Your daily reckon…

Hi everybody. Judging by the flood of complaints I'm not receiving, my reduced rate of blogging suits everybody just fine. The readerships stats imply that if I give up writing completely, my readership will expand exponentially. And yet I find the fortitude to carry on. Far better that I cast my Reckons on a sea of mute indifference than I expound them to my captive colleagues. What's that I hear? 'Just don't share your opinions with anyone in any format?' Preposterous!

What has mostly been detaining me today is teaching: several hours of Ben Jonson's Volpone (like Ben Johnson the athlete, Ben Jonson the playwright saw everybody as a cheat), followed by a long session on ethics and advertising. They worked very well: Volpone tries to 'gull' everyone, and so do advertisers. In fact there's a comic scene in which Volpone dresses up as Scoto the Mountebank to sell the gullible his cure-all Elixir. Most of them won't buy because they think he's a charlatan - but none of them realise that they've already fallen for his tricks.

I think the students came to enjoy Volpone. They found it hard to get into his frame of mind after studying Lear most recently, and the comic dialogue doesn't work too well on the page, but they rapidly got to grips with structure, allusion and the like. It's rare to have a seminar in which people interrupt each other, sadly, but today was one of them. The advertising session was good too - team teaching with a great colleague. The hours went far too quickly and it was harder to get the students to grasp the thematic and ethical concerns, but they're good at analysis.

The other thing that's kept me from blogging much is a severe shortage of opinions. By now, you could all pretty much construct my thoughts on anything from what I've written before. Newsnight, Savile, benefit cuts, Tories cheating in elections… you know how I feel. Need I make things explicit? Perhaps if the work ever slackens I'll widen the scope to provide ready-made opinions on a range of things. Like my friend Ben, who when challenged once had an opinion on the question 'sandstone or limestone'.

Anyway, I'm off fencing tonight for the first time in a couple of weeks, so that's bound to be painful and humiliating. Only two books in today: the Library of Wales edition of Dorothy Edwards' lost modernist masterpiece Rhapsody and Daniel Rodgers' provocative but interesting intellectual history Age of Fracture. It turns out that not only do I have four editions of Rhapsody, I already own this new edition, so if anyone wants it, say so in the comments box. First come, first served.

Welcome to the BBC wing of Opus Dei

Anyone else watch Newsnight last night? I certainly did. It's like visiting the deathbed of an ageing relative to whom you're theoretically attached but actually rather fed-up with. The viewing experience becomes like an episode of Miss Marple. Will there be a deathbed confession? Will we find out whodunnit? Or will there be another executive's body on the carpet by the time the show ends and I've turned over to something less morally troubling like South Park?

In the event, the show became less Poirot and more Witchfinder-General. After Eddie Mair's raging hints at suspension or cancellation last week, this week's editors (dead men walking, presumably) decided to take the Opus Dei route and self-flagellate before the mob of Tories and Murdoch employees turned up with pitchforks. Nowhere did I hear many facts: such as the inconvenient truth that Newsnight didn't name McAlpine, and the victim of the sexual abuse was misinformed by North Wales Police.

Instead, we got a decent amount of considered self-criticism followed by a shell-shocked public confession to all crimes barring murder on the Marie Celeste. Sure, Newsnight massively screwed up by not running the Savile film and making basic journalistic errors in the Bryn Estyn story, for which it should be severely reorganised, but let's not lose sight of the way the public narrative is trending. Conservative MPs and Murdoch papers have always hated the BBC. They think it's one of the last state-corporate institutions left and they want it dismembered to make way for fully-privatised media. And they think (wrongly) that the BBC is full of lefties. Excuse me if I just say Homes under the Hammer, Flog It, Escape to the Country, the Today programme as merely a few examples of cultural and political conservatism in action.

As it happens, I was discussing public service broadcasting with the students yesterday. After initially not seeing a problem with privatised media, they then began to understand what happens when licence-funded media and investigative journalism and abolished. Imagine the Sun being left to cover phone-hacking. Imagine any newspaper or TV station conducting consumer investigations into its own advertisers (this show about climate science is brought to you by Shell and British Airways). Imagine TV news being Fox vs MSNBC. Imagine children's TV without the Beeb: bought in dubbed toy adverts and nothing else. Who would make shows for the groups with little purchasing power: Welsh-speakers, the old, the very young, ethnic minorities? How would boring but important shows get made if they didn't attract advertisers, such as local news or discussion programmes?

Newsnight and the BBC need urgent surgery - but just look at the contorted faces of its enemies and ask yourself: who stands to gain from a shrunken, cowed BBC? The very same rich and powerful forces (politicians, police, corporations) who have made the UK a rotten, corrupt and bankrupt oligarchy. The £145 licence fee is quite a bargain when it keeps these forces at bay, however imperfectly.

Book news: there isn't much!

That must be one of the most exciting titles I've used here on Vole, and I've been going for some years now! But it's true: for two weeks I've read more books than I've bought. If I keep this up, I'll have run out of unread books some time in 2053, which is some months ahead of my actuarially-calculated shuffling off this mortal coil and all that jazz.

So what have I been reading and receiving. Well, I had the pleasure today of receiving John Rowlands' A Taste of Apples. It was originally published in 1965 as Ienctid Yw 'Mhechod (Youth is my Sin) and is notorious (well, in so far as any literary novel published in Welsh can be notorious given the tiny print runs) as the first novel featuring explicit sex to be published in Welsh.

It's not exactly a break from other Welsh traditions, however: it's a steamy tale of a Chapel minister's fall into lust and his spiritual battle:

The agony of decision – torn between the engulfing tides of temptation and the tormenting call of conscience… brutally physical… His agonising dilemma… is starkly and arrestingly portrayed… A Taste of Apples is an uncompromising and an outspoken novel, memorable for the sincerity with which it tells of one man's struggle between the flesh and the spirit.

I can almost see the washed-out tones of a 1970s TV adaptations, all forbidding expressions and sobbing. It sounds horribly like a Welsh Mills and Boon with added self-loathing. I think I'll enjoy it, actually.

I've also read and hugely enjoyed Dorothy L Sayers' 1935 campus crime novel Gaudy Night, which I bought in a lovely 'cheap edition' of 1949. It's full of lovely quotable bits which I'll bring to your attention soon, though it does take a curiously misogynistic turn: lesbian fear features heavily and Sayers is obsessed with using quotations and epigraphs to demonstrate that her novel is out of the ordinary run of the genre. Very refreshing to read 50-odd pages before a single line of male dialogue appears though - I can't think of many novels which do that.


I've just finished C. J. Sansom's Dominion, a variant on Fatherland in which a defeated Britain becomes a puppet state after making peace with Germany in 1940, before a chain of events lead to independence again in or around 1952. I like speculative fiction and alternative history, especially ones which consider the politics of the Celtic nations: Owen Sheers' Resistance was an interesting one, while Jan Morris's Our First Leader was witty and pointed simultaneously. Sansom's book is a very decent thriller, if rather too dependent on Harris's Fatherland, and packed with the most awful expository dialogue ('You remember, darling, that Churchill's son Randolph decided to work for the Germans and Lloyd George became Prime Minister don't you?" sort of thing) and lots of descriptions shoe-horned in ('in the mirror he saw himself, greying hair, neat suit, worried eyes etc') but the plot mostly works and Sansom's grasp of the political characters of the day is very good indeed. I tended to agree with all his guesses about which way Halifax, Ben Greene and others would go. I only disagreed with his presumption that Herbert Morrison (Peter Mandelson's grandfather) would join the puppet government. Authoritarian and right-wing though Morrison was, he was a fierce campaigner against fascism and non-inervention in the 1930s.

What ruined the book for me was Sansom's obsession with the Celtic nations. The novel contains multiple references to de Valera's Catholic Nationalist Republic and its openness to accommodating the Nazis. Fair enough, it was a rightwing, ultramontane-Catholic regime with little regard for urban and secular politics, but I found it hard to believe that the Irish characters - especially IRA veterans - would rather emigrate to a Nazi Britain. Allied to this is the repeated assumption that the Scottish Nationalists tend towards fascism, explicitly or unconsciously.

Now, this is a field I know something about, having been steeped in the study of interwar Celtic politics. It's absolutely true that the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists in this period were led by very authoritarian, often Catholic-authoritarian groups influenced by non-Nazi French fascists such as Action Française. It's also true that some nationalist fringe movements such as the Bretons were used as puppets during WW2. But Sansom's arguments are pretty evasive. Firstly: by objecting to de Valera's style of government, he avoids addressing the central issue of the Irish War of Independence: should Ireland have risen? The novel returns to the question of India frequently, eventually making Churchill reluctantly agree that a popular movement has made the reconquest of that subcontinent unwise and unfeasible. So there's a basic commitment to anti-colonialism there. So why is Sansom so evasive when it comes to Ireland? Yes, on the left we tend to believe - as the gay Scottish Communist character Ben (how many 'issues' can we pile on one character?) - that nationalism is a reactionary diversion from the class struggle, but we also tend to believe that colonies should be free. Was Ireland meant to wait until Britain decided it had no further use for John Bull's Other Island?

Secondly, although Sansom is absolutely right in his analysis of early Scottish and Welsh nationalist politics, he doesn't recognise the potential for arguing that an England which accepted Nazi rule might have alienated a Scotland that didn't. More rooted in the real world however is his explicit assumption that nationalism is always and irreversibly fascist. The Welsh nationalism of Saunders Lewis is not that of Plaid Cymru today: modern Welsh nationalism draws on the liberation movements of 1968 and is broadly socialist. Should Wales have accepted the death of their language through the hostility of a distant English state? The same can't be said of contemporary Scottish nationalism, but the intervening decades have brought about a left nationalism.

All this wouldn't matter very much if it wasn't for Sansom's multiple Afterwords, in which he makes it clear that the novel is primarily a vehicle for unionism, in particular attacking the SNP for being potential fascists in cultural nationalist clothing. I enjoyed the novel very much, even the bits where my interpretation differed from Sansom's, so it was galling to have the text's richness reduced to one particular line of argument. Furthermore, a good author doesn't need to spell things out so starkly. It implies a lack of faith in his own creative powers. I don't begrudge Sansom his unionist position (though my own views of unionism are coloured by Northern Ireland) but I do object to be lectured like this. It's patronising and belittling. It retrospectively rewrites a complex text as a simple path towards a specific end: persuading Scots to vote against independence. I have ethical qualms too: is this particular purpose sufficiently important to justify the use of the Holocaust, torture and all sorts of other horrors in the rhetorical pursuit? Perhaps for Sansom, it is, but I'm not convinced.

I'd recommend Dominion as an excellent realist alternative-history crime thriller but it's also a very clumsy piece of agit-prop. The narrator repeatedly critiques Ben the Communist for reducing his politics to a reality-defying fantasy and being a bit of a bore (though an understandable one given his suffering), but it's a trap into which our author sinks very deeply indeed.

Hair we grow again

I like Ben Goldacre and his friends. They call out bullshitters. I thought that the upswell of pro-science, anti-woo feeling would get rid of the most egregious charlatans. 

Apparently not. Just past the Observer fashion spread encouraging men to buy tracksuit tops (£395), tracksuit trousers (£195) and trainers (£390) so that we can all look unemployed, was this gem which attracted my eye because as the years progress, your Vole is looking more like a hairless rat every day. 

So. The 'iGrow'. What an appalling name, by the way. As though sticking 'i' in front of anything attracts the cachet of an Apple product. But let's delve further, shall we. 

'Laser' energy. Call me an English Lit graduate, but LASER = 'Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation'. It's a strong and focussed beam of light. I'm finding it very hard to believe that this product has a laser licence like my CD player. Given the use of lasers for hair removal, it's hard to accept that lasers will help hair regrow. And it seems that Laser Therapy is by and large bullshit. 

What about 'LED energy'. Well, LED = Light Emitting Diode. So the energy emitted is in fact 'light'. 

Perhaps it has been proven that strengthening hair follicles might lead to regrowth, but that looks like the only sustainable claim here. The rest is a cunninc mish-mash of conditionals: you can 'expect' (sounds promising) to see reduction in "the appearance of hair loss". Not hair loss, you understand. Just the appearance. 

Let's have a look at the website. There are bound to be academic references to the research there… aren't there?

Um… no. Apparently there are 'hundreds' of clinical trials of LLLT. It's just that they haven't the time to list or link to any of them. But a man in 1967 said that hair grows in the right light. Which explains why your chest hair isn't down to your ankles. Not enough light, you see. 

But what's this?

LLLT has been shown to stop the appearance of hair loss and help rejuvenate hair for anyone with genetic forms of hair loss, such as male/female pattern baldness. Those with significant hair loss due to disease or medical causes will not benefit from LLLT.

I see. So despite the hair loss being genetic, i.e. a fundamental part of your operating system, shining a laser and an LED lightbulb on to it will make it regrow. Whereas 'disease or medical causes' (whatever that means) won't. Mmmm… I smell bullshit. 

But we should always give these guys a fair chance. Let's see if there have been any clinical trials into LLLT and hair loss. Oooh: there was one! How did it go?

This study has been withdrawn prior to enrollment.

Oh dear. Northwestern decided to ponder whether women with breast cancer might regrow their hair after chemotherapy. They pulled the plug before testing it on anyone. Who knows why? Perhaps they gave everyone an iGrow and they all turned into Rapunzel. 

And the LED treatment? Well, four private dermatologists tested a HairMax Laser Comb on 110 men. Some of them had thicker hair. 

 significant improvements in overall hair regrowth were demonstrated in terms of patients' subjective assessment 

But wait. What's that magic word? 'Subjective'. So they thought their hair had grown back. Personally, I got up this morning and subjectively assessed my height at 6'3". Yet nobody's pointed out my trousers cuffs are flapping around my knees yet. 

Still, you can plug your iPod into the iGrow. And drown out the mockery. 

And it's goodnight from them…

Poor old Newsnight. They got hammered by everyone for not broadcasting a true story about Jimmy Savile. Then they got hammered for broadcasting an untrue story about Lord McAlpine.

Or rather, the Conservative Party and their Murdoch allies (the newspapers that didn't get the Savile story despite hacking every celebrity mobile in London) are trying to get Newsnight shut down when in fact it didn't name McAlpine. If anyone's guilty, it's the Heddlu Gogledd Cymru/North Wales Police, who apparently told Steve Messham that the man in the photo was Lord McAlpine when in fact it wasn't.

However, Newsnight is in deep trouble, and rightly so. I've crossed swords with it recently too: they interviewed an MP who'd written 'a report' on climate science, allowing him to rant and rave without ever mentioning that he's a director of an oil exploration company. There's been no reply to my formal complaint and I don't expect one now, given everything else that's gone on. But it is symptomatic of an editorial team which has lost sight of basic journalistic safeguards. They should have checked on the MP. They should have got a comment from McAlpine. They should have shown Messham a photo. They should have run the Savile film without regard for what the rest of the BBC is doing.

The show has been in trouble for ages. The leading presenters are trapped in a failed paradigm: talking heads and sarcasm may have worked once, but the politicians, PR spinners and assorted other publicity-hounds are well-versed in this kind of thing. Quizzical looks and sharp one-liners are no substitute for sustained, critical journalism. Paxman has long since stopped being the attack dog of the Third Estate and become a fully paid-up member of the establishment. The editorial side has been looking desperate for a while too: as an example watching the hugely impressive Paul Mason (perhaps the best journalist on TV at the moment) being forced (by his editor, he told me) to use teen hacker-speak to sex up a piece was nauseating. Then there's Allegra Stratton's monstrous and dishonest presentation of a hard-working teenage mother as some kind of parasite.

This is a programme that's lost its way: it doesn't know what's news, what's comment, and what's serious. It also, I suspect, doesn't know what its audience is or where a new generation will come from. It knows that the Westminster bubble is a turn-off but can't wean itself off the access and familiar formats. Mason is doing superb work with the Global South and the struggles of the bottom dogs, but the rest of the show is addicted to shots of Downing Street, head-to-head shouting matches and painful attempts at occasional levity.

However, we need Newsnight. Without it, BBC news becomes Huw Edwards putting on his furrowed brown for earthquakes and his grovelling face whenever a politician hoves into view. Sofa news, feel-good fluff and no more investigative journalism than you'd find on BBC3's celeb-driven drivel. It's news as wallpaper, as safety, as tame pussycat. The BBC is constantly under suspicion as the 'state' broadcaster, and it's true that plenty of its output may as well be government-approved: check out its use of 'efficiencies' when it means cuts and job losses - vocabulary from Tory HQ. But check out also the Daily Mail and the Sun, the BBC's biggest enemies. Did they get Savile? Did the Sun report the hacking story, or Leveson? Did the Mail  cover its editor's appearance at Leveson? Only briefly and in the most fawning terms. The Hillsborough cover-up wasn't revealed by the tabloids: the Sun participated in the demonisation of Liverpool fans.

The primary responsibility of the media is to enable the people to hold power to account. Newsnight has failed to do that, but nowhere near as completely as the popular press. This is why we need to defend Newsnight now. Look at the people circling round it: Tory MPs and the rightwing press. They hate the BBC and they hate being held to account. What they want is a cosy, neutered BBC which welcomes the powerful onto the sofa and asks them if they have anything they'd like to share with the nation. Yes, Newsnight and the BBC need a clear-out, and a cold hard re-appraisal of its standards and practices. But we'd be a poorer, weaker nation without a bold, independent hard news programme. Call it Newsnight or anything you like, but without it we're left with ducks on skateboards and Tory MPs demonising the poor/young/foreign without question, while Fox and Co fill the airwaves with poison.

Are all paedophiles conservatives?

'Here we go', you may be thinking. 'Old Voley finds a new and particularly tasteless way to attack the Tory Party, using the latest moral panic to make sectarian political points'.

And you'd be right, if I was drawing a straight line between the stuff floating around on the internet and  pictures like this:

Because it's obviously not true that all Conservatives or conservatives are paedophiles. 

But we can quite legitimately ask whether paedophilia is a conservative act. It all depends on your definition of conservatism. For me, a major element of conservative thought for the past few hundred years has been the preservation of oligarchic or elite rule. Take the former requirement that only property-holders could vote: the thinking was that only those who owned land had a significant stake in society and therefore a legitimate contribution to make to the governance of the country. Conservatism has always been about maintaining control of the levers of power against the evil or mindlessly destructive instincts of the Mob. This is what led Matthew Arnold, for instance, to promote mass education: without it, the Mob could never be tamed and trained. 

None of this is particularly controversial, I should add. Traditional conservatism's core belief is that an enlightened few know better than the masses what's good for them. There is another wing, free-market conservatism which holds that 'markets' make decisions in some abstract and theological way, and that all other social constraints should be abolished. It's obvious to me that the Conservative and Republican parties are essentially in a state of permanent tension with each other. Take the forests, for instance. A traditional Tory believes that forests are part of England's National Birthright or some such thing and need protecting. A Market Conservative believes that's all sentimental nonsense and forests are resources to be exploited. At some point they're going to clash. But what they agree on is that the needs and views of the masses are irrelevant. 

This leads me to my major point. In every major institutional paedophilia scandal, and in similar instances such as the rash of army recruit suicides at Deepcut, Hillsborough, Northern Ireland's state-run death squads, the Miners' Strike cover-up, the Birmingham Six fit-up and many more, the evil things done have been a consequence of the exercise of power. Bryn Estyn, the Welsh children's home used to supply children to untouchable local luminaries echoes the Kincora scandal, in which prominent Northern Irish politicians, the police and the British intelligence services covered up and perhaps participated in a paedophile ring. 

All these events share common DNA. They stem from the Conservative and conservative position that some people count and other people don't. The Deepcut recruits were at the bottom of a hierarchical system. The Hillsborough fans were Northerners, Scousers, plebs and hooligans in the eyes of the government and a police force which - as in Bryn Estyn - saw itself as a colonialist service defending authority against the subversive and primitive natives. Pat Finucane was a solicitor who defended terrorist suspects from all sides but when his activities came too close to exposing state involvement in murder, he was assassinated with the full knowledge of the security forces. Again: an individual's life and rights were subsidiary to the maintenance of a secret state. The same police force which fixed Hillsborough systematically faked evidence during the Miners' Strike because the miners were - in Margaret Thatcher's words - 'the enemy within': communities without rights in the zero-sum view. 

And so we come to Savile, Bryn Estyn and Kincora. Paedophilia is a crime of power. It assumes that some people have rights and others - the marginalised, the unwanted, the inarticulate - don't deserve consideration as individuals or as groups. The suffering of a child, or a miner, or a Northern Irish solicitor is irrelevant to the 'big picture'. Jimmy did a lot of work for charity. Some of Finucane's clients were terrorists. Scousers are lefty whingers. Kids in care are on the scrapheap anyway. The Deepcut teenagers were cannon-fodder. The poor and old Stoke population I saw on last night's heartbreaking episode of The Year The Town Hall Shrank are benefit-dependent shirkers. They don't get to share the 'rights' of ordinary decent folk, whoever they are. 

This is a conservative position. Some people matter, most people don't, especially the weak who lack the backbone to strike out, make something of themselves. If most people don't matter, they're fair game. They can be ignored, fired, written off, slandered, murdered or abused with relative impunity. They're both out of sight and out of mind. Consider the government's current mass removal of poor Londoners to distant Northern cities. It smacks of dehumanisation. To them, the poor don't have families, or social networks which constitute a community. They don't deserve them. They're just mouths to feed. But consider this: an unemployed teenage Londoner dumped in a hostile estate in Rochdale or Stoke is far more likely to get into trouble than one who can pop round to his grandmother's flat round the corner for a square meal and a chat. More importantly, that displaced teenager has a right to a family life just like the unemployed rich kid in Mayfair - but for the Conservatives he's just a pawn on a chessboard. 

This is why paedophilia is a conservative crime. It's activated by the refusal to recognise the victim's right to consideration as a discrete, feeling person. Like hunted foxes, their sensations are considered unconscious and irrelevant. Once a child, a group of people or even a whole class or race is dehumanised, they can be collectively or individually abused without compunction. 

I'll say it again. Not all Conservatives or conservatives are paedophiles. Most would be rightfully horrified at the idea. Some of the most monstrous conservatives have been members of other parties, such as Cyril Smith (another one admired while alive but whose obituaries accused him - probably correctly - as a child abuser). As a liberationist socialist, I would certainly put Stalinism in the same category: a tiny elite assumed that any atrocity could be committed on 'the people' in the name of 'the people' in pursuit of its own grip on power. But an ideology which consistently argues and acts in a way which implies that groups of people are inherently disposable is always going to be conducive to abusers and abuse. There is an unbroken continuum between Jimmy Savile's abuse of his position to destroy the lives of individual children and his friend Margaret Thatcher's abuse of her position to beggar and marginalise entire swathes of the population.  

Et tu, Trudeau?

Humph. One of Doonesbury's long-running character arcs is the decline of print journalism and the ongoing search for a viable alternative, personified by Rick Redfern. Once a crack investigative journalist, he's been 'liberated' from print media to become a freelance blogger, to his own disgust and the mockery of pretty much everybody else. It's a tale of deprofessionalisation, proletarianisation and the decline of the public sphere - and I speak as a person who blogs rather than writes professionally. We have a credibility gap for the very good reason that we lack the time and resources required for investigative journalism.

Doonesbury nails it in today's strip: you may need to click on it to enlarge.

Are You Happy Now?

I took the plunge yesterday back into the early 1990s by buying a ticket for a gig featuring Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Cud, The Frank and Walters, DJ'd by Steve Lamacq, the presiding genius of 90s Indie: he had enthusiasm, DMs with 501s and his own record label, Deceptive. It's like a time capsule of Indie before Britpop killed off everything that was loveable about the music scene.





I should confess that I had that very haircut for most of the 90s - when it wasn't a lot longer. Straight and jet-black. I was thin too, and squeezed myself into narrow black jeans, stripy hippy shirts and an old biker's jacket with Senseless Things painted on the back… Oh dear, this could turn into a very self-pitying blog post. Now I'm porky, receding and bitter. Such is life.

That was Ned's. Here's a great Cud track: 'Rich and Strange':



and some The Frank and Walters. I do love also-rans, especially ones who didn't get the breaks their music deserved. Can you imagine music TV letting these chaps within a million miles of a camera these days?





I remember distinctly when Britpop hit. It was summer 1993 and I was a waiter in a horrible family pub. The establishment possessed one cassette tape of muzak. One it were two decent songs, and if you timed it right, you could be clearing tables or wiping up vomit in the area with speakers every 80 minutes or so. It was like finding an oasis in a desert of bland, repetitive, dumb musical sand. Ironically, one of those songs was by Oasis, 'Cigarettes and Alcohol'; the other was Blur's 'Popscene'. I was smitten, at least for a while. However disappointing both bands quickly became, I'll be forever grateful for those moments of respite they gave me in the Wacky Warehouse. They were so direct, alive, snarling and vital compared to the rest of the stuff in the air. I bought 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' on cassette tape. It came in a mock fag packet. Class.

I should probably explain that I was from a pop-deprived family. My mum owns the sheet music for some Beatles songs. My dad had a U2 tape because he was at school with their manager, and a Dubliners tape. The rest of the time, we listened to appalling Irish radio, religious music and mainstream classical stuff. School was little better. One friend had REM's Automatic For The People, to which I was addicted. Another did me a tape of some minimalist classical stuff, a genre to which I still cleave, and one guy liked See See Rider. I also knew some Metallica from friends back at home. And that was it. My ears were opened by installing a massive 1950s cabinet stereo and secretly listening to John Peel at night, but I didn't actually possess any music because I couldn't record any and didn't get pocket money to purchase any.

So actually my musical education started with Britpop and NME, which became my bible at university, until the not-very-gentle scorn of the record shop staff turned me on to the Welsh-language stuff then appearing (SFA, Gorky's - lovely, lovely songs linked to there - and so on) and to the delights of indie label obsession and the proto-history of Britpop. One day I was buying Menswear 7" singles, the next I was raving about 4AD, Sarah Records, Fierce Panda, Ankst and Tystion. Eventually I realised that Britpop was a nasty capitalist tool which was all about replacing a genuine subculture with marketing, and became an Indie Archaeologist.

So I wasn't a Ned's Atomic Dustbin fan 'back in the day', nor a Cud fan, nor a Frank and Walters fan. I found my way there by swimming upstream, just as everybody else was raving about Parklife or 'What's the Story, Morning Glory?'. The gig will be odd: I won't be nostalgic but I will be appreciative of a musical movement which preferred integrity (and terrible band names) to ambition.

Obligatory election commentary

Excellent photo by Justin Sullivan

OK. My all-purpose Reckon on the election.

Overall result: generally good. Obama's electoral college numbers higher than I predicted, even though I erred on the side of optimism. I was surprised Wisconsin went Democrat - Republican V-P candidate Ryan is from there, and Scott Walker survived a recall vote after he smashed the unions, so I thought it would trend rightwards.

Also pleased that the various rape-friendly republicans (Akin, Mourdock etc) lost, and that more women, a lesbian and an Asian-American were elected. Bernie Sanders, who sometimes calls himself a socialist, won by 71% to 25% in Vermont. The Senate is up to 19 women… of 100 seats. Not exactly a revolution. Sadly Michele Bachmann, who claimed the Founding Fathers abolished slavery (clue: they all owned slaves) amongst other idiocies, was re-elected by 3000 votes.

Obama's weak version of healthcare survives, and he'll probably get to pick one or two Supreme Court judges. In a constitutionally-based political economy, this is in some ways as important as winning an election.

And now for the backlash: I'm getting mine in early.

Keeping Romney out was probably a good thing: he's a naked hyper-capitalist who would have tried to strip government down to total military dominance of the globe and little else. But that's about it. Obama is a symbolic candidate - in terms of identity politics, he makes the US look progressive. Perhaps some black kids will be inspired to follow a political path. But in political terms, he's a no-change conservative. He wants more black, gay, poor and female faces in the corridors of power, which is a good thing. But he wants this wider pool of people to carry on doing the same things, principally maintain a capitalist model which has manifestly failed the world's citizens (and not simply over the past 5 years), he wants to ignore the looming disaster of climate change, and he wants the American Hegemon to extend its global domination. Poor people around the world will continue to be paid less for making more consumer good for people like us. Pakistani weddings will still be illegally bombed by drones. Bond markets and hedge funds will continue to avoid tax, subvert sound economics and be bailed out by taxpayers. Americans will continue to drive gas-guzzlers, suck in oil-shale, run the A/C and shoot each other in massive numbers. Israel will continue to run open-air concentration camps for Palestinians.

Still, we'll all feel better knowing that presiding over all this is someone young and cool. I'm genuinely pleased that nasty old racists like Bill O'Reilly, homophobes and rape apologists are pissed off. But when we all go home, the US and hence the world will still be run by and for a tiny clique of obscenely rich people for their own benefit. Some of them may not fit the WASP demographic, but they're still quite literally in a class of their own.

Another of my favourite moments from the campaign. A real Freudian slip

Politics: ugly business for show people

Politics, it used to be said, is showbusiness for ugly people. You get to hold forth at length in Parliament, on TV and in the local and national press about whatever it is buzzes around your bonnet. With Lembit Opik, famously, it was asteroid strikes. Until he ended up dating a Cheeky Girl (ask your parents, kids) and losing his seat and whatever shreds of dignity remained to him. He tried stand-up, music and most recently, professional wrestling. It didn't go well.

What didn't often happen was a transfer between politics and showbusiness. There was a sense that politics was largely a serious business undertaken out of duty to improve the lot of your fellows. It was often the culmination of a lifetime's work: as a union activist, as an entrepreneur, diplomat or teacher. it wasn't a stepping stone to greater things.

Until the advent of Tony Blair. Entering politics as a young man and unencumbered with any serious ideology, he parlayed the ability to persuade people of his sincerity into a long stretch as PM and now a life of plutocratic luxury doing something mysterious which persuades merchant banks and foreign governments into giving him millions of pounds. His example spread stardust around the houses of parliament like dandruff from a celebrity's collar. Ann Widdecombe, previously famous for insisting that prisoners giving birth should be chained to the bed, turned up on an amateur dancing programme. Still an MP, she combines being dragged round a dancefloor with announcing that gay people can just think themselves straight, amongst other nonsensical opinions. The Speaker's wife appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. Louise Mensch dabbled in politics just long enough to snag a column in the Murdoch press and leave for New York, away from all those constituents whinging about their terrible lives. Worst of all, Lord Drayton resigned from his job as Minister for Defence Acquisitions to pursue a career as… a racing driver. Meanwhile, the MoD spent £30bn it didn't have on 'defence acquisitions' that don't work. This is politics as a hobby - no sense of public service at all.

And now we've reached a new low. Serial self-publicist and reactionary Nadine Dorries has announced that she's joining I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here - not after her political career is over, but during it. Despite being paid £65,000 to represent her constituents, she's off to Australia for a game show. Presumably the Tory whips' office have agreed to this because she's such an embarrassment, but that just deepens the sense that politics is a springboard to a media career or fame and fortune. These people are cynics and dilettantes… which goes some way to explaining why our public sphere is rotten to the core. The only people who'll stick around are the lunatic fringe and the lobbyists.

Contagion…

Good afternoon, pop-pickers. Apologies for the sporadic and slightly grumpy nature of my blogging at the moment - the Dreaded Manflu continues. I'm rarely ill and usually work through any minor ailments, but mortality is making itself felt. I've obviously got cholera or consumption or pleurisy: the only way to stop coughing last night was to sit in bed bolt upright. Obviously that meant no sleep, so I had an uninterrupted night of listening to the town's legion of drunks beat up each other and kick in windows in the disused restaurant underneath Vole Towers. Living in The Dark Place is enough to turn one into a misanthrope: being ill and witnessing the nocturnal cavortings of its denizens is enough to drive even a shy and retiring rodent to Bickle-esque fantasies.

However, I resisted emptying the contents of my kettle, bladder or chip pan over their monstrous heads, contenting myself with cursing them, their parents and their parents' parents. Then I came to work and tried to persuade the five students who attended my guest lecture on a colleague's module that de Certeau, Lefebvre, the psychogeographers, Anna Minton and Augé are fascinating even if their insights into urbanisation are modulated through the strangled tones of yours truly. Still, it gave me the opportunity to thoroughly humiliate Paul Uppal MP in an academic arena: we examined a speech he gave in which the terms 'shopper' and 'consumer' entirely replaced 'citizen' in his narrow-minded, reductive and socially-reductive mental landscape. It made me feel better, anyway.

As for the rest of the day, I need to finish my lecture on Ben Jonson's Volpone (there's a nice segue: from a selfish, deluded Tory to a play about grasping, deluded plutocrats) before staggering back to my hovel. I'd love to stay up all night watching the American election but I'm not up to it. However, I'll give you a sneak preview of the result: militarised hyper-capitalism wins.

Vole's election night ticker

With thanks to the Texas Tribune, keep up with the count right here!

My call: I think that Obama will win it with a fair margin of electoral college votes - into the 280s or 290s. Most of the marginal states will go for him by a narrow percentage, with the exception of Florida and possibly Wisconsin (but then Wisconsinites are Cheeseheads - ironic given the appalling quality of American cheeses).



Last election night was excellent all round. I went to see Sigur Ros playing locally and met a load of my Dutch students, who invited me back for an election night party. I seem to remember taking a shot every time a district went for Obama. I don't remember much else, other than my better nature reminding me that he's a conservative by non-American standards, and not to expect too much. As John Major said, 'fine words butter no parsnips'. Very clever man.

This election night will be a lot different: I've two lectures to give the next morning and still a bad cold. Plus the emotional weight of four years of climate change denial, drone attacks, bank-loving and rightwing economics. Still, Romney would be worse and that's the choice.

Guantanamo? Novice stuff

I often wonder why I still read the Guardian. It's so timid and bound-up in the concerns of a self-regarding soi-disant liberal elite whose concerns are far removed from the actual struggles of the left and the non-metropolitan classes. Perhaps it's because I'd like to spend my life agonising over my second home, school-fees guilt and the origins of my artisan cheese rather than doing admin, cleaning vomit off my doorstep and keeping students awake after they've done a factory night shift.

But sometimes the good old Guardian makes me laugh. In particular, I loved Philip Hensher's review of monstrous art critic Brian Sewell's autobiography. In it, we learn that Sewell harboured his old tutor Sir Anthony Blunt, who was unmasked as a KGB spy. Now, being a syndicalist communist and the bearer of an Irish passport, I'm not that concerned about nationalistic patriotism nor the Cold War. But I can understand why the British Establishment was less than impressed by Blunt and by Sewell's behaviour, just as I can understand why the USSR would be unhappy about the activities of traitors in their ranks. Blunt told the KGB about spies in the USSR, and some of them were killed.

Sewell suffered the full weight of the Establishment's wrath. OK, he didn't go to prison. Nor was he ever arrested. Or fired. Or tortured. Or sent to an offshore secret prison. Nor did any of these things happen to Sir Anthony. But he and Blunt were treated, says Hensher, in a 'brutal' fashion.

not just Blunt, but Sewell too was stripped of his library privileges at the Courtauld. 

Oh! The inhumanity! To lose your library card! I'm sure there's something in the Geneva Conventions about this kind of viciousness.

For feck's sake.

Cough Splutter Groan

Hi everyone. I've got man-flu: it's like the 'flu that women get only much, much more subjective painful. The nadir was lying awake last night, alternately coughing and trying not to vomit with each heave, tears streaming down my ravaged face as folk memories of the 1918 epidemic raced through my frazzled brain.

However, there's no time for illness. Saturday night saw me being cultured and ill, trying not to cough all the way through Sibelius, Grieg's Piano Concerto (played by Leonskaja) and Rachmaninov's tricky First Symphony. The Sibelius Karelia Suite and Grieg are very familiar - even if you're not a classical music fan you'll have heard them:





In my case, the opening of the Grieg was accompanied delightfully by the 5-something couple behind me. Arriving late, they proceeded to argue in a passive-aggressive fashion about whose fault that was, before the know-all man explained to his paramour that he'd 'researched' the music on Youtube, before holding forth with all the expertise I can deploy on subjects such as string theory.

A few death-stares later, they subsided into dumb, ox-like passivity, before delighting us at the start of the Rachmaninov with a brief resumé of their love lives. She had endured a long, unhappy marriage primarily contracted for tax reasons. Her friend's considered view of this was that the husband's Jewishness was the root cause of the nuptial failure. He then confessed that he'd been honest with himself during a dark night of the soul and come to the realisation that he was too selfish for marriage. Based on how he behaved in a concert hall, I'd have to say he was right in this regard, though not in any of the things he had to say about the music.

After the familiar pleasures of the Sibelius and Grieg, the Rachmaninov was a fascinating triumph. Its first performance was a disaster: the conductor was drunk, the orchestra useless and the reviewers merciless. Rachmaninov abandoned composing for several years until therapy fixed him up, going on to ever greater heights. He withdrew the First Symphony from shame, only quoting it subtly in one of his final pieces. It only reappeared when the orchestral parts were found in the ruins of Leningrad and has gradually become admired. It's long, loud, tricky, passionate and unhappy: really easy to see how a conductor or orchestra could wreck it. But it's brilliant.



After that triumph, I went home and spent the night coughing like a miner, then went to the Shropshire Closed fencing competition the next day, like an idiot. On looking at the entry, I predicted 3rd place, and lo! it came to pass. Luck got me top seeding after the first poule, plus a badly pulled thigh muscle. Luck again got me past my friend John Paul: despite being massively better than me, he gets stressed, he had a broken toe, and had to fight a very annoying child to get through to fight me. 15-4 to me, plus fingers dripping with blood after JP smashed his guard into them. Then - damn it - I meet my friend Alec in the semi-final, purely through the luck of the draw. I'd hoped to lose to him in the final, but no. Despite being only just out of bed after his 18th birthday party, his ridiculous speed and array of clever moods sorted me out good and proper. Odd really: he's an epeeist and I'm a foilist, but he usually beats me at foil and I usually beat him at epee.

And so home - bloody, bruised and limping, but clutching a bronze medal. And another night of consumptive coughing. At least the World Service was there to get me through the night. As for this week: all my usual lectures plus two extra 3-hour ones as favours to colleagues, and the American election to stay up for too…

Gone to Pot?

Good afternoon everybody. Following yesterday' rather self-pitying post (which I'm ascribing to the stinking cold I'm trying to fight off rather than Bruno's accusation of a 'mid-life crisis'), I'm back and raring to go once more.

Mostly because I watched last night's BBC4 documentary about Stoke-on-Trent. The first in a three-part series, it tracked the city council's leaders, cutback protesters and the victims of cuts as horrible decisions were made. It was utterly heartbreaking. The leader of the council came across as a fundamentally decent man whose response to the terrible job thrust upon him was to isolate himself from realities on the ground: bullied into a 5 minute visit to a care home hours before he voted to close it, you could tell that he'd rather be staring at a spreadsheet. His paid CEO was a snide, overpaid hatchet man whose protestations of woe belied a fundamental impatience with democracy… though the councillors' fixations with upcoming elections didn't make them feel too good.

There were some wonderful things about this documentary. The editing, composition and photography were first-class: filming confused residents' listening to a radio broadcast of the news that their home was to be closed was a master-stroke. In fact, a motif of the film was corridors: old people shuffling slowly down bare, institutional corridors, then cutting to the ornate council buildings to follow politicians and unelected officers striding down grand corridors, occasionally blocked by card-access doors really brought home the distance between the rulers and the ruled. It was wonderful, too, to hear so many Stoke accents for a sustained period of time - I suspect that if you've never heard Garth Crooks on Match of the Day, then you've never heard it because Stoke's a sad black hole where a proud culture once stood.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on the local politicians. Stoke is a victim of bad national government and global capitalism, plus the vindictiveness of a Tory state which openly despises the poor and the northern: one telling scene saw the council leader reading out the local government cuts (designed to bail out the bankers on whom we lavish more pity than we do for the old, sick, young and hungry): 1% or so for Wiltshire, Somerset and other white, Conservative-voting areas, 8% for poor old Stoke.

Stoke was until the 90s a 100% Labour city, which led to the kind of endemic corruption, laziness and inertia which happens in any one-party state - and I say this as a member of the Labour Party. Added to this, the winds of economic change overthrew the city and nobody had a coherent solution. The pillars of the economy were nationalised coal and steel, and the potteries: mass male labour and (in the potteries) mass and often skilled female labour. Unions were strong and the city had a proud civic culture of the kind which can only exist when the working and middle classes are independent and strong.

All this has gone. The coal and steel industries completely failed to modernise, and privatisation killed them off. Globalised capitalism did for most of the potteries: owners preferred to ship the factories off to near-slave wage economies to bolster their profits rather than modernise their home production. Skilled workers were laid of in the tens of thousands and the potteries still closed: consumers wanted the prestige of pots made in Stoke, not merely branded with historic names. Some pottery remains: high-end stuff and some volume production, so it's not impossible. It's just that the shareholders aren't interested for the most part. Some skills remain: oatcake manufacture, and apparently Stoke boasts a distinctive class of burglars who specialise in ceramics - they can break in, value your china and get out before David Dickinson can get a smarmy smirk onto his leathery face. Into the void came the BNP, adept at turning what should be class-warfare into resentful racial conflict, and a sense of political, cultural and economic exhaustion

One of the points made in the documentary was that Stoke Council is now the city's largest employer. I'd guess that the NHS is next - there are numerous massive hospitals and the inhabitants drink, smoke and eat chips with their oatcakes while waiting to die from a coal- or clay-related respiratory death. In fact, I'm not too bothered about this fact: it's Keynesian economics. The gap in the labour market hasn't been filled by the private sector because it's not interested, despite the city's many geographical and economic advantages, and so government has stepped in. It's not ideal, but it's a temporary solution.

Stoke's the emblem of capitalism and its failure. Under the Conservatives and New Labour, politicians coldly decided to abandon the working and unworking poor. Their old employment was gone - to Japan, then to China or wherever. There were too many of them to help. Instead, some of them would be found insecure, low-paid working cleaning offices, serving coffee or polishing nails. The rest would subsist on benefits if they behaved, paid for by whatever bones the financial services sector deigned to toss down from the table. Then it turned out that the banks and transnational corporations were incompetent, dishonest liars who not only were intent on minimising any taxation (while relying on governments for infrastructure, healthcare, education and so on), but were actually secret socialists all along: when the crash came, they decided that they needed benefits more than the poor old population. No more tax receipts from corporations, no homegrown industry to fill the gap.

So here we are. One of the chilling scenes of the documentary was the council meeting in which the £36m budget cut was passed. Wizened, lined faces of heavyset men and women loomed at the camera as they voted for the city's doom. A couple of Tories seemed almost jubilant, but the general air was depression and defeatism. The spirit of the 1930s, when millions of people often led by their councillors  resisted and protested was nowhere to be seen. Either the council did what it was told or central government suspended local democracy. This is one of the most pernicious aspects of our current government: the worst cuts are channelled through the councils because they're mostly Labour, and so the blame is shifted from the Tories and the Lib Dems to another tier.

Can Stoke, and places like Stoke, be saved, or are they the collateral damage of global restructuring? I think they can… though if I had a complete answer, I'd be in charge, and not just of Stoke. Certainly I'd block the TNC's from generating paper losses by sending cash overseas untaxed. I'd cut taxes on locally-produced goods and I'd bring in a massive swathe of environmental legislation which would boost employment massively. For instance: upgrading every window in the country to triple-glazing like Germany. Manufacturing, installation… huge employment opportunity, and the mass scale would keep costs down. Solar panels on every roof. New train and tram lines. A huge expansion of education. Taxes on pollution and pointless financial transactions. And that's before I get on to the mass nationalisation programme…

Ah, the dictatorial juices are flowing in my veins now.

'…mend your speech a little, lest it may mar your fortunes''

I was thinking just now about why my blogging output has declined in recent months. There have been peaks and troughs before of course, matching my moods or my activity. Sometimes I bore myself, and resolve not to bore you into the bargain. At other times I'm simply too busy, or my head's too full of things I guess you lot wouldn't be that interested in. On the rare occasions I find time to do some research, it's in a field which is too small even to form much of a community, let alone a readership. Perhaps, too, Twitter has soaked up too many of the passing thoughts that might once have formed the kernel of a Blogging Disquisition. And there's only so much Uppal-baiting a vole can manage before anomie sets in.

But one thing I don't think I've done is fall for King Lear's line here. Cordelia listens to her sisters construct beautiful flights of dishonest rhetoric when their father asks them to enunciate their love for him in return for large tracts of his kingdom. Realising - hundreds of years before the structuralists and post-structuralists that language is a bar to communication rather than a tool - Shakespeare has her reply that she can say 'nothing', to Lear's horror: for him, love and words of love are transactional.

It's a good lesson. I shouldn't blog simply because the performance of blogging is important to me. 'I blog, therefore I am' is a fast route to becoming a bloviating bore, a disease widely known in the old media as Clarksonia Majora. In fact, I've found myself blogging less because my opinions are becoming calmer and rarer. Perhaps it's because I'm happy (happier) at work: the top level of management is no longer hostile to the values the teaching staff hold dear. There's a new sense that though we still have all sorts of problems, management and staff perceive them in similar ways. The office of the Vice-Chancellor is no longer occupied by an Emmanuel Goldstein. In short, I have been defanged: firstly by the fear of persecution under the old regime and now by kindness under the new one. It's weird not existing in a state of mutual antipathy - at least then we all knew where we stood. I bumped into the VC in the canteen the other day: not something that would ever happen under the old regime. He asked me if my employment status had been resolved. Formerly, that would have been a veiled threat (who's been reading dossiers then?), but these days it's at least possible that it indicates attention to detail and actual human interest. I can't deal with it! At this rate I'll have to hand in my Impossibilist membership card and take the walk of shame towards my very own Executive office. Oh god… the Syndicalists were right.

Even when writing about the wider world, I'm flagging. It's hard work remaining this angry about the government and its individual sleazebags: there are so many of them and there's no chance they'll ever repent. It's even harder to retain readers and communicate the righteous zeal for reform I feel when the same sickening ills repeat themselves day after day: after four years of blogging, I feel I'm becoming repetitive and monotonous. Just like my lectures… I've certainly become aware of a certain nagging predictability in my writing. Reading Simmonds' comic strip about the Weber family, I'm conscious that I've become a stock character: the frustrated bourgeois lefty Guardian reader adrift in a sea of consumerism and aggression when I'm fairly sure that there is (or used to be) more to me than that.

Perhaps blogging's a young person's game.

Anyway, enough of this moaning. What consumer goods have temporarily distracted me from the existential gloom this week? Well, I've received Phillip Pullman's new versions of Grimm Tales, C. J Sansom's Dominion. I'm vaguely planning a paper on invasion novels and the Celtic nations - see also Sheers' Resistance and Jan Morris's wonderful Our First Leader because the intersection of Celtic nationalism and imperialist German and British nationalism is always interesting: Sansom sees the Scottish Nationalists as homegrown Nazis, while the founders of Plaid Cymru were certainly close to the ultra-reactionary Catholic blood-and-soil French fascists, though the party is now a post-1968 socialist anti-colonialist body these days. Sheers' book is interesting because its tale of Welsh farmers quietly disappearing into the hills to resist echoes Owain Glyndwr's revolt: he too survived to disappear into the population and was never heard of again.

I also got Kevin Jackson's day-by-day history of modernism, Constellations of Genius, which Zoot Horn informs me is seriously good. I've been listening to the alienated machine noise of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (the ! changes place with every album release) and I've been hard at work on a lecture about Ben Jonson's Volpone.

I'm resistant to the usual blatherings about dumbing down, but looking at my old student notes, I can't work out how we managed to cover Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, Dekker, Haywood, Chapman, Wycherley, Tourneur, Kyd, Middleton, Marlowe, Webster and a whole load of other playwrights in the Drama stream, while going into similar breadth in all the other genres. Weeks of lectures about the Edinburgh Review, Steele and Addison! Now I'm teaching a module called Shakespeare, Milton and the English Renaissance: it's thoughtful and detailed, and yet we seem to cover so few texts. We haven't dumbed down, but the space seems to be shrinking. Still, one of the things I'm really determined to do is set Shakespeare's work in a literary and cultural context, rather than leaving him on a pedestal - which is why we've discussed the 'happy ending' versions more commonly performed in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example. At least a blast of Jonson will help them understand that there's more to the Jacobean stage than Shakespeare.

Anyway, back to my lecture-writing…

And When Did You Last See Your… Tutor?

I don't know if you're familiar with this painting, WF Yeames' 'And When Did You Last See Your Father?'. It's a Victorian bit of Royalist propaganda: the lad is being asked to inform on his Cavalier father by the Puritan Roundheads.

It's been parodied many times, but one particular version caught my eye this week. I'm reading the complete volume of Posy Simmonds' Weber Family cartoons, a long-running strip from the Guardian in the late 70s and 1980s. George Weber is a nervous and underachieving sociology lecturer in a polytechnic, and the paterfamilias of a large, largely happy but disparate family. He and his wife are 60s idealists struggling to retain their pride and principles in the face of 1980s horrors: greed, consumerism, selfishness, racism, conservatism (actually, the previous four words cover the Tory Party quite well on their own). They are, essentially, comic versions of me: liberal, tired and depressed by the revolting state of the world. Without being cutting edge or violently offensive, these beautifully-drawn and written strips have captivated me this week. 

In particular, here's Simmonds' parody of the painting above, entitled 'And When Did You Last See Your Tutor?' (click to enlarge). 

Given that here at The Hegemon we're having a massive crackdown on attendance by proving to the students that coming to class and talking to us will actually improve their lives, it really struck a chord. BUT - only if you don't examine it too closely. The red-faced chap is the appalling lecherous tutor who's worried that our heroine will tell them that she saw her tutor quite recently. This morning, in fact. In bed. 

That kind of thing doesn't happen here. But if you ignore the plot, it's an amusing bit of academic humour. 

Intruding on private grief…

My usual two hours of shouting abuse at the radio edition of the Daily Mail (a.k.a the Today programme) reached a peak this morning when the producers decided that Disney's purchase of Lucasfilms and decision to flog a horse so dead that its carcass forms the major ingredient of tinned dog food by promising an endless succession of lazy Star Wars sequels merited more coverage than the Coalition's determination to replace our planet-destroying arsenal of nuclear weapons with even bigger nuclear weapons. You know, the nuclear weapons that kept us out of all wars since 1945. As long as you don't count Northern Ireland. Or Suez. Or the decolonisation wars. Or the Malvinas/Falklands conflict. And the Gulf War. And Gulf War 2. Oh, and Afghanistan. Plus the bombing of Libya.

But that's beside the point. I could understand if the Disney takeover merited a mention in the business news headlines, but there's no way that a faded commodity deserves the attention it's getting. I would propose that Disney is the Empire, except that George Lucas's cynical outfit hardly fits the role of heroic upstarts, unless you think doing violence to people's childhood memories in exchange for billions of dollars is a subversive act.

I should admit from the start however that I have not a scintilla of emotional attachment to Star Wars. Unlike most of my friends, I'd never heard of it until I went to university. I guess school chums must have had the toys but I don't recall any discussion of them. My first proper exposure to Star Wars was accompanying friends to a cinema in Rhyl (quite painful enough) in the depths of a freezing winter to sit in a smell cinema and endure the first of the 'prequel' movies. I was bored beyond tears and found the graphics reminiscent of Civilization II, the computer game which filled my supposed study time. Even without being familiar with the original movies, I could tell that this was jaded hack work and as we emerged from the foetid swamp of late adolescent bodies, my friends had the look of veterans who'd seen their comrades die in the trenches for nothing. Their childhoods had been sullied, their faith in Hollywood destroyed. Mine not so much - my parents virtually never took us to the cinema. We queued for ET until my dad got bored, so I only saw that in chunks if I happened to catch it on TV. Cinema was somewhere I went on other people's birthday treats. Particularly horrific are my memories of Howard the Duck - awful, but notable for the first topless scene I'd ever witnessed, albeit a topless duck - and whatever that Michael Jackson film was called. Moon-something?

I should confess too that I'm a (critical) Star Trek fan, particularly of the original series. It's essentially a liberal (though not reliably so) retelling of the exploration of the American West with a side-salad of Cold War politics: early episodes of the show explicitly supported the Vietnam War, while later ones became anti-imperialist. Until we got to the execrably Next Generation, Liberal Interventionism In Space with a slathering of New Age bullshit in the shape of Ship's Counsellors and all that bullshit. It's not enough to Explore: you've got to Emote. Christ. For me, the original Star Trek used familiar plots to explore current political and social concerns in interesting ways. I'd also like to draw the jury's attention to my enjoyment of Space: 1999, a surprisingly gritty European SF drama, to the camp pleasures of Buck Rogers, and above all to the original Battlestar Galactica, which depending on who you're listening to, is either Wagon Train in space, or Virgil's Aeneid in space, which is both ambitious and impressive. I haven't seen the 'rebooted' Battlestar, but I gather that it has 'boldly gone' into the realms of political commentary - especially about the Iraq war - which is exactly what good science fiction does.

Since that awful day in Rhyl, I've caught most of the major scenes of the original films, though I've not seen a single cel of the other prequels, nor would I ever want to. Star Wars: A New Hope dramatised exactly Walter Benjamin's theory of the reproducibility of art in the mechanical age, and Jean Baudrillard's concept of multiple-order simulation. The 'original' Star Wars re-enacted the American myths of the war of independence as a way to recoup that nation's fantasy that it is the eternal underdog battling for truth, justice and freedom ('the American Way'). The Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Watergate saga, plus the United States' enthusiastic support for every fascist state in South America, Africa and Asia were making a few Americans wonder about whether they'd lost their way after 200 years.  In fact, some of them felt a bit like this:



So Star Wars isn't, for me, a joyful celebration of America's natural rebellion: it's a deeply conservative appropriation of liberal values for the purpose of making an Empire feel better about itself. The real rebels - and perhaps you could read Star Wars in its context like this - are the North Vietnamese.

So Disney's plans to treat Star Wars as yet another commodity to be ground at is both unsurprising and not particularly interesting. In Baudrillardian terms, each film is a more faded photocopy of the original, each one trying more desperately to capture the essence and passion of the original, and each one fated to be less and less artistically successful. No doubt rabid fans will turn up in droves, and the publicists will hail each film as a 'reboot', but the concept has long since moved from the category of art to commodity, if there is indeed any separation between them in a capitalist economy (thinking of you, Damien Hirst). I doubt the new films will even have the political significance of the first Star Wars films.

You Star Wars fans can regain your dignity quite easily. Just refuse to acknowledge the existence of the  new films. Behave as though George Lucas is dead to you. He's a greedy old man who cares only for the green. He is, in fact, Han Solo without the redemption, or even Jabba the Hut. He's encased your culture in carbonite (is this right?) and he's sold the corpse to the Emperor - and he's not sorry.

Cherish your childhood memories and seek out pastures new.

Curses! Thwarted

Well, the creepy caretaker has got away with it this time, and we pesky kids can go f… ourselves: the Serious Fraud Office had decided not to pursue the COnservative Party for the stolen money it received from Asil Nadir in 1988 and hung on to during his twenty years as an international fugitive and his recent conviction of multiple accounts of fraud.

My instinct is that leaving aside the morality of taking and keeping stolen money, the Tories could well be in breach of the Proceeds of Crime Act, for accepting, keeping and not reporting the possession of potentially stolen money, and that a party which is in or aspires to be in charge of public justice should be held to the highest principles.

So why have the police decided to let Grant Shapps and his friends keep the cash? Is it because they is innocent. Not quite…

the SFO has concluded that the cost to the taxpayer would be too high.

So there you have it. If you steal 6 bottles of water during the London riots, you'll get six months in jail. If you profit from theft to the tune of £400,000, you get a get-out-of-jail free card. I don't quite see why this crime is so difficult to prove. The administrators' report and letter to the Conservative Party made it clear that the money is stolen. The Tories still have it.

The stubs of six cheques totalling £365,000 made out to the Conservative Industrial Fund, had been discovered during SFO raids on Nadir's Mayfair address in 1993. The payments had not been authorised by Polly Peck's board, according to administrators.

Therefore they're guilty. There's no mystery at the heart of it. More importantly: a crime is a crime. Justice shouldn't be a matter of profit and loss - though we all know it is.

The Tories have told me to get lost: their defence is that the cash was accepted 'in good faith', which isn't a defence in law of any sort. Asil Nadir's bankruptcy trustee has written asking for it back - no reply. The police aren't going to help, and I doubt any moral pressure will either, but let's give it a go. Ask your local Conservative Party representative why it's OK to hold on to money stolen from the employees of a bankrupt company.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness

I come not to bury Conrad Black… nor to praise him.



Did you see this interview on Newsnight last week? My favourite bit was Conrad expressing a wish to smash Jeremy Paxman's face in. He also turned up to be interviewed on Sky by Adam Boulton: amidst the arrogance, he rather wonderfully paused to ask for Boulton's name - a slight which will have hurt that pompous presenter more than physical violence ever could.

If you're unsure who he is, Conrad, Lord Black of Crossharbour is a viciously rightwing Canadian newspaper magnate who quit the wide open prairies to own the Daily Telegraph and various other British and American newspapers, motivated by twin greeds for power and money. Citizen Kane-eh, if you like.

Being obsessive about free markets, it was somewhat of a surprise to find that when he sold his newspaper empire, he took 'non-compete' fees: essentially bribes not to start competitors to the publications he'd sold. Hardly free-market economics. He was convicted of several counts of fraud and dishonesty, some of which have been overturned on technicalities.

I rather like Conrad. He's rude, blustering, arrogant, entirely devoid of reflective qualities. He's nakedly greedy and incapable of considering anything objectively - and is therefore top quality copy. More importantly, I think he needs to be taken less seriously. He's been used, for the last few years, as a mini-Murdoch: a Capitalist Bogeyman with which to scare the kids. Don't be like Conrad, they'd say, with his silly fancy dress costumes and his Marie Antoinette wife and corporate jets. He's bad, mkay?

It's a distraction. Conrad's a pantomime baddy, the jester of corporate capitalism. He's the disciplinary model: if you're not behaving like him, you're OK, seems to be the message.

This is wrong. Conrad ripped off some other greedy scumbags and got caught. Paraded through the courts and interviews, we're all meant to boo and hiss, then return to our lives safe in the knowledge that the Bad Guys always get caught in the end.

Total bollocks, of course. The real bad guys don't nick the occasional private jet, or filch a few million here or there. The real bad guys don't need to break the law, because laws are made and unmade for them. They deal in multiples of billions and they don't wear fancy dress, at least not in public. They dress down and stay out of the papers. They trash entire countries and even global economies. They're bailed out by you and me, paid for by cuts in disabled children's welfare funds (true) and hospital closures. You'll never know their names and they'll never take responsibility.

So laugh at Conrad if you like, but while you do, the real heist is happening elsewhere.