A Lefty Academic Writes Leftily About Leftwing Groupthink.

If you read or listen to the rightwing media, by which I mean BBC Radio 4's Today show, the Times, the Mail and a range of other grubby outfits, you'll have heard about some research by one Noah Carl (currently studying for a PhD in sociology at Oxford) that reveals that universities are packed with left wingers.  

 Although I have a very busy schedule of indoctrination and brainwashing to get through today, I thought I'd have a look at this report to see whether it stands up to the kind of scrutiny everything I publish has to undergo, even when it doesn't get the attention of major news outlets. If you're interested in methodology, stick around. 

Firstly, the report is called 'Lackademia', though the URL is a little more blunt: it reads 'Left Wing Bias Paper'. Now this hurts, because some years ago I coined the term 'slackademics' to satirise the view that we teach for six weeks a year before bunking off to Siena or somewhere equally agreeable, where we quaff wine in-between organising attacks on Truth or Objectivity. I meant it as a joke, but unless the Adam Smith Institute (for it is they) are making a clever reference to Lacan's theory of desire being fuelled by a lack of being, then it looks like this thing is snide from the off. 

Who are the Adam Smith Institute? Well, it's a very, very rich think-tank funded by nobody knows whom because they won't tell us (though off the top of my head I'd guess: the Koch brothers, mining, pharmaceuticals, weapons, oil and tobacco firms). They dedicate themselves to campaigning against all government and regulations, believing that the state's only roles should be a) nuking foreigners and b) persecuting trades unionists. Sorry, they do have another role: to ensure that the actual Adam Smith spins perpetually in his grave as the Institute continues to abuse his name and ideas by wilfully distorting and extrapolating beyond anything he'd recognise as his own. 

Anyway… the ASI reckons that universities are stuffed with leftists and they want to know why. I must assume that this is the first in a series of papers, perhaps including 'Why Are So Many Bankers Rightwing?' and 'Why Are Conservatives Over-Represented In The Arms Trade?', though I may be being over-optimistic. For those of you too busy to trawl through the whole thing, the Executive Summary is probably enough: 

• Individuals with left-wing and liberal views are overrepresented in British academia. 

• Though relatively little information is available, evidence suggests that the overrepresentation of left-liberal views has increased since the 1960s. The proportion of academics who support the Conservatives may have declined by as much as 25 percentage points since 1964.
• The left-liberal skew of British academia cannot be primarily explained by intelligence. The distribution of party support within the top 5% of IQ is relatively similar to the distribution of party support within the general population.
  
• The left-liberal skew may be partly explained by openness to experience; individuals who score highly on that personality trait tend to pursue intellectually stimulating careers like academia. And within the top 5% of IQ, openness to experience predicts support for left-wing parties.
  
• Other plausible explanations for left-liberal overrepresentation include: social homophily and political typing; individual conformity; status inconsistency; and discrimination.
  
• Ideological homogeneity within the academy may have had a number of adverse consequences: systematic biases in scholarship; curtailments of free speech on university campuses; and defunding of academic research by right-wing governments. 
• Recommendations include: raising awareness; being alert to double standards; encouraging adversarial collaborations; and emphasizing the benefits of ideological heterogeneity within the academy. 

I quite like a report that admits at the very start of a sentence that 'relatively little information is available' then leaves merely a comma before using the phrase 'evidence suggests…'. Point 2 depends on Intelligence Quotient scores, as though IQ isn't thoroughly discredited as anything other than a measure of how people perform on IQ tests: Nisbett's Intelligence and How To Get It is pretty persuasive on how IQ is a function of various silent and/or unconscious social assumptions about what constitutes intelligence. I always did very badly on IQ tests, and also struggle with doors bearing PUSH and PULL stickers, yet here I am with my PhD, managing to string a sentence together. 

Now I have to say that I like the implication of points 2 and 3: that leftwing academics are simply more intelligent and outward-looking than those on the right. Sadly though, it's nonsense. The use of political parties as a proxy for 'conservative' and 'liberal-left' doesn't really work: there are some very-close-minded Stalinists identifying themselves with the left and some very open-minded conservatives (or so I hear: I don't get invited to those kinds of social events). But what's important is that the ASI is worried about campuses producing generations of leftwing graduates and academics who never hear or espouse a rightwing view. Which is funny because virtually every politician did the same course (PPE, Oxford) and there's no shortage of conservatives on any campus. What ASI have done is guess that they're all teaching humanities and decided to focus on that. Then it's a short step to deciding that all these lefties are throttling 'free speech'. 

OK, that's the executive summary: the version that the newspapers and R4 picked up because it makes a good headline. That's what Adam Smith Institute want. But I'm going to spoil their fun by reading the whole thing. First impressions: it's like a bought essay of the kind I'm all too familiar with. It's nicely proof-read and fluently written. There are even footnotes to make it look like real research, but there's a major gap between assertions and evidence. 

It starts with Orwell's attack on the 1930s' left's lack of patriotism (wow, a real 'hot take') and quotations from the Telegraph, the Spectator (James Delingpole, no less) and the Daily Mail bemoaning the leftist bias in universities: “Universities have become breeding grounds for intolerance where anyone challenging left-wing views is ‘shouted down’”. Let's just take a moment to remind ourselves that even Wikipedia has banned the Daily Mail as a reliable source. This is not a great beginning: I once read a student essay which took its definition of socialism from the BNP's website. It feels familiar. 

There's a quick definition of what 'left' and 'right' mean which is largely OK, before we're plunged into the 'evidence' for leftwing overrepresentation. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. 

Relatively little good evidence is available on the political views of British academics. Nonetheless, that which are available point to a sizable left-liberal skew. In April of 2015, the Times Higher Education (THE) ran an online poll open to anyone with a UK university email address, which asked respondents whom they intended to vote for in the upcoming election

That's not great: the 2015 poll was therefore open to all students and staff. It was, as this report fairly notes, 'self-selecting'. However, they continue to use it as evidence, despite admitting in the methodological appendix that 'The question posed by the THE poll (2015) was not stated explicitly in the write-up'. So: the Institute report relies on a self-selecting newspaper poll without being able to say for certain what the question was, and worse, what the response rate was in percentage terms or raw numbers. We learn that 46% of the respondents (probably) said they'd vote Labour but we don't know whether 50,000 people replied or 5. This is backed up by a paper by Halsey from…1992, which even the authors admit isn't an unproblematic thing to do:

Insofar as the question posed by Halsey (1992) was different to the one posed by the THE poll (2015), the two sets of figures are not directly comparable. 

Nonetheless, this paper decides that if there is a flaw with the THES poll, it's that

utilising the overall percentages understates the academy’s left-liberal skew 

for reasons which remain obscure to me. But for them it's fine: it gives them enough ammunition to confidently claim that

Relative to the outcome of the last general election then, British academia shows a considerable left-liberal skew. At least 50% of the general public voted for right- wing or conservative parties in 2015, compared to less than 12% of academics. 

Then the paper says this:

Interestingly, and consistent with evidence from the United States (Carl 2015b), left-liberal overrepresentation varies systematically across subject areas: the percentage of respondents supporting the Conservatives was highest in business and law (though still less than 20%), was low in the social sciences (at less than 10%), and was lowest of all in the humanities and arts (at less than 5%).

Now congratulations are due to Carl – who is cited repeatedly here and is, not coincidentally, the author of this piece –  for getting two papers into the same journal in a single year, both examining why intelligent people are leftwing. However, Carl 2015b doesn't have anything to say about British departmental differences in voting intentions, and nor does the THE poll, at least according to what's quoted in this report (and he doesn't give a link, an issue number or a page number). 

What Carl does do here is make a pretty table conflating Halsey's 1964-1989 political analysis with the figures derived from the THES even though he admits that the questions aren't the same (and without admitting that the THES poll isn't statistically significant or available for analysis). 

Are these percentages or raw numbers? Noah doesn't tell us but let's be charitable and assume that they are. He then provides a graph of the same dubious figures which fills up a little space, then repeats Halsey's 1992 table of far-left/left/right/far-right academic identifications without comment, and certainly without wondering whether definitions (and events) have changed anything in the ensuing 25 years. 

Then we reach Section 3: Intelligence As An Explanation for Left-Liberal Overrepresentation. I should say before I plunge in that I'm a literary scholar, rather than a sociologist or a biologist, so some of what follows is derived from other people who are experts. 

Essentially, Carl sets up a straw man by wondering out loud whether academics are leftwing because they're more intelligent. He cites American research as though conclusions about the political cultures of the US can be imported into a British context without question, and again cites himself to prove that while being clever can make you more social liberal, being clever ('cognitive ability') is positively associated with some rightwing economic beliefs. The suggestion appears to be that the cleverest people don't mind gays and dope-smoking as long as neither activity is being taxed. 

But how do we apply all this to Britain?

Unfortunately, there do not appear to have been any surveys of British academics asking about specific policy issues, either economic (e.g., nationalisation of industry) or social (e.g., immigration). 

 Well, we could do some research. Or we could do this: 

I calculated the distribution of party support for individuals within the top 5% of IQ4 , using data from the Understanding Society survey.  

I don't know anything about the Understanding Society survey other than that it seems legitimate and robust. Score one for Noah. I do know, however and as mentioned above, that IQ is a load of cobblers often promoted by rather unpleasant people who have a habit of moving from IQ scores to theories of racial difference, by which they almost always mean superiority. We'll see what happens as 'Lackademia' unfolds. For now though, Noah discovers that there are as many high-IQ Tories as there are in the general population, and slightly fewer Labour supporters. What he concludes is that Tories aren't being excluded from academia because they're stupid, but because they don't hold the right economic views. I'm starting to smell polemic, children. 

After another couple of exceedingly unhelpful graphs, we move on to a discussion of whether conservatives are rare on campus (despite having no serious evidence of this) because they're not open-minded. Carl concludes that Labour and Lib Dem supporters are more likely to be open-minded than Tories, but dismisses the survey's evidence that UKIPpers are more open-minded than Tories as 'sampling error'. Again, his graphs depend heavily on the problematic THE poll for which he lacks the raw figures and the actual questions. 

Section 5 is where it gets interesting. He asks whether conservatives are too incurious and inflexible to thrive in academia, citing himself to point out that mathematics and similar subjects lend themselves to a 'predilection for certainty'. Elsewhere he refers to science being 'objective':

It should be recognised, of course, that all the evidence of bias cited above is from the social sciences; the physical sciences and mathematics do not appear to have been a icted by ideological homogeneity in the same way. This is perhaps not sur- prising, however, given the objective nature of the physical sciences and mathemat- ics, as well as the obvious fact that the social sciences relate directly to the sphere with which politics itself is concerned, namely human behaviour and society.  

which means he's either missed the last century and the development of postmodernism and poststructuralism, or he just doesn't want to talk about them. Or, and this might just be the answer, he mistakes conservative scientific discourses for neutrality. On this point I'll just leave this here: more research is being done and more money is spent on male baldness than on malaria. Now tell me science is immune to social forces. 

There's a vague discussion about self-selection before Carl wonders whether academics are leftwing because they're paid so little: out of jealousy they start to develop levelling tendencies which they think of as egalitarianism. 

Fourth, the left-liberal leanings of academics may derive from a peculiarity of their social-class positions, namely that they receive low incomes relative to their advanced educational attainment and rich cultural capital (Gross, 2013). The closer that society gets to laissez-faire capitalism, the more status, power and in uence will be tied to individuals’ earnings and commercial achievements, and the less academics will earn relative to those in other occupations vying for social in influence (lawyers, doctors, managers etc.). Consequently, academics generally prefer policies that minimise differences in earnings across occupations, the better to safeguard their own influence. 

Is this true? Am I just a bitter purveyor of the politics of envy? There's no evidence, but Noah's just going to leave it there for you to think about. Meanwhile, he's going to selectively use American research to demonstrate that leftist academics discriminate against conservatives in the hiring process (he's not interested in other research about hiring processes, such as racial and gender biases), nor is he going to mention that hiring is largely a function of managers, not academics). 

But don't worry: he's got solid evidence. Well, he's got a paper which found that 82% of the conservative academics surveyed felt that there's a hostile climate for their views. This isn't, obviously, proof of employment discrimination because 100% of the respondents had academic jobs. Still, 82% is a massive number. We should all be Very Concerned Indeed that 82% of conservative academics feel persecuted. 

What's that you say? Raw numbers? Well, if you insist. 

82% of the 17 conservative respondents felt there was a hostile climate towards their political beliefs within the field, compared to just 7% of the 266 liberal respondents. 

So that's 14 conservatives in one particular field – social psychologists – cowering in their offices in fear of their lives. How many of the liberals feel persecuted? Alas, space restrictions don't permit Carl to dwell on it, but then again, nor does the original paper as far as I can make out (though I'm pretty poor on statistical analysis and remain open to correction). Noah does cite a supporting study, but one review suggests that both papers concentrate on the conservative/liberal divide when what the findings actually reveal is that academics are too ready to discriminate against their colleagues across the field. Some of the evidence just doesn't bear the weight of implication. I'm disturbed by this finding:

Similarly, almost a third of the sociologists interviewed by Yancey (2011) stated that they would disfavour hiring a Republican, while a comparable fraction said they would look favorably upon a prospective candidate’s membership of the ACLU (a socially liberally non-profit organization). 

But I'm reassured by the knowledge that the hiring process wouldn't allow any discussion of this to occur. 

If you're still with me, I can only apologise: we're only just getting to the meat of this study, and this is where the amusement I got from picking holes in Noah's paper comes to a juddering halt. I am officially sounding the Jim Crow Klaxon. The next section of Carl's paper addresses the consequences of his unproved claims. It starts unpromisingly with a citation of Roger Scruton back in 1985, just after the Salisbury Review published Honeyford's academically unjustifiable attack off multiculturalism. Scruton thinks that editing the Review led to him being black-balled from academia: he doesn't seem to think that writing an awful lot of its articles under a range of pseudonyms displayed a lack of integrity. But this is mere throat-clearing. The true purpose of Lacakademia becomes clear. It isn't really about the sociological curiosity of imbalanced political views amongst academics. It is about academic rejection of theories of racial superiority. There's a swipe at climate science, then a sustained critique of sociology's use of the term 'white privilege'. 

the term erroneously implies that whites are advantaged relative to all other groups. Whereas in actual fact, Asian Americans are more advantaged than whites along a number of important sociological dimensions: they have higher average incomes, better educational outcomes, and a lower likelihood of crime victimisation. 

This is of course localised and unnuanced, which is no surprise. A white male author from a country governed by a white male billionaire, taking money from an élite, white think-tank in a country ruled by white conservatives is only ever going to claim that he's actually from a persecuted minority. Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose. 

He then attacks sociologists in particular for their discourse which casts conservative views of society as constricting rather than structured, then castigates them for their 'angry expostulation', which is pretty rich from someone who started his reports with Daily Mail quotations. Economics departments too are up to no good: their text books have too much to say about market failure and too little about government failure (never mind that the global economy was crushed by banking corporate failure). 

And then, dear readers, we are back to the thorny issue of Race. Carl talks of 'witch-hunts' despite the only recent witch-hunt was the terrifying Professor Watchlist in the US, which invited students to add their professors' names to a database of subversives. What it boils down to is this: the sociologists have been nasty to the Eugenicists and Racial Superiority theorists, in particular Charles Murray. E. O. Wilson and Lawrence Summers. Murray used IQ (hello again) to postulate in The Bell Curve that Asians are intellectually superior to whites, with black and Latino people (yes, all these categories are used homogeneously) at the bottom of the heap, because Genetics. Not history, experience, class, economics, racism, poverty. Bad Genes. (As Roger McCarthy pointed out, another reference is to Helmuth Nyborg's outraged (and outrageous) defence of eugenics.

What are the consequences of these nasty close-minded leftwing sociologists (even though Carl's already suggested they're actually more open-minded than conservatives)? Well, it's a dystopian vision of hell:

‘A social science without sacred values’, Winegard and Winegard (2016) go as far to suggest that a substantial number of academic social scientists have become “paranoid egalitarian meliorists”: individuals who espouse a narrative in which society progresses ever closer toward a state of natural equality (between the genders, classes, races etc.), 

Godless social scientists leading us into a state of class, race and gender equality.  The bastards. (And while I'm at it, Winegard and Winegard (2016) is an unpublished working paper, i.e. not peer-reviewed, while the other paper by this duo cited is a rather bitter defence of Evolutionary Psychology against the perception that it's a crank theory indebted to, well, Nazis and anyone who discounts social and environmental factors in favour of biology. Hello again, racial superiority theory. 

After that, it's downhill to the argument that campus homogeneity leads to the end of free speech, because universities have free speech 'codes' and sometimes give 'trigger warnings'. 

On both sides of the Atlantic, lecturers have begun issuing so-called trigger warnings before they discuss potentially upsetting material. Reportedly, law students at the University of Oxford were warned that they might find the content of lectures about sexual offences distressing, and were given the opportunity to leave beforehand (Daily Mail 2016).  

'Reportedly'! This is just embarrassing. UK universities are compelled by government to have rules about these things. I know because I'm a university governor and contributed to writing those rules. The current government equates freedom of speech to Letting Islamic Terrorists Recruit: British universities have done rather well to resist this implication. Personally, I'm in favour of some basic restrictions: the right seems to be arguing that if someone shouts 'Fire', then I check the facts and say 'Don't listen to him, there isn't a fire', I'm an enemy of free speech. As to 'Trigger Warnings: I teach literature. I teach material that represents and explores deeply distressing subjects in graphic ways. I've never once decided not to teach these things, but because I know there are people in the class who have suffered some of the experiences discussed, I make sure we talk about them in a supportive environment. 

However: any paper that uses the word 'reportedly' and relies on the Daily Mail for evidence is a paper that's less interested in what actually happened, and more interested in garnering – as it did – outraged headlines in papers like, well, the Daily Mail. Carl adds to the abject stupidity by citing Spiked Online as evidence for his opposition to no-platforming. If you don't know Spiked, it's an outpost of the former Revolutionary Communist Party, a tiny groupuscule that as Living Marxism accused ITN of faking evidence of Serbian death camps, then devoted itself to publishing pro-industry propaganda under a variety of pseudonyms. It uses a variety of front organisations to propagate a radical libertarian-captialist agenda which opposes government action against, for example, racism, climate change and child pornography. Once you're reduced to citing this disgusting crew as evidence, you're down the rabbit hole and there's no coming back. 

What's missing from any of this is the absence of any contextual analysis. What about universities as institutions, existing within, contributing to and being influenced by neoliberalising discourses? What of the shift in the UK to student fees, to managerial over-reach, to the Employability Agenda? What about diversity between universities and regions? Or about social and cultural factors beyond individual psychology? Nothing. 

Instead, what we have is a nasty attempt to rehabilitate eugenics disguised as a defence of freedom of speech. It's bad enough that Noah Carl was paid to produce this stuff: it's worse that the media didn't spot it. 

One last thing: the Adam Smith Institute's commercial spin-off was in the paper yesterday too: banned from Uk government contracts for, er, corrupt and dishonest practices. Perhaps they need staff from a wider range of ethical positions to prevent this kind of thing happening? Just a thought. 

Tahnie Martin

On Wednesday we celebrated 50 years of English at this university. We invited former colleagues, students and friends of the department to a dinner, interspersed with readings and reflections of the previous half-century. The food was good, the wine flowed, the hall was decorated beautifully and the freebies were lovely. The speakers were warm, witty and thoughtful. We looked to the future: a Chair in English was announced, as was a new cross-disciplinary initiative.

As we left, I hugged and thanked Tahnie Martin from the marketing and events department, who worked tirelessly for six months to make it all happen. Yesterday she was killed by a flying piece of debris during the storm that swept the country. Tahnie was bright, enthusiastic, irrepressibly optimistic, bursting with ideas and undaunted by the grumpiness and stress she got from me over the past few months – it's dreadful to think that we won't see her around campus. We're all shocked and saddened, but at least we got to express our thanks for everything she'd achieved.

Root 1 cricket

Popped over for lunch today in the school canteen with the new England captain, Joe Root. He seemed like a very nice chap as he signed shirts and shook hands - having been unveiled as captain only a couple of days ago, with a tour starting at the weekend, he'd have been forgiven for cancelling. He'd done a Q+A with students and local children which I missed but which was apparently very good. His reply to the question about giving Pietersen a place ('There's a Twenty20 tournament on at the same time so I think he's probably busy') was a well-pitched, witty response to a tricky issue.

I took a few photos.

Bitter Northern Scum ©All Newspapers

Well, perhaps not all newspapers. The liberal ones will send their Toynbeebots up to the dreadful slums once every five years to wring their hands about why the proles are bitter fat racists. The rightwing ones will pay some toff to churn out 800 words from a golf course bar about why the  proles are Speaking For Britain while still being Unwashed, fat, racist and northern.

What they won't do is spend any time there or ask whether the inhabitants of places like Stoke are reacting to a polity and economy that has absolutely no interest – whoever is in government – in managing the transfer from full, mass, employment (Stoke had potteries, coal and steel) to a post-industrial economy. The liberal ones send in the Tristrams now and then like ineffectual missionaries to explain why globalisation is brilliant and they have to get with the programme, and then wonder why the oiks fall for the constant stream of racist bile delivered in simple words by the right. And poor old Labour has to run an election campaign with the lotto voce slogan 'We know Tristram was a selfish prick who ran away at the first sniff of a canapé, but this time it'll be different'.

There's a distinct air of David Attenborough about the media and state's attitude towards places like Stoke, except that he loves his subjects while they are embarrassed by or cynical about those left-behinds. Poor old Stoke - hard to find a babycino or a hedge-fund trader there. What hope do they have? For the people of Stoke, politics is like the weather: it happens to them and there's nothing they can do about whatever is thrown their way.

And so we beat on…

So, many terrible things are happening and they're happening so fast that I can't keep up. I'm living in two time zones: my own, and Donald Trump's, waiting to hear of his latest assaults on reality and decency. The Black History Month speech in which he boasted about himself, listed a few black people he clearly knew nothing about, and relegated them to the status of forerunners to the true black heroes: Trump donors. The National Prayer Breakfast, at which he assembled lots of religious people before mocking their raison d'être by 'praying' for Arnold Schwarzenegger's ratings. The call to the Mexican President which included a threat to invade that country ('banter'). The angry call to the Australian PM, a natural ally in reactionary bigotry, which was terminated half-way through because Trump was 'tired' (according to the White House) or a boor (everybody else). The ceaseless stream of executive orders making life hard for the weak and very, very easy for the powerful. His spokesman's invention of the Bowling Green Massacre to defend the Muslim Ban was today's low point.

And that's to say nothing of the Brexit Lemming Dash. But I have nothing to add that cleverer people haven't already said. So instead, here are some pictures from the Literature Festival I helped organise last weekend. We had nearly 80 events over a long weekend, most of them free. Some were over-subscribed, some were quiet, but none were failures. We were spread over multiple venues: churches, galleries, a farm, theatres, the university and many more. The plan was an active festival: some headliners that people could sit and listen to, but most were participatory, and seemed to attract people who wouldn't go to Edinburgh or Cheltenham festivals. It was hard work but I was stunned by the enthusiasm of those who volunteered to put on events, and of those who came to them. The budget was tiny – about £2000 plus what came in from ticket sales – but we managed. We're definitely putting it on again, and we intend to be even more ambitious. I did the Q bit of a Q and A with novelists Catherine O'Flynn and James Hannah, introduced Sathnam Sanghera, looked after wordl-famous-in-Tipton Doreen and generally floated around opening doors, pointing to places and providing coffees.

From 'The Quiet Compere'

Miles Hunt, ex-Wonder Stuff

Donald? Is it really you?

Could be a scene from any of my lectures

Doreen

A Doreen fan

A presenter's view of the Sathnam Sanghera crowd…including his mum

Sathnam Sanghera and Paul McDonald

Sathnam Sanghera

MPs Paul McFadden and Emma Reynolds

Paul McDonald

My favourite sight of the weekend

Arts and Crafts lectern, Bantock House.

A special mention for the lady at Doreen who asked me what I was studying while I ushered her group in. I'm nearly 42 and course leader of English, but for a moment I almost believed I looked young, fresh and innocent enough to be a student.

A Poem for Donald

This Be The Verse

adapted with no apologies from Philip Larkin's original, in honour of the new regimes in the USA, Britain, India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines and probably the Netherlands and France shortly

They fuck you up, your mum and dad the men in charge.   

    They may not mean to, but so they do.   

They fill you with the faults fears they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But were they fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style gold-trimmed hats flats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy Twitter-stern

    And half at one another’s throats?

Man hands on misery to man woman.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

But if you use ungodly ways

    To stave off an extra kid

They'll come for you and lock you up

   If it helps an election bid. 

    

You can donate to Planned Parenthood here and the Family Planning Association here.

Picking Cherries With James Harding

I'll keep this one brief. 

A lot of people active on social media think that BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg is biased, specifically against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. I don't know if she is or isn't because I haven't seen much of her work (and therefore my general view can't and shouldn't be applied to her): interviews between politicians and reporters, and political reporting, are now so sterile that I can't face watching any more of them. The politicians are so well-trained that they can effortlessly flannel through any really pressing question, while the savvy ones simply avoid appearing at press conferences or tough interviews: Cameron would only appear on sofas, while the Today show is reduced to sarcastically pronunciation of the words 'no minister was available'.* 

One particular report she filed on Corbyn's attitude to British shoot-to-kill policies was reported to the BBC trust and investigated for misrepresenting the Labour leader's views by misrepresenting the  question put to him (unseen on the particular show complained about), which altered how his response was framed. The findings were mixed: she was found to have been inaccurate:

…the report had not been duly accurate in how it framed the extract it used from Mr Corbyn’s interview

and that 

Trustees considered that the effect of the inaccuracy was compounded when the report went on to state that, consequent from Mr Corbyn’s answer:

“[the Prime Minister’s] message and the Labour leader’s couldn’t be more different.”

Finding: Upheld as breaches of accuracy and therefore as a breach of impartiality 

but not biased:

Trustees agreed that there was no evidence of bias or any intent by the BBC or any individual to misrepresent Mr Corbyn’s position

People may agree or disagree with this finding: that's their right. But what caught my eye was the subsequent behaviour of BBC executives. The Head of News, James Harding, was quoted saying this:

While we respect the Trust and the people who work there, we disagree with this finding…BBC News reported on the leader of the opposition in the same way it would any other politician…It is striking that the Trust itself said there was ‘no evidence of bias’. Indeed, it also said the news report was ‘compiled in good faith'.

The Trust is being abolished shortly, so no doubt Mr Harding felt that he could ignore it with impunity, but I worry that this attitude mimics the behaviour of governments and politicians. In the space of two sentences, Harding rejects the substantial findings of the report while cherry-picking it for the positives – like a film poster which bearing the quotation 'STUNNING' when the original review read 'the cash spent on this film is a stunning waste of time'. You can't say 'this was all rubbish except the bits I like': that way lies @realdonaldtrump. 

Harding's a public servant, not a PR operative or political hack: either he rejects the whole thing and explains why, or he accepts it, but to pick and choose like this is spin and we should expect better of the BBC. As a journalist or an executive responsible for journalists at one of the world's most respected broadcasters, he has an ethical duty not to editorialise or himself misrepresent despite the understandable pressure to defend one of his own. Doing so adds to the perception that all uncomfortable or inconvenient decisions and judgements should be dismembered and rebuilt in a different way for the convenience of one side. 

*I also groan whenever a political story is reported 'live from' Downing Street/the White House/wherever even if it's 3 a.m. and the story relates to Syria because they think the viewer is so stupid s/he needs to see some synecdochic or metonymic architecture. 

Farewell Tristram, we hardly knew you

The resignation of Jamie Reed MP to spend more time with his mildly radioactive money was hailed on the right as evidence that 'sensible' (i.e. besuited capitalist) Labour MPs were flinging themselves from the sinking SS Corbyn. Strikingly absent was the critique of this opportunist shill, just as not a word was said when Tony Blair appointed Paul Drayson to government: a man who never once deigned to face the judgement of the electorate. Drayson then promptly resigned to spend more time with his racing cars and nobody said a word about the public service ethos so signally lacking in these lightweight mates of the powerful. Drayson walked away with a free peerage and permanent seat in the British legislature.

Reed and Drayson were part of Blair's temporarily successful plan to make Labour electable once more by packing it with chaps with the right temperament and background. Out went horny-handed sons and daughters of toil. In came smooth types who'd been to Oxford or Cambridge and knew how to behave on an oligarch's yacht. To give them a little more credibility and to make it look like they were the people's choice, they were parachuted into deprived constituencies in the north, usually through the good offices of trades union headquarters with little connection to grass roots. Blair was MP for Sedgefield, while Peter Mandelson was MP for Hartlepool. These chaps would use their PPE degrees and ability to distinguish between a fish fork and a grapefruit spoon to ensure that ex-miners and textile workers would share in the bounties of the futures and sub-prime mortgage credit default swap markets that buoyed the economy in the late nineties. In return, they'd teach the proles not to be fat racists.* And we all know how well both of those projects worked out.

The poster boy of this was The Hon. Dr Tristram Julian William Hunt FRHistS, who has just resigned to become director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The son of a Labour life peer, Tristram was sent to a private school, after which he beats the odds and dragged himself up to Cambridge, where he spent a lot of time at Footlights working on hilarious sketches with people who became cookie-cutter Radio 4 comedians, followed by a PhD. He then dropped out of the Establishment to spend a number of years emptying bins, working on oil rigs and answering the phones in a call centre, living on dripping sandwiches. No he didn't, obviously. He wrote some books which at first glance seemed like history but were actually nice stories about the past. Like so many other leading socialists, his political big break came from getting a job at Labour HQ, which ensured pretty quickly that the people of Stoke on Trent – virtually all of them Labour voters at that point – woke up one day to find that through no fault of their own he was their new MP.

How's that worked out? Well, they aren't Labour voters any more: Stoke-on-Trent Central went from being one of the safest Labour seats in the country to being a very marginal constituency, with terribly low turnout, so inspired are they by politics as Tristram practiced it. 66% of Potters voted to leave the EU and UKIP is coming up fast. A city with a glorious past in manual work (coal and steel) and famously highly-skilled labour in the ceramics industry is now packed with unemployed and underemployed people. They're poor and unhealthy. The city is a mess: badly run, semi-derelict, fuelled by exploitative low-wage industries and abandoned by central government. Whatever the benefits of globalisation, they passed Stoke by. Its population isn't stupid: they watched their jobs disappearing overseas without the government lifting a finger to save or replace them, and they worked out that they were disposable: their votes for the BNP in the 90s and UKIP now should be seen as howls of fury from a people who couldn't get the attention of their rulers in any other way.

And then there's Tristram. In he came with his lantern jaw and boyish good looks. A man who'd written several zippy books which mentioned Stoke as an example of Victorian manufacturing prowess. Would he stand up for a proudly working-class city with a progressive history? He would not. He made some documentaries, he had some photo-shoots with like-minded soi-disant saviours, and then there came the day when he crossed a picket line of his own academic colleagues to deliver a lecture on…Marxism. To this sometime Stokie, he was a diffident nonentity: shamelessly profiting from the machinations of Labour HQ and the weakness of the local party, and yet incapable of justifying his existence by growing into the role in the way a better politician might have done. No doubt he adorned some social gatherings and had quiet words with his establishment contacts, but he was a political blank space, petrified by his inability to object, let alone develop alternatives, to the economic and political cyclones that destroyed his voters' existences. He behaved like a Victorian missionary come to civilise the natives (I always mentally dressed him in a safari suit and solar topee) when in fact the natives had a long history of artistic, political and moral sophistication (William Morris was a frequent visitor and admirer of Stoke's artistic skills) and they were baffled by this expert on Marxism who had absolutely nothing to say about the economic base being demolished before their very eyes. Whatever political instincts he possessed, they were not democratic. His seat was an unearned sinecure and he behaved as though politics should be the preserve of decent chaps who understood each other, practiced behind closed doors over cups of tea - well-meaning perhaps but patrician at best.

And now he's gone, off to V&A, where he can surround himself with the products of bygone Stoke-on-Trent without being inconvenienced by the cries of their abandoned and embarrassing descendents.

Now you might think that my shrill, bitter and resentful interpretation of the Gilded Life and Times of Tristram are motivated by class envy and jealousy. And you'd be right. But there's more to it than that. Some of the greatest Labour Party people were much posher than Tristram: Clement Attlee attended Haileybury, was an officer in the first world war and never picked up a hoe. And yet Attlee, having worked in the East End of London, devoted his entire life to transforming the lives of the poor, with whom he'd worked, fought and lived. He started out at a social mission founded by his school, a pure product of the patrician wing of Victorian radicalism. Tristram isn't like that. He has the looks, origins and training of that class of de haut en bas saviours, but his commitment to public service turns out to have been skin deep. John Profumo was publicly disgraced and atoned for his sins buy devoting himself to invisible public duties. Not so Tristram, whose stint in Stoke is akin to collecting enough tokens to qualify for Higher Things. He's done his time amongst the chip-eaters and his reward is a comfortable chair at the heart of the establishment, where he'll be able to turn over plates at the V&A and nod knowledgeably at the trademark, while his peers appreciatively murmur 'Stoke…he's been there, y'know'. He's earned his stripes. He's lived amongst the savages and now he's back to reap the reward. Soon a peerage will come along, perhaps the occasional government report, then the Mastership of one of the less flashy Oxford or Cambridge colleges to tide him over in semi-retirement. In the meantime, Stoke will decline further; its voters will hopelessly tick the box of some feistier bigot and its civic fabric will continue to decay, out of sight and out of mind.

I don't think that people who went to private schools are unqualified for public office, or that the haute-bourgeoisie can't serve the needs of the working-classes with verve and dedication – but I do think that this shameful phase of class tourism at the top of the Labour Party did nothing for them people at the sharp end of neoliberalism. They were used, and a better way must be found. For that reason, I won't miss Tris.

*You and I know that the proportion of working-class racists was pretty low, and that working people were always in the vanguard of anti-racist and internationalist movements, but New Labour decided to assume that they were all reactionary scum who needed placating. Add that attitude to the continued existence of the Daily Mail and the Sun and you get a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well that escalated quickly…

Last year's end-of-term report seems so sweetly naive now. There I was in a deserted office (just like today, only it's a different building), reflecting on the excellent books and albums I'd bought, and the research I was thinking of doing. The only dark spots were the multiple funerals I'd attended and Labour's then-shocking defeat in the general election. And Syria…

This year? 2015 looked like a warm-up for 2016. And 2016 looks like a warm-up for 1938. Bigots and billionaires – usually the same people – running the UK, the US, Russia and lots of other places. Electorates the world over are looking to atavistic con-men to save them, despite these con-men largely being the causes of said misery. Generosity of spirit seems in short supply and the Cult of the Great Leader is recruiting, from the White House to Vice-Chancellors' offices across the world.

Trump reminded me of the late and very much unlamented Senator Bilbo, a man rather less endearing than the fictional character you first thought of. A few days ago Trump asked a rally to applaud the black voters who stayed at home on election day: Bilbo – a Senator and two-term Mississippi governor – appealed to

“every red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls in the July 2 primary. And if you don’t know what that means, you are just not up to your persuasive measures.”

Here's the Claibornes' song about Bilbo's campaign to prevent immigration. He particularly hated Catholics, black people and Jews) and tried to get 12 million black Americans deported to Liberia, taking advantage of Marcus Garvey's black separatism.



The main difference between Bilbo and Trump is that Bilbo had a long track record of (evil) service to his state and country: Trump's such a lazy autocrat that he has no such record. Like Trump, Bilbo was seen as dishonest and underhand: the Senate passed a resolution stating that he was:

unfit to sit with honest, upright men in a respectable legislative body

Bilbo was as thin-skinned as Trump too: on becoming Lieutenant-Governor he had the resolution stricken from the record.

So that's the USA. For a lot of complex – and not very complex – reasons they voted against the gradual and controlled triumph of financialised capitalism, drone warfare and rentier economics (don't forget that Hillary was 'proud' to serve on the board of Wal-Mart) and for demagoguery, racism, corruption and vicious self-interest. Over in the UK, the Great British Public voted against the aforesaid financialised capitalism, drone warfare and rentier economics and for demagoguery, racism, corruption and vicious, but deluded, self-interest. Only Brexit came without the laughs associated with the Trump campaign. Instead it was a grey and seedy return to the small-minded suspicion of the 1950s, wrapped up in an awful lot of sick-making hypocrisy about British values and now loyalty oaths, not seen since McCarthy or 1930s Germany. One assumes that Mr Javid will not be requiring his former colleagues to solemnly swear to pay corporate taxes.

In the plus column: I've been to Iceland, and met Liz Morrish, Richard Hall, Kate Bowles and her daughter Clem in the flesh. I read some good books and listened to some good music.

Hmm…the scales don't seem very balanced. It might be that the individualist pleasures of friends, books and music don't entirely outweigh the collective misery of a glob gripped by hatred and suspicion, but I get the sense that it's what most of us will do: retreat into a cosy cave in the hope that the storm passes rather than get out there to do something about it. When faced with climate denial, racism, economic hostage-taking, Syria and all the other evils abroad today it's much easier to treat power like the weather and behave as though there's nothing to be done other than wait it out. Sadly, I suspect that it doesn't work like this. If we don't get out there with our social/cultural/political sandbags, we're going to sink beneath the waves.

Happy Christmas.

At the revels

This week I have mostly been going to cultural stuff. And watching my friends and colleagues marking essays. As I'm on a sabbatical (cough cough) this is the first time since 2000 that I haven't had any. I miss the teaching, but marking? Not so much.

So last week it was a Beethoven and John Adams concert at Symphony Hall: the Leonore Overture was pretty enough (yes, I know this sounds terrible), the Violin Concerto was stunning – particularly good cadenza – and Adams's Harmonium was utterly wonderful - it draws on poems by John Donne and Emily Dickinson to thrilling, gutsy effect. It's just a shame that the audience is reduced by a half whenever a living composer appears on the bill. The version below is from the 1980 CBSO performance under Simon Rattle. It was also lovely to see the James Ehnes, the Beethoven soloist sitting near us for the Adams half of the concert. That doesn't happen often.







I've also been to see a two-hander of Pride and Prejudice which worked wonderfully, went to the cinema for I, Daniel Blake which reduced me and everybody else there to tears (though we all enjoyed one character's devotion to Stoke City's Charlie Adam), and saw Pixies last night. Sometimes I worry about bands over the creative hill flogging the old favourites, but Pixies were utterly ferocious. The famous songs weren't reverently reproduced identically to the recorded versions, and new songs fitted well. The gig finished with their Krautrock b-side (considerably toughened up) 'Into the White' being delivered into a hall filled with blinding white smoke, which looked and sounded amazing, and also annoyed the ghastly folk who view gigs through their mobile phones. Which was a bonus.

Change of tone for the next couple of gigs: Oxford this weekend to hear my sister sing with the City of Oxford choir, including the modern masterpiece that is Lauridsen's 'O Magnum Mysterium', then on Tuesday it's back to Brum for the Tallis Scholars' Renaissance Christmas, which also features a contemporary piece, amazingly.





It's not all fun though - several Annual General Meetings and the like to get through first… Oh, and tonight's the very last All Hands On Decks, where failed or wannabe DJs get to torture the general public with 10 minutes of their musty vinyl. Not sure what I'll play tonight but it's bound to be something far removed from the soulful and groovy stuff everyone else likes. Why is it the last one? Perhaps because – like Mary Bennet – I have delighted them long enough.

No laughing matter

I just got an email from the Birmingham branch of the Glee Club, a chain of comedy venues.

Something didn't look quite right. Can you work out what it is?

OK so far?

Starting to twig?

I think a theme is starting to emerge. But let's read on. 

Yes, there's definitely something that links these performers. Are there any more? There are!

It's on the tip of my tongue… What could it possibly be?

It's coming to me. I'm almost there. One last push.

By George! I've got it!

Male comedians listed by Birmingham Glee Club in the six months from December 2016 to May 2017: 25
Female comedians listed by Birmingham Glee Club in the six months from December 2016 to May 2017: 4.
Male headline or solo acts listed by Birmingham Glee Club in the six months from December 2016 to May 2017: 18
Female headline or solo acts listed by Birmingham Glee Club in the six months from December 2016 to May 2017: 0.
Pictures of male comedians: 19.
Pictures of female comedians: 0.

Now, what are the possible explanations for this?
1. Women aren't funny.
2. They were all busy for half a year.
3. All female comedians have collectively decided that Birmingham is shit and they're never coming back.
4. The inhabitants of Birmingham are so sexist that the Glee Club is actually protecting women by not booking them.
5. Female comics hibernate for six months of the year. Do NOT open their cardboard boxes too early.

I did ask the Glee Club about this. They got a tad defensive.

Firstly: I'm no comedy expert. They have a professional team which looks for talented comics to book and that team has managed not to book any women. They have managed to book six women this year: not, to my mind, an astonishing number. They also said that they'll be announcing more acts…which makes it sound like women have to fit in the gaps left once the men have been booked. Or perhaps it's that they have booked women but didn't think it worth mentioning.

Finally, here's what happens if you unsubscribe from their mailing list.

That's right. It's not them. It's you. Or your nasty, stupid friends. You can't really want to opt out of their list. That would be incomprehensible. You heartless brute!

PS. As @MrSimonWood points out, the excuses are similar to those made in academia:

Something to chew on (you smug gits).

This week has mostly been dominated – at the risk of sounding like the egregious Martin Amis – by my teeth. I'm part way through a dental restructuring exercise which feels more like the medical equivalent of slum clearance. Extractions here, fillings there, and lots of very equivocal promises of a bright future from my dentist (who has very kindly suspended the associated programme of Reproachful Shaming).

Until this week it was fine – even the extraction didn't call for any painkillers once the anaesthetic wore off. Until Tuesday, when a simple filling led to a night of uncontrolled shrieking and sobbing. The pain far outweighed that of the various broken bones and sporting injuries I've had. It still hurts. At one point during that eternal stretch of delirium I found myself recalling the Fredric Jameson I'd been reading earlier. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act he talks about texts being apparently isolated units while actually functioning as examples of wider social struggles and contradictions, however subjective they appear to be ('a symbolic enactment of the social within the formal and the aesthetic'). Angela Carter makes a related point in the introduction to The Sadeian Woman, speaking specifically of sex:

We do not go to bed in simple pairs: even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our unique biographies – all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

(Next year I'll be adding the word 'discuss' and setting it as an essay question).

I think it's true to say that the violent encounter between me, my dentist and his assistant is also no simple triangle. We've exchanged details of our working lives, our neighbours, our relationships and on the relationship between the body and the self and whether repair or improvement is a meaningful concept. As I lie there my parents are around me: being medical doctors, I got the sense that they considered dentists to be mere mechanics, on a par with surgeons. I also curse them for never making me look after my teeth as a child, leading me to this humiliating, painful and incredibly expensive situation. My bank balance, therefore, is present: without a secure middle-class job I'd be in even more pain, and so the encounter is also a political one, going back to the abolition of universal free NHS dentistry so that the British could have the atom bomb. I can't say there are 'sexual…expectations' but the dentist and the nurse are now on a very short list of people allowed to stick things in my mouth. My presence at the dentist's and my previous long absence from it, and the way I behave while there are not simple facts but narratives of deluded self-sufficiency, denial, power relations, Catholic notions of suffering, sacrifice ('offer it up') and guilt, fear caused by previous encounters, sorrow and anger (I liked my previous dentist and he retired early through illness, and then the practice was taken over by some disgusting corporation). No doubt the nurse and the brute dentist have similar narratives which resulted in their presence in the room.

Then, finally, are all the cultural associations I've picked up around dentistry: the horror of Marathon Man, the appalling Oedipal-dental sub-plot of the insulting adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the gleaming perfection of Hollywood teeth in in the mouths of actors playing Dickensian urchins or destitute medieval peasants, a practice I've long considered represents a deliberate subversion of realist pretensions, and of course the Simpsons.



Do I, should I, aspire to Richard Briersesque levels of gnasher hyperreality? Should I make myself super-human via implants, veneers and bleach and embrace the full Kurzweil? Or should I accept pain, gaps, gumminess and the inability to eat hazelnuts as a corporeal reminder of impending mortality and my rapidly declining usefulness to the tribe? No teeth, bad eyes, failing legs: all signs it's time I was for the sabre-toothed tiger while the young and hale make their escapes.

Still, there's nothing like overthinking to take your mind of the agony. See you next week.

Spam, spam, egg and chips…

Who am I? According to my spam folder for Nov 10th-15th I am:

• a heterosexual woman unsatisfied by her boyfriend's small penis
• a lonely heterosexual man
• Fat
• the laziest of academics
• unobservant when it comes to how major corporations' names are spelled
• greedy
• about to be a millionaire
• cold
• sick
• American
• bored
• a Labour member
• uneducated
• a future Captain of Industry
• hobbled by obsolete IT
• a small business owner
• low in confidence
• missing some parcels
• quite racist in a creepily sexualised way
• bald
• paranoid

…

but capitalism will save me.

Here's the found poem of the spam list. 

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