero for 45 minutes. We want the money back and the phone number of your agent. Comprende?
'Luis?'
'¿Si, Reg?
'Bite me'.

And with that, the phone goes dead.