Science literally rocks

How to publicise the good work you do at The Blast Lab, Imperial College London?
Simple. Use lab equipment to perform brutal blues pastiches:

An academic's work is never done

Open Day today - lots of (hopefully) eager young tykes keen to press their noses up against our institutional windows to see what their futures might be.

I really hope the university's viability doesn't rely on today's events: I'm giving the English talk. It's always a difficult one - balancing some inspirational and exciting stuff with the need to explain how the course works and the stuff the parents are here for, i.e. will little Johnny/Joanna be unemployed afterwards?

I've gone for a mix of the two: a brief tour d'horizon (not a phrase I'll be employing in the lecture) of how English can completely defamiliarise the world in a creative way - the world as narrative and the English graduate as interpreter, followed by a run through the exciting specialisms of my colleagues.

The other thing about Open Days is that they make us become marketing executives, which I don't particularly like. It's not like the old days when universities chose the students: they're choosing us. Consequently I feel under scrutiny - choosing today's clothes was a struggle. I tried to balance neatness with approachability - which means cherry-red DMs, black jeans, open-necked shirt and a black v-neck (pretty much my dress-up style since 1993, heavily influenced by Modern Life Is Rubbish-era Blur).

Another night in the office…

Sigh…

I've just been to a colleague's lecture on Secular and Religious Forms of the Apocalypse in Popular Culture. Two hours really isn't enough on this stuff, but it was a thrilling ride. His major point was that religious Apocalypses have a purpose, whereas secular ones don't.

More specifically, 'apocalypse' literally means 'revelation': the point isn't necessarily the destruction, it's the epiphany the individual has which qualifies them to be Saved. Dispensationalism holds that a final destruction has to happen before the eternal Reign of Heaven can be instituted. It separates the sheep from the goats, in which the 'wrong' Christians, Jews who won't convert, atheists and adherents of all other religions get what's coming to them. All the suffering has a purpose. For example The Left Behind series of books, films, games and comics, for example, explains that only the best Christians go to heaven immediately (the first one opens with airline pilot Rayford Steele (a porn name if ever I saw one) realising that his missing passengers must be the True Believers who've been given a first class ticket to heaven, and that he and his allies must Shape Up Or Be Damned (continued over 12 volumes). The remaining weak Christians have to battle the Anti-Christ (he's the head of the United Nation, naturally) to demonstrate their righteousness.

The problem for popular representations is that people getting to heaven by being nice is very boring, and in any case, the dispensationalists (the theological term for Rapture-ready Christians) don't really believe in niceness as the route to heaven. They aren't Quakers or Oxfam: they actually want to bring on the Apocalypse because it's God's plan, and you get saved by converting and/or killing as many unbelievers as possible. You should want the Apocalypse - which is why American evangelicals are so heartily opposed to environmentalism: God gave the earth to be used, not conserved (this is the theme of that Protestant Ur-Text Robinson Crusoe and interfering with global warming is like mooning at Jesus. Anyway, killing infidels makes for more exciting viewing than Good Works, but runs the risk of attracting those who just enjoy the slaughter. And there are a lot more of them than you'd think: Left Behind has sold upwards of 60m copies.

You can check whether the Rapture is near on Raptureready.com, which collates evidence on a minute-by-minute basis. Seriously. Baroness Warsi's there now, adding the wave of sarcasm I and others directed at her as evidence of Satan's rise. Currently - and I'm not kidding - they're claiming that the Satanic background to the Eagles' Hotel California, combined with the US government's increase in passport fees, signals that we are 'nearing midnight'. Personally I'd have thought that the continued toleration of the Eagles' soft rock is in itself a sign that we're living in hell already, but I'm no theologian. But they have a kind of consolation: God has a plan and will make it alright, at least for the chosen few.

Steve's converse point is that secular apocalypses don't have end-points or purposes. Up to a point, I think. There are plenty which use the end of the world as a background for explorations of familiar themes, such as masculinity or individualism: Mad Max is a thinly disguised Western for example. Others engage with politics, or the nature of human society, such as the unrelentingly grim, unsensationalist The War Game (made by the BBC and then banned - I saw it in an old nuclear bunker and it scared the bejasus out of me). Still more reflect popular anxiety about globalisation (Contagion), environmental collapse or technophobia (Terminator). They don't have an Ultimate Purpose, but they function as Jeremiads: warnings. They tell us that we are fully capable of destroying ourselves because we lack maturity as a species - like this:





There's also the erotic self-harming element: flogging ourselves with the thought that, having been stupid enough to destroy ourselves once, we'll recover just enough to do it all over again - such as in the curious Catholic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, in the knowledge that we probably won't:



In literature, non-vampire teen fiction (and also adult literature), once concerned with nuclear holocaust (Z for Zachariah, Brother in the Land), is obsessed with environmental collapse - my shelves are groaning with dead trees stamped with stories about, well, dead trees (and everything else). Science fiction, remember, is never about the future: it's about the fears of the society in which it was written. Bertagna's Exodus, Blood Red Road, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Ready Player One, The Wind-Up Girl, Ship Breaker, Momentum, The Hunger Games to some extent, Jensen's eco-thriller The Rapture, a lot of Philip Reeve's work, Baxter's Flood, Sedgwick's Floodland… and that's just a small selection. Kids who read must be terrified! I guess that, like all the nuclear fiction of earlier generations, children's apocalypse fiction (and fiction featuring kids, like The Road) is given extra weight by the implied readers' impotence: they're innocent, and adults are doing these horrendous things to us: it's a kind of pornographic fantasy.

So religious apocalyptic culture is in a way smugly optimistic: it's the cleansing before heaven (for some), whereas secular apocalypses function both as warnings about self-harm, and as weirdly comforting fantasy.

What's the answer? Well, Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos depicts a humanity which is finally safe and happy… because we evolved to be seal-like creatures incapable of doing too much damage. Someone throw me a fish.

A shameless plug for a talented friend

If you're immured in this godforsaken city on Friday February 17th, don't go all the way to the canal for the purpose of ending it all. Go to the Light House Bar to hear my very good friend Gary and his band do their soul/blues/lovers' rock stuff. He may even do a song about how much he's looking forward to Margaret Thatcher's death. Only a few tickets left - you won't regret it.

Poetry corner…

Channel 4's The 10 O'Clock Show is - like its father The Daily Show - not quite as good as it thinks it is, but Charlie Brooker's poem about the Sun's habitual targets was sublime. It's the joy of a headlong, impassioned rant tied to a sense of form and structure:



It reminds me of Marcus Brigstocke's soliloquy on the subject of religious intolerance. Not 'fair' perhaps but satire doesn't do nuance:



PS: If you can't see the Brooker rant, it's because C4 have done something weird. They gave out the embed code, but it's not very reliable.

Those still in the office at 8.38 p.m. blues

Soundtrack to my evening:

Tindersticks, 'Another Night In':



Stars of the Lid, 'Dungtitled (in A Major): much more majestic than the title promises!



Robert Forster, 'Let Your Light In':

Books in…

Blogging about the weirdo-mystical section of 1930s British fascism the other day led me to the British Fascisti, later the National Fascisti, a forerunner of the more famous British Union of Fascists (the smaller, older groups thought that Mosley's lot were uncouth and not nearly anti-semitic enough).

One of the leading Fascisti was Colonel Victor Barker, a champion fencer, boxer and violent street-fighter, forever leading raids (wielding an illegal revolver) on socialist groups and publications. 'Barker' wasn't the colonel's real name - nor was he a Colonel. Or a he - Valerie Arkell-Smith adopted the name when an invitation to the Colonel to join the Fascisti accidentally dropped on her doormat. S/he moved into the HQ, taught the young fascists their favourite sports, stood trial over the revolver matter and was acquitted. S/he also married a young woman named Elfrida Hayward, and awarded her/himself a knighthood. However, 'Sir Victor' was imprisoned for making false statements on her/his marriage certificate (i.e. posing as a man) and again later for theft. According to D. H. Lawrence, her/his wife never realised that her husband was also a woman. Arkell-Smith lived under male identities for the rest of his/her life.

Read all about it in Rose Collis's Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment. I only got it today, so I don't know if she'll claim that Arkell-Smith's fascism was a performance of hyper-masculinity derived from her cross-dressing(as I suspect), or whether it's unconnected, but it's sure to be a fascinating read. She uses Barker/Arkell-Smith to explore the little-known (at least to me) world of 'female husbands'.

It's rather unsettling to see Colonel Barker proclaimed as a hero in lesbian circles - doesn't being a racist antisemitic Nazi outweigh the dedication to Sapphism?

Also in: an odd Arthurian tale, Knight Life by Peter David, in which King Arthur runs for the New York Mayoralty, with his spin-doctor Merlin. Not sure whether it's an Arthurian parody, a political satire, or both.

Not suitable for children. Or adults.

This film ticks every single box in my list of pet hates.



1. Based on a schmaltzy, manipulative book which easily-impressed people think counts as Literature (see also: The Time Traveler's Wife).
2. Features Tom Hanks.
3. Uses U2's music.
4. Employs the Twin Towers atrocity as a plot device to explore said schmaltzy themes. This is the worst offence of the lot. I genuinely think that Love, Actually was the most degrading, immoral and reprehensible film in the history of cinema because it used footage of 9/11 simply to get people in a sentimental frame of mind for a romantic comedy.

I can't find a useful clip of the actual film, but here's an animation of the whole hateful monologue, which to me is the definition of cynicism.



Those people did not die so that Richard Curtis, Jonathan Foer and Hollywood studios can make money during the half-term. When Karlheinz Stockhausen said this about 9/11:

he was making a profound, challenging, deeply offensive point: one which showed he understood that 9/11 was as much a symbolic event as an actual one. However wrong you think he might be, at least he didn't use the murders of 3000 people to sell a few cinema tickets.

Happy Birthday John Adams

Despite just going on about falling out of love with music, I still have a soundtrack to my life, though I'm starting to think that that's the wrong way round. Most especially, it's the minimalist and post-minimalists, though I never got into the electronica artists who derived so much of their styles from the classical scene. Some of my friends - for some reason women in particular - find the repetition with only tiny variations unbearable to listen to: one or two have even left the room in tearful frustration. For me, significance and drama emerge from the tiniest alterations.

Amongst them is John Adams, who's on the romantic post-minimalist edge these days. As well as repetitive instrumental music, he's single-handedly revived the opera as an art form, despite the vicious attacks directed at him for the Klinghoffer controversy (finally to be revived in London this month, not that I've any chance to see it). Here are some clips:

One more aural wafer, monsieur?

Can one ever have too much of a good thing? The thought crossed my mind as I looked at my music collection and I wondered whether I was a fan or an archivist. Perhaps it's an age thing, but it seems that the thrill of discovering new music is starting to pall.

Some of this is because, having reached my mid-thirties, most things don't sound innovative to me: I can see the roots and understand the context. It makes me more discerning - never again will Menswear feel like the future - but there's a cost: there was something wonderful about discovering exciting new things: part of the thrill of running the record shop gauntlet was in the gap between the staff's weary cynicism and your own neophyte enthusiasm.

My music is both very dear to me and a source of shame. Apart from my inability to stop buying books, music is where the greedy consumerist in me comes to the fore. Modern capitalism has made buying music simultaneously easy and supremely dull. When every excessive penny I spent on music meant cheaper beans or another night in, each vinyl disc or cigarette-box cassette tape meant something special. Some things - Japanese imports of records I already owned in a UK release, for instance - gave me instant credibility with fellow victims, and marked me out amongst the wise as an easy target, not that I cared.

I still buy an awful lot of music by most people's standards, I guess. Getting a proper salary (though after 12 years, not a permanent contract if you're reading this, Vice-Chancellor) meant that I could fill in the gaps in the back catalogue so it looked like I was in on the start of a band's career. I could (and did) obsessively buy every side-project, solo album and post-split utterance by members of bands I liked. I bought music according to the record label too: if Darla, Wurlitzer Jukebox and Drive-In released Hydroplane and The Cat's Miaow's fine albums, I reasoned, I probably shared their tastes, and bought everything else they did.



At some point, I crossed a line and started acquiring for the sake of it. Having money and an internet connection at work meant that I didn't need the intense connection to a piece of music to buy it: I now often buy music on a whim, or if it sounds like it might be interesting - leading me to interesting places, of course, but the sheer volume has got on top of me. I've got upwards of 20,000 vinyl records, several thousand CDs, and 18772 tracks on my computer, or enough for 53.8 days, iTunes tells me. For instance, I've just bought Philip Glass's 9th Symphony: not because it's specially wonderful compared to his previous work, but because I'm a completist. Similarly, I've bought a box set of Saariaho's orchestral work because a discussion about female composers led to a recommendation from Dan. Will I listen to much of it more than once? Hard to claim I will when it's competing with almost 19000 tracks.



The effect of this is that music has become a disposable commodity. I buy something, listen to it for a few days, then it disappears into the hard drive, rarely to be seen again. My iTunes list is so long that the only tracks I see on the screen when I open it are albums by Acetone and The Accidental. The odds on alighting on a Proustian gem are negligible. Sometimes a tune pops into my head and I hunt for it, but by and large the music is becoming wallpaper. I don't rush home to play a particular track any more - my iPod and computer means it's all instantly accessible. Music is no longer an essential element of my identity - it's something I consume at my convenience, and I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing. When the Saariaho box set turns up, I'll listen but unless it's astonishing, it will simply fade into the background like all the rest  - how very jaded I've become!

Have I become the equivalent of the banker who buys art 'as an investment' and leaves it locked in a bank vault? Is this the condition of the age? That genius is to be swamped by too much information? Music still thrills me, but devotion is becoming more difficult. Maybe I'm just turning into a grumpy old man. I assume 'the kids' still obsess about particular musicians/sounds/scenes - it'll all be OK as long as my generation think that 'it's just noise'. Instant accessibility means that they'll have a much richer palette on which to draw: when I was a kid, music from the past was largely lost - bands would talk about Beefheart or Badfinger or whoever, but they weren't available in shops - now time is irrelevant.





Oh to be 15 again… (apart from the actual misery of being 15).

The war against religion?

If you've read Baroness Warsi (Tory cabinet minister with no responsibilities, appointed to make David Cameron look non-sexist and non-racist), you might be under the impression that Christians are being lynched in the street or burned at the stake on a regular basis.

Britain is 'under threat' by the 'rising tide' of 'militant secularisation', she says, neatly implying that 'Britain' is a coherent concept which in some way requires religious belief, and that non-religious people are a security problem.

Only the last time I looked, most British people don't practice any form of religion, and yet appear to believe that they're both still British and non-threatening. On the other hand, virtually all the major crimes I can think of recently: 7/7, 9/11, Ulster loyalism and to a slightly lesser extent Irish Republicanism, Serbian aggression and a whole swathe of other atrocities were committed by religious people. It used to be states burning, hanging, drawing and quartering their citizens on religious grounds: now it's amateur groups. I could start listing the violent and intolerant sections of various religions' holy books, but that's just point-scoring. I'll content myself with pointing out that many religious groups - particularly the cruder ones which grab the headlines (not all: I've a soft spot for the Quakers for instance) -  insist as a matter of absolute fact that they're right and everybody else is wrong - and to an extent, fair enough: so why isn't the same respect extended to those of us who are atheists. There's little point having fundamental belief if you don't feel the need to convert or condemn the infidels - which is where religion threatens us all. (I'll exempt Judaism and Islam from this: they haven't tended to be proselytising faiths, though forced or voluntary conversions aren't unknown).

I just don't see the fabric or the security of this country being threatened by people calling a little more loudly for a science, education or morality based on evidence and humanist values: they imply respect for individuals' beliefs, while requiring a little more rigour in public policy.

Warsi sees it differently:

For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant. It demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes – denying people the right to a religious identity because they were frightened of the concept of multiple identities.”

I just don't see it. Religion is - and has to be under circumstances - intolerant. If you're convinced that your way is the only way to heaven, surely you have to be militant if you want to keep for own group and possible converts out of hell. I can't see anything more militant in atheism than a few dyspeptic professors and frankly that's small beer compared with say Galileo's lifelong house arrest, the legal murder of Catholics under the Common Wealth, the ban on Catholicism lifted only in 1848, the genocidal campaigns against heretics in the Vendée and elsewhere, the Gordon Riots, the exclusion of Dissenters from public life… need I go on? Warsi's inventing a straw man by raising the spectre of 'totalitarian regimes': I can think of two deeply religious countries of the top of my head which regularly top the league table for oppression, intolerance and ruthless abuse of human rights: Saudi Arabia.

Is the British polity under attack from 'militant secularists'? It doesn't look like it from here. An Established church. Compulsory worship in all schools. Bishops in the House of Lords. Religious groups being handed control of schools with no oversight whatsoever. A Prime Minister officially defining Britain as a 'Christian country' (Warsi seems very confused about this: as a Muslim, she's calling for more Christianity).

Forget Warsi's shrill carping. There's something else going on here. Over in the United States, capitalism failed as long ago as the 1970s. The wages of the working class have declined since about 1973. America's heavy industries failed to invest and innovate, leaving massive swathes of the heartland destitute. The Democrats, stuck in Cold War narratives, refused to evince a leftwing agenda of state support and investment, for fear of being accused of Socialism. The Republicans, unable to challenge their economic orthodoxies (sound familiar, by the way?), decided that they needed a new way to attract working-class voters.

They hit on the 'culture wars'. Neither party had a leg to stand on when it came to economics, but the Republicans realised that the people could be distracted by social matters. So they constructed a new country, 'Real America', the bits between the (liberal, urban, socialist, Jewish) coastlines. Liberal America, they said, was going to take away your guns. Liberal America would force Real Americans to have abortions. Real Americans would be forced to abandon school prayers, the Pledge of Allegiance, SUVs and 'states' rights' (i.e. racist laws). Liberal America would turn your children gay and your wives into feminists. Real Americans want a theocracy: Liberal Americans want a Soviet Atheist dictatorship complete with Death Panels and schools which brainwash your kids. Liberal America would spend your taxes on Mexican-American History classes, immigrant rights and 'socialised healthcare', like Cuba. Real Americans supported Israel because the Bible said so: Liberal America supported burnoused Arab terrorists. Liberal America was Godless America. Real America believed in God and Guns.

And thus it came to pass: every defeat for Real America (such as the legalisation of abortion after Roe v Wade) was further proof that 'militant secularists' were on the march. Never mind their hero Reagan's genial lack of religious feeling (or the deism of the Founding Fathers) - this was not a reality-based struggle. While the rednecks out on the plains saw this as final apocalyptic battle for America's soul, the Republican leadership saw it as a magnificent way of locking in votes for ever, despite the overwhelming evidence that a vote for the Republicans was a vote for the military and corporate powers which destroyed middle America. It's a distraction technique, and a stroke of genius.

You can read up on this stuff: it forms the core of political speeches by Republican candidates even now: Gingrich, Santorum and co (as this Gary Younge piece explains. They believe in Small Government and Self-Reliance - except when it comes to the bedroom.

Warsi has clearly picked this stuff up, and I strongly suspect that the Tories are deliberately copying American political strategies: too much of this stuff is popping up in Tory political discourse in recent years. They're talking about Freedom from the state - education, healthcare - and creating a siege mentality amongst their core voters which isn't borne out by the facts. But as in America, we're not dealing with reality, they're attempting to create one.

Will it work? I doubt it. It's a core vote strategy, and it's clear that even up against the least popular Prime Minister of recent years, the Tories only managed a 35% share of the vote: there isn't a natural Tory majority out there. I also think that religious bullying of this kind doesn't play in most of Britain, thanks to the legacy of the Civil War. After the Restoration in 1660, the word 'Enthusiast' became a term of abuse in polite society, applied to anyone whose religious fervour threatened to return the country to civil war and the years of the stake. Despite occasional outbursts of state and popular intolerance, the UK gradually decided that religion was a private matter rather than a public flashpoint.

Why are the Tories suddenly banging this drum? Because, like the Republicans, they know that their cherished economic orthodoxes have failed. The Finance Tories (hardline free-marketeers, financial engineers, uninterested in social values) and the One Nation Tories (hunting, paternalism, jam and Jerusalem, social fabric) are in serious danger of parting company. Cameron's solution is the same as the Americans': wrap yourself in cross and flag, generate controversy, keep quiet about economics - that's for the big boys who read the FT, not the Mail-reading voters.

Cynical, no?

(Disclosure: I'm a Catholic Atheist. If you're one, you'll understand what I mean).

Update. I've been discussing this all day with @z_rose on Twitter. She objected to a couple of inaccuracies in my characterisation of religion, which I've corrected, and suggested that I've fallen into the trap of accepting dominant discourses around religion as genuinely representative. She makes the point that many religions and religious people aren't exclusive when it comes to truth, or oppositional, and that accepting the media's love of discord is to cede the ground for debate to extreme positions (implicitly mine as well as those of religious groups). I'll concede a lot of this, though I do think that massive swathes of American society are more Manichaean in approach than we acknowledge, and on the rare occasions I attend Mass I'm always surprised by the sermon's intolerance: Israel right, Palestine wrong; contraception evil etc. There are nice religious people, moral religious people and open-minded religious people - just as there on my atheist side.

She also says religion is a lived experience rather than a static thing: again, I agree up to a point. It drives me mad when the media present all Muslims as observant fundamentalists: plenty drink beer and don't pray, just as most 'Christians' don't darken the door of a church from one year to the next. But - the more text-based your practice is, the less tolerant it is: if you genuinely believe that God personally dictated a ban on gays and shellfish and that these rules still apply, you're bound to practice them.

What have I learned from today? Warsi's a dangerous, short-termist with evil intent, like all Tories. But also that I shouldn't blog off the top of my head. I need footnotes to keep me accurate, despite the fact that - having been retweeted by my idol Marcus Brigstocke to 101,000 followers - the less nuance, the more readers.

Learned we may be with another man's learning…

Teaching did not go well today. On the agenda was a short children's novel, Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons, a leftwing Robin Hood adventure.

Of the twenty or so in the seminar, three had read it. I went through the admin - including announcing that I'd arranged a theatre trip if they wanted to take the offer up, gave a quick potted history of the socialism and literature debates going on in the 1930s, and then realised that a) they wouldn't have anything to say about the novel and b) I didn't want to fill the silence with an extra lecture. So I cancelled the class.

I may well have sounded much huffier than I really am. I actually really like this class and look forward to it every week, which isn't always the case even though I love teaching. I'll still look forward to teaching them next week and hope there isn't a froideur in the room.

I also worry that I may have been a touch unreasonable: lots of the students have jobs and children to look after, and I may have asked them to read too much, though none have said so and I hope I'm approachable enough for them to mention it.

What does Montaigne have to say on the subject? In 'On Idleness', he has words which reprove both my students and me, for my blog wittering (you'll have to forgive the inaccurate biology - he was writing over 500 years ago):

…just as women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh but need to be kept busy by a semen other than her own in order to produce good natural offspring: so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts… When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say if you are everywhere, you are nowhere.

That works for me as a definition of good teaching. I don't teach my students what to think and I don't make them more or less intelligent. I do show them new ways of thinking and hopefully provide them with texts which are worth thinking about - not necessarily in terms of judging quality, but ideas and subjects which illuminate their lives and widen their intellectual horizons. Sometimes they might be 'boring' texts: certainly the extract I gave them from Poly-Olbion last week couldn't be described as thrilling, but it does illustrate one perspective on Renaissance Britain.

Montaigne also has some sharp words for us teachers. In 'On Schoolmasters' Learning', he quotes some Latin doggerel from Rabelais' Gargantua which translates as the 'biggest clerks ain't the most wisest' and goes on lament that 'a soul enriched by so much knowledge' often fails to 'be more alert and alive' (how I wish he'd been on my PGCE course and not the new-age charlatans endlessly referenced instead). He goes on to speculate that:

…our minds are swamped by too much study and by too much matter, just as plants are swamped by too much water… our minds, held fast and encumbered by so many diverse preoccupations, may well lose the means of struggling free, remaining bowed and bent under the load

although he actually believes that the best minds expand the more they learn. I guess I'm not in that first rank: the more I learn, the more I worry how much more there is to learn before I have a basic grasp of anything, which produces a terrible paralysis. But Montaigne's right to attack the scholar who loses sight of the ultimate purpose: to expand the circle of scholars. By failing to consider my students' needs and capabilities empathetically and by giving up, I turned away from my usual progressive collaborative pedagogy back to a hierarchical, oppositional stance which serves nobody. Empathy has always been key to me: I ask myself what stage of life, what situation my students are in, and how literature might improve/destablise/challenge/broaden their cultural states. Having a bit of a strop doesn't really help. Montaigne feels keenly the usual division between the learned and the good in a way that Michael Gove and co. don't:

…the cares and fees of our parents aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge: nobody talks about judgement or virtue. When someone passes by, try exclaiming 'Oh, what a learned man!'. Then, when another does, 'Oh, what a good man! Our people will not fail to turn their gaze respectfully towards the first. There ought to be a third man crying 'Oh, what blockheads!'.

We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty… our schoolmasters go foraging for learning in their books and merely lodge it on the tips of their lips, only to spew it out and scatter it on the wind.  

Montaigne despises those teachers who treat learning as a secret which elevates the scholar above the concerns of the world and of those who use their skills for personal profit: he approves of those who like Heraclitus, preferred playing with children over ruling alongside the citizens who reproached him: I think Montaigne would have worked at a post-92 university like mine rather than an ivory tower.

But what is worse, their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed form hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements… 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi sedum' (They have learned how to talk to others, not with themselves'). 

I certainly think that my students aren't entirely to blame for not doing their reading. Our education system from a very early age is dedicated to the generation of certificates rather than the acquisition of wisdom, and this is only getting worse under the current regime. League tables, SATS, classifications: is it any wonder that students under so much pressure try to get away with the minimum? Especially in my kind of institution where the classes are not filled with rich teenagers with no shortage of time or books. Wisdom, compared with the terror of unemployment and debt, is a luxury. I try my best - presenting them with texts they'll never see in a glossy BBC adaptation or on the shelves of Waterstone's, to provide alternative views of the things they think are simple and solid. But collaboration needs more than one enthusiast.

Whenever I ask a certain acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about anything, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of 'scabs' and 'arse'. 

Montaigne here is heading towards a very modern view of meaning: that it isn't in the books, it's in what the reader does with the books. That's why I don't just lecture and send out reading lists. My classes aren't indoctrination sessions: my students create meaning, if they speak. Without them, there is no meaning.

I could quote Montaigne all night, but I'll leave you with this analogy of his, which explains rather neatly why my students need to contribute as much as I do:

All we do is look after the opinions and learning of others: we ought to make them our own. We closely resemble a man who, needing a fire, goes next door to get a light, finds a great big blaze there and stay to warm himself, forgetting to take a brand back home. What use is it to us to have a belly full of meat if we do not digest it, if we do not transmute it into ourselves, if it does not make us grow in size and strength?… We allow ourselves to lean so heavily on other men's arms that we destroy our own force… Learned we may be with another man's learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.* 

I'm quite a nervous and shy person (most voles are). Given the chance, I'd rather give a pre-prepared lecture to 300 people and leave. Instead, I make myself rearrange the classroom so that a small number of people have to look each other in the eye and rely on each other to make meaning. It's terrifying - which is how you know it's important. Let's not throw it away.

*And yes, I'm aware of the irony in thinking through an event by quoting someone else's wisdom.

Book news…

The book drought is ongoing. I didn't receive a single one last week, though I may have ordered one or two. Over the weekend I bought and read Brian Aldiss's Greybeard, in which a nuclear blasts renders everyone infertile. The novel tracks the social decay resulting from a land without young people. It's compelling: often lyrical, more concerned with death, the pointlessness of posterity and the philosophy of decay than the typical SF obsessions which group round this story line, and quietly rather beautiful. It's not an SF novel, in a sense: the nuclear blast is a plot device which happens decades before the novel's setting. Instead, very little happens: some ageing men and women travel around a degraded English midlands meeting other desperate or hopeless people.

If you think it sounds like P. D. James's The Children of Men, you're not alone: Adam Roberts's introduction pretty much accuses her of plagiarism, and adds a charge of religious clumsiness.

The post also brought me a rather interesting text, Patricia McKee's Public and Private: Gender, Class and the British Novel (1764-1878): not my period, but certainly themes in which I'm interested. 

The Life Academic

This was circulated at the weekend:

It's pretty clichéd, but some of it rings true. Certainly all my friends talk about 'three month holidays' (er, no: that's when we do a lot of marking, admin, module design and finally catch up with the research that's meant to keep us at the cutting edge), while my family appear to think that I just chat about books. Well, some of them. The others ask me why I don't want a 'nice' job teaching English at a boarding school ('you'd get free accommodation'). This suggests that they don't actually know me very well, or the job. If you're not an academic: add what you saw your school-teachers and lecturers do in class to an office job. Then extend the working day to run 9-9, which is our teaching schedule. 

The other HE snippet I caught this weekend was risible bum-obsessed poet/professor Craig Raine's reply to the question of how to avoid sleeping with your students. 'I read their essays', he said. Funny, but yet again extending the myth of humanities lecturers as dirty old men preying on naive young star-struck women. Well, not here. Some of my colleagues ARE women. Some of both sexes are homosexual. All of us have a friendly and respectful relationship with students - and then we go home to kick the cat or dribble in front of TOWIE. The idea that universities are hotbeds of illicit romance is derived from cheap literature and bad TV: written I suspect by similar dirty old men. We see quite enough of our students in class, thanks.

Today's the day for indoctrination

I've been teaching a module for final-year students called 'Positions' - my role is to lead the strand dealing with class, both in literature and as readers. The idea is that we don't just look at how social class develops as a cultural theme, we take a Gramscian approach to literature as an hegemonic vehicle, and a reader-reception/Barthesian take on the reader's role in creating meaning.

On the course so far, we've done some Chaucer, some extracts from Piers Plowman, an extract from Michael Drayton's interminable Poly-Olbion, and Anthony Munday's The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon, a play which hasn't been revived for the simple reason that it's structurally all over the place, though very interesting in many ways. The Drayton and Munday both feature Robin Hood, because I'm using him as a way to examine class as a site of social anxiety - Robin starts off as a threatening, shadowy figure, before becoming appropriated for aristocratic purposes: Munday is the first to make him a peer.

Today we're taking a different approach to Robin: Geoffrey Trease's Bows Against The Barons, a 1930s children's novel which is a rare example of children's communist propaganda. Last year it got a very good reception as a novel, but the propaganda element went largely unnoticed.

I don't think it's because my class were unsophisticated - they're familiar with the relevant theory and history. Instead, I think it's because the general culture is very disinclined to examine class in a political sense. Downton Abbey and various working-class soaps and comedies prove that there's plenty of cultural mileage to be made out of class differences, but the irresistible tide of individualism, allied to the downfall of mass employment means that political class-consciousness seems to be a thing of the past. We'll boo (or thrill) when a toff behaves arrogantly in Downton, and scoff at Vicky Pollard or the Big Fat Gypsies, but this is all class as lifestyle: the implied audience is securely middle-class, and the ways in which class is portrayed (snobbish, patronising, loud, drunk etc) are viewed as individual choices to some extent. The slew of these shows is meant to discipline us into adopting middle-class values: don't be common, aspire to the Downton lifestyle but don't be arrogant either.

I wonder if this year's class will be different: whether Occupy and Greece and Tahrir Square and bankers' bonuses and a government made up of the landed gentry will alter their positions as readers. I think my generation and the ones after me have lost the sense that we have a collective identity. We consume, usually as individuals. We work as individuals, jealously guarding each demarcation and distinction. Union membership has been crushed outside the public sector - and even in it the least well-paid are excluded by their insecure contracts and fear of victimisation.

After Trease, we're doing two plays about the clash of new and old money - Massinger's A New Way To Pay Old Debts (1625) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, a comic and tragic play in rhyming couplets about the clash between aristocratic corrupt bankers and pushy working-class corrupt bankers, from the 1980s. I saw the Birmingham Rep revival a couple of years ago, and was stunned by how prescient the play was.



If you get a chance - go. Then we look at some of Gerard Winstanley's pamphlets, Churchill's play about him, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and end the module with Lewis Jones's misunderstood Cwmardy and - in total contrast - Waugh's Vile Bodies - now adapted for the stage.

Cornish men are fishermen…

A Cornish song, famously turned into a graffiti challenge on a mine's wall, ran 'Cornish men are fishermen/Cornish men are miners too/When all the fish and tin are gone/What are Cornish men to do?'.

I thought of this last night while listening to Paul Uppal MP, Emma Reynolds MP, Ken Harris and Jane Nelson debate employability. They - and we - all support further education for all, apprenticeships, transferable skills and all the other current jargon. Emma, Ken and Jane also spoke up for the humanist values, very hearteningly.

But we still have a problem. Not everybody can be a web developer or a graphic designer. Economies can't run on serving each other coffee, cutting each other's hair and doing people's nails. I've found my personal solution: 4 degrees and I'm in the 12th (yes, 12th) year of temporary contracts. The current one expires in June. No contract, no mortgage, no planning for the future.

But I'll be OK. It's what used to be called the working class that's bothering me. What's the point of apprenticeships if there are no jobs out there? The UK abandoned investment in industry after WW2: no innovation, no specialisation, no energy efficiency - then affected to be shocked when the metal-bashing jobs went abroad, quickly followed by the highly-skilled manual jobs which could have replaced them. In recent years, the Labour government provided mass higher education, but didn't develop an economy to take advantage of these skills, leading to degree-holders colonising the jobs traditionally taken by the less-educated. It made HE look like a way of massaging the unemployment figures rather than a serious plan.

Some sections of society will be fine: bankers, hedge-fund traders, shareholders and especially the executives who've diverted what should go to shareholders into their own profits by way of bonuses and what they disgustingly term 'compensation' (for what?).

We have a problem. In the old days workers sold their labour, and owners profited from it by selling physical goods. The UK has abandoned goods in favour of intellectual work - rather than ripping stuff out of the ground, business monopolises the fruit of state education and workers' ingenuity. This makes executives rich, but it privatises intelligence and - more pressingly - leaves massive swathes of the country not just unemployed, but unemployable. What are they to do? In the boom times, taxes from the City covered the benefits payments and we left these people to a life of not-very-pleasant indolence. Now that cash has gone and the government's suddenly discovered that these people are 'benefit scroungers', feckless, idle people 'too comfortable on benefits' (as Uppal and one hysterical audience member claimed last night).

I don't think they are. The problem is that there are 60 million people in Britain and we've abandoned mass employment. They aren't unemployable because of their individual failings: they're unemployable because our economic structure is designed to exclude them. Capitalism relentlessly replaces workers with machines and - in the modern period - physical work with mental work. We used to pity those with arduous jobs: now millions of people envy those lucky enough to be struggling along on the minimum wage in some dead-end drudgery.

Governments used to be 'for' the people, at least in theory. Now they operate in the interests of capital without any qualms. They shrug their shoulders and point at China: how does the British worker compete with a billion people ready and willing to work harder, for longer and for massively lower pay? The government's answer, of course, is that we should join the race to the bottom: safe in the knowledge that the political class and their children will never have to suffer personally. It's ludicrous anyway. Those jobs aren't coming back. When the Chinese demand too much money, the British, American and European corporations which control industry will move the factories to somewhere willing to accept even less. The needs of the workers here and in China will be left far behind in the pursuit of even greater profit margins. We're used to thinking of unemployment as a temporary, shocking aberration which happens on a mass scale at moments of crisis: we need to start thinking of it as a permanent and necessary condition of successful capitalism. Lots of unemployed = ever lower wages. Increasing mechanisation = ever-increasing unemployment = permanently declining wages.

But what should we do? Is there meaningful, non-exploitative work to be done? I think there is: our infrastructure is, you may have noticed, knackered. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for it. The corporations which depend on the transport, education and health system to provide decent staff (this is how they privatise the common wisdom or what Marx called the 'general intellect') spend their time exporting jobs and hiding profits from the taxman, while citizens have been encouraged to see taxation as extortion rather than the subscription we pay to join a civilised society. The Greeks bought off their middle classes with massive state employment - and now the bond markets are taking their revenge. In the meantime, billions of people sit around, unwanted. In first world countries, contraception slowly reduces their numbers, but that's a very long-term and quite sinister solution. In developing countries, poor health care, high mortality and manual labour encourages large families - reducing the chance of developing an educated society in a vicious circle of deprivation.

The logic of this is the total abolition of international proletarian solidarity, and the dissolution of national solidarity too: the upper classes are walling themselves into gated communities, living off their bonuses and share options, hating and fearing the not-wanted-on-voyage poor: many of whom have been educated just enough to understand what's been done to them. This is of course quite useful: as Paul Mason frequently points out, the conditions of revolution require a vanguard which is educated, articulate and excluded - all those graduates suddenly finding that they're poorer than their parents.

How the state buys off these potential revolutionaries is as yet unclear. Apprenticeships and internships might help a tiny minority, but the fervent hope of the ruling classes is that the education system is so dedicated to the maintenance of the hegemonic elite that the disenfranchised youth won't have the tools to elucidate their situation. I disagree: it will take a long time, but consciousness will return.

National Unemployed Workers' Movement

What seriously depresses me is the passivity of the long-term unemployed. In the 30s, across the US and Europe, militancy rose quickly and gloriously - perhaps because unionisation was prevalent, and because the workers knew that mass employment was the normal condition in industrial societies. Now, mass unemployment is a fundamental element of the capitalist structure. They've got used to it, and nobody has any trust in governments any more: the state works for the banks and the City, everybody can see that.

The working poor aren't going to strike - it's been made legally difficult and self-harming. When the university staff went on strike recently, virtually all the picket-line crossers were the lowest-paid: cleaners, caterers, security guards. Why? Because they're desperate to retain the tiny stake they have in society, however oppressive. They're all on zero-hours contracts: sackable in an instant. During the academic holidays, they're left to fend for themselves, unpaid. We teachers, conversely, have pensions and contracts (however temporary): we're not yet proletarianised and we're fighting desperately to stay that way. For the cleaners, the battle's over and they've lost. If a university can't treat its staff properly, what hope for contract cleaners at merchant banks or supermarkets? The militant student isn't fighting alongside the ex-working class: s/he's fighting to avoid joining it. When the underclass does revolt - as in the riots last August - the mode is one which horrifies or baffles the rest of us. Smashing up Snappy Snaps and nicking water bottles might seem stupid to us, but it's a mark of the depoliticisation and dissolution of a class which in the 1930s was capable of sophisticated analysis and concerted action.

Instead of meaningful work, we've become the willing servants of the information economy: every time I blog, and every time you add something to Facebook, we're handing over a free product to be sold to advertisers and corporate interests. They know that information is a commodity: we haven't yet caught on. The old solution was to kick out the bourgeoisie and circulate the profits of industry amongst the actual workers: now there's no work and the profit is in intangible, low-employment activity. I suppose we could all work in Farmville or playing MMORPGS to generate online goods like magic swords for sale to talentless rich kids (as featured in Ready Player One) but it's a minority pursuit and not good for social cohesion.

I don't know what to do about the millions who would have once made things. We're in the process of taking away the benefits designed to keep them calm and obedient: is the government sure it knows what to do when these people start to lash out?

The Downton Manoeuvre: where DO the Tories get their ideas from?

You may have noticed that the Tories have floated the idea of letting the super-rich off some of their taxes in return for employing more servants. No, really! As if the rich don't already have enough money, most of it hidden from the Revenue in any case.

It's a mad idea economically: that a modern economy with 60 million citizens can be heaved out of recession by employing a few more maids and butlers. It's offensive too: it indicates that the landed gentry running the government really believe that Britain's salvation lies in returning to Downton Abbey, where contented servants tug their forelocks in gratitude to the Master's generosity. No doubt the sub-minimum wage salaries will be enhanced by a few eggs and the left-overs from banquets. The ultimate in thoughtless trickle-down economics.

However, there's more to this than meets the eye. Although the inspiration is supposed to be a stupid rightwing Swedish tax break, the idea rang a bell in the recesses of my weird little mind.

Come with me on a journey to the outer fringes of the confused, weird and sinister 1930s British aristocracy…

After the depression, most European countries spawned fascist or neofascist political groups: the New Party/BUF in Britain, the laughable Blueshirts and Greenshirts in Ireland, the Nazis in Germany, Action Française and others - loads of them, some successful, others not. We're familiar with the most famous groups, but there was a multitude of groupuscules out there, competing for ideas and space. In Britain, many of these anti-democrats rejected Mosley's fascism - too European, too violent, too political, too proletarian, too urban (according to some, too Jewish!).

Out on the fringes, an agrarian, environmentalist, medievalist movement stirred. Some of them were utopian idealists who fell in with the wrong crowd, amongst them the Kibbo Kift, whose themes of organic, 'natural' communities soon saw them associated with racial purity movements. Starting off innocently, their naive concern for stability, static communities, independence and purity led in small steps towards a much more disquieting set of beliefs.

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift parade in their clan, tribe and lodge divisions

Others, like the Catholic-inspired Distributivists were concerned with social order and called for the return of Guild practices and a peasantry protected and nurtured by a true aristocracy. Democracy of course was out, but an organic link to the land (which implicitly excluded migrants, the urban and Jews in particular) and a total distrust of finance (those pesky Jews again). From these origins came the rightwing element of the modern environmental movement: members owned rather a lot of England and wanted it to stay green and pleasant.

Amongst the groups urging this return to a quietist English fantasy were the English Mistery and its successor, the English Array, led by Gerard Wallop, the 9th Earl of Portsmouth and Viscount Lymington. Like many of the hyper-nationalist English aristocrats of the day (including Churchill and the Astors), he was half-American and spent his early years in the US, a product of the Victorian-Edwardian aristocracy's importation of heiresses in return for titles.

Banner of the English Mistery

The English Mistery believed that only those who had a long-standing and large stake in English society truly possessed the wisdom required to organise a country - the landed gentry, who would protect an obedient peasantry and maintain the monarchy's prestige against foreign (ironic, given the monarchy's recent origins), Jewish, urban and socialist attacks - it was very similar to Action Française's authoritarian, hierarchical neofascism, though lacking the numbers to be anything more than a Tory ginger group.

Poster for the English Mistery - beautifully illustrating their concerns

Lymington's leadership meant that the Mistery had a degree of respectability: he gathered around himself a motley crew of peers, authors and environmentalists: Rolf Gardiner of the Kibbo Kift was a member, as was Colonel Seton-Hutchinson, later exposed as a Nazi spy. Amongst the ideas they promoted, funding the aristocracy to employ (or shelter, as they saw it) many more servants was a key idea: that way, the working classes wouldn't be subject to the vicissitudes of the coal market, for instance. Organic food and farming were also important: naturally better and requiring more workers - the movement refused entry to women and openly espoused the virtues of benevolent feudalism. They weren't the only ones either: the aristocratic, pro-Tory, pro-Mussolini British Fascisti - who viewed the BUF as upstart commoners - got there first (thanks for reminding me, Simon)

The English Mistery collapsed in the mid-30s, to be replaced by the English Array, attracting plenty more well-known people, such as Edmund Blunden, AK Chesterton (who edited Lymington's New Pioneer) and his Catholic-Distributivist group. Lymington and his supporters, though never making a big impact as a group, utilised their aristocratic network to become leading members of the wider WW2 government, founded what became the now irreproachable Soil Association and other early green groups (alongside former fascists such as Jorian Jenks), and took political and administrative posts under Churchill. Lymington ended up in the pro-Nazi British People's Party and eventually emigrated with lots of other unpleasant aristocrats to Kenya.

The central tenets of the Mistery, the Array and their allies were: an essential link between 'pure' English blood and the soil (key to Aryan German politics too); feudalism; anti-democracy; distrust of finance (which they associated with Jewry); hatred of socialism; a deep and abiding faith in the inherited wisdom and benevolence of the aristocracy.

It's probably a coincidence that David Cameron, a multimillionaire aristocrat and George Osborne, a multimillionaire aristocrat who will inherit a Baronetcy, are proposing a silly policy first dreamed up by some deluded maverick toffs in the maelstrom of the Dark Decade. But that doesn't mean that there's no link between them. These two are directly descended from the circles which formed the Array and the Mistery. They share a deep faith in aristocratic values and contempt for the poor ('benefit scroungers'). Their political mission is to persuade us that they are indeed the 'natural' ruling class, in whom we should put our trust: this is why ideology is rarely mentioned in Conservative discourse. Instead, the narrative is about tradition and benevolence. Our role is to obey, not to question. Despite the modern finance-led economic positions they take (there's certainly no anti-Semitism left), the current Tory leadership is firmly within the tradition of aristocratic patronage.

Do your patriotic duty: become a butler.

Live-blogging the Uppalopacalypse

Probably 40 people here - a scattering of staff. On the panel: Emma Reynolds MP, Paul Uppal MP, Jane Nelson from the university Executive and Ken Harris the SU President, moderated by Dan, a very good student activist who looks somewhere between 1970s Gerry Adams and Ricky Tomlinson in that family comedy whose name I can't remember. The mood so far is muted expectation. Uppal's in a very decent suit (he is, in case you don't know, a multimillionaire). Jane's wearing pop-art polka dots and Emma is in scarlet and resembles Kathy Newman from Channel 4 news.

A little misleading: Ms. Reynolds is a lot smilier than this photo implies. On the right is Ken, the SU President. 

Ken in full flow

First q: is education a public good?
ER: Yes. We're concerned about it. The original fees was controversial but at least we capped it. We increased the quality of education and improved provision. The government is taking funding away from humanities and creative subjects. The funding cut is almost privatisation.

They say living well is the best revenge, eh Paul?

PU: Yes, it is a public good and I benefited from it. It is a universal truth that parties in power impose fees and in opposition oppose them. That illustrates the heart of the issue. Tuition fees came from the Browne Inquiry. If we have an honest and mature discussion, we must say that the route was a fait accompli. More private money is the reality to get an education system fit for the twenty-first century. £9000 is a good news story: applications are actually up. You have to be careful to look for the positives though I appreciate it's difficult for some. I got a free education but didn't get a grant. I value education. It's been a foundation for me. Those in opposition always oppose but always go impose it in power.

JN: it's a public and private good. Neither party has tackled the issue head on. Participation was very low when I went to university but tax was very high: juggling that balance is always difficult. The policy we now have is a mishmash and won't reduce government expenditure in the short or medium term.

ER chatting to a student after the event

KH: It's a public good. I wouldn't be here otherwise: working with a family, I decided to come back to education, calculated on affording £3000. Now I wouldn't have left my job to go to university. It's a barrier to higher education. My oldest son (13) is already making me worry about the costs of university in a few years' time. My sister has 4 children: she can't afford to send her children. We don't all come from a privileged background but we can still succeed and it looks like the door is closing.

Q2: Now the fees are trebled, will a sector of society be put off?
ER: I am really concerned about this. Applications are up here but the national rate is 10% down. It's not black and white but £27000 is a lot of debt for the start of your life. Getting on the housing ladder is harder, the jobs are harder to find. This might lead to fewer students. I went to Oxford: I don't want the elite universities to bar the brightest from going there. We already have a problem in that very few of their students come from the state school system. I don't want to discourage people though. Education is also a private benefit, hence our introduction of fees: 60% of young people not in HE need help too.

ER meets an overseas student. Paul Uppal had a train to catch and couldn't hang around. Damn: I wanted his autograph. 

JN: I'm quite optimistic. There aren't many other options post-school at the moment. The detail of how the funding works has been obscured by the politics: you don't pay fees until you're earning £21k. When you start repaying what you owe, it relates to your earnings, not your debt, so if you go to an expensive university, you simply repay for longer. It's all income related. When fees went up to £3000 in 2006, applications peaked the year before, dipped, then levelled out again.
PU: Try to take the politics out of it. Debt or investment? The advantage of having a degree is enormous. It's a matter of perception. At the Grammar School they see this as an opportunity to grasp (?!). Earn above £41k and you pay more. We've faced choices in government and if we want first-class education this is the best option on the table. I've been to India in recent months: their students covet an English university education: a UK Plc brand (vomit). I'm optimistic. My extended family won't be put off.
KH: I've been fortunate to work on student recruitment for 2012. 95% of them don't like fees but still intend to come here. There aren't any jobs out there. It will lead to a more informed choice of subject and discussion of earning potential. With the focus on STEM, what about arts and humanities, where's the creativity? What legacy are we going to leave behind?

From the floor: I think the HE system needs a kick up the backside. The people responsible are dimwits running education - civil servants, think tanks: targets etc. miss the whole point of education. We're letting students down badly. Under Blair, education didn't lead to jobs. We need plasterers and engineers and having to import them.

Q2: Should degrees be focussed on jobs?
PU: There can be a disconnect between provision and the work ethic and what employers want. The chair of the Black Country LEP is working on school-business involvement. The 9 primary schools and 3 secondary schools improved their GCSE results by 25%. The preparation for a life in work hasn't been explored enough. Vocational training needs more attention.
ER: when I was at school in Codsall I did several language exchanges. In Spain, they don't often do degrees in non-vocational subjects. Our system is better than that. Academic studies encourage people to think and make arguments, which is why other countries in Europe envy us. I take the point that we need to concentrate on non-university people to provide skills but we're not going to survive with low-skilled workers in a globalised system. Young people need skills transferable between lots of jobs. I'm proud we expanded the university population. China and India are producing thousands [millions, I think] of graduates and we can't be left behind.
KH: Degrees fit for jobs? We've shut down the manufacturing. We've seen Birmingham's car factories go, my employer Cadbury's is declining. We need to go back into schools and provide better role models and celebrate success and achievement so that kids naturally want to go to university. We have a society of get-rich, get-famous and we need to stop this kind of aspiration.
JN: The majority of graduate jobs don't ask for a specific subject: employers actually want the ability to think. Even if you do a technical degree, a 40 year career can't depend only on a 3 year degree: these things date very quickly. Most graduates will have 10 jobs: the particular skills they need for their first job won't sustain them: it's the other qualities they acquire.

From the floor: 'quite a lot of degrees don't go out of fashion: philosophy, for example'.
JN: As a politics and philosophy graduate, I completely agree with you. Distinguishing between what's necessary and sufficient is one skill I use regularly.
ER: my degree is PPE - very useful
PU: I studied politics too.

Chair: employability - unemployment is at a high. What does the audience think?
From the floor: you learn a lot at university that isn't on the curriculum - political socialisation. I've been here for many years and have watched governments remove all sorts of subsidies. There's been a concerted effort by both parties to shift the balance of what both young and older people learn in university. If we look at the privatisation argument, the public/private funding split was 55/45 in England in 2009. Getting rid of grants, bringing in fees in stages educates students in a narrower way: to expect low-paid routine jobs and a life of wage-slavery. Blunkett and Browne et al made the case that you pay for what you get out of it: individualisation, marketisation, competition. What students don't learn is mutuality, support, empathy: the postwar values once supported by both parties.

JN: on political socialisation - I've seen the expansion of the system and its intake make universities much less rarefied places. The extra-curricular concerns coping with families etc, rather than living away in isolated activities. Students now aren't shut off from everyday life: they're more grounded. There are some advantages to that.
ER: being at uni isn't just about the education. It's about socialisation but I agree with Jane that expanding the intake creates a much more diverse social environment. When my parents were at university, the percentage was tiny. It's fair to ask students to make a contribution but now we're insisting in arts and humanities that you pay for the whole thing. I think that's the danger with the 85% cut in the teaching grant.
KH: People do learn different things at university, but the fees system is commercialising education. Coventry is bringing in the Netto degree at £48000. Some people - mature, mortgaged - will be tempted by that. What people won't realise is that you won't get the things that come with a full university: library, academic support, an SU, social interaction… If I wanted to be lectured at then go away I'd have done an online degree. I've really appreciated interaction with students at seminars and elsewhere. With new providers offering cut-price degrees the learning experience is going to be completely different. We'll have multiple tiers of institution and the employers will judge you on the institution not the degree classification.
PU: I was at Matthew Boulton Technical College for A-levels. At university I was the only non-white person there. Met my first double-barrelled person. That social aspect explodes vocabulary and soft skills. I took that from university more than anything else. The fundamental aspect is human interaction. People talk about new media but human interaction is the authentic extra yard that seals the deal. If college can enhance those skills, that's something that's still an asset. My relatives have been transformed by university. But increasingly preparation for modern work is for 9-10 careers. Social interaction and networking is essential for this.

Q3: You mentioned non-white faces Mr Uppal. After several years of lobbying, the government is considering whether or not to include caste under the Equality Act. It hasn't been done yet despite the report finding discrimination in the UK. Will you lobby for this?
PU: This predates the current government. It's not an issue that's come onto my radar. Give me your details.
Q. That tells me about your position and caste status: had you belonged to a lower caste, you'd be aware of it. Had you been a victim you'd have been concerned.
PU: Some of my best friends are lower-caste.

Me: tax breaks on property developers or cuts in disabled property? You're a millionaire.
Uppal: I haven't called for tax breaks. You're just reading it that way. I am independently wealthy. I'm not a developer I'm an investor [eh? Isn't that worse? He's contributed nothing to society. He also got a bit huffy that I wasn't 'looking at' him - I was typing his response. Apparently his assistant was looking a bit twitchy too].
ER: I think taxes should increase. I agree those with broader shoulders should pay more. I don't think the 50p tax rate should be abandoned and I don't think bankers bonuses should carry on. It's not right that the incredibly wealthy get too far ahead. We need equality - not just 'equality of opportunity'. Unequal societies have higher crime, worse health and more expensive health systems. We need to take tough measures to tackle this. On the benefit changes it's disgraceful that if you've had cancer, you lose your ESA after a year because you're deemed to be better. There is a real problem with fairness with this government.
KH: If you can afford to pay more, you should. What we're doing now is taxing the poor. If you're on low wages, your cash goes on taxable expenditure - heating etc. The changes are moving us backwards. We're supposed to be civilised. These changes are abandoning the old sick and disabled. We're all going to be old.
PU: On who should share the burden of course it should be carried by those with broader shoulders. I think we should keep the 50p tax rate. But inequality grew at a phenomenal rate under Labour and venture capitalists paid less tax than their cleaners. I'm sorry Emma chose to be partisan. Welfare reform is important. I have been dirt poor. There's no nobility in poverty. My government will provide a ladder out of poverty which is why I voted for the Welfare Reform Bill.
ER: I'm a politican and I'm Labour. Our divisions are healthy. I did say we didn't do enough but we did redistribute. Even Peter Mandelson is no longer relaxed about people getting filthy rich. The crisis has underlined that people risking our money are still being rewarded. We need to fix a culture in those sectors that are out of control.
JH: I support the 50p rate and taxing the rich. But the system of tax and benefits is hugely complex, as is student funding. At least income tax is simple and there.
PU: Lib Dem idea of raising the threshold is good.

From the floor: I've got 2 disabled children. We didn't choose to have genetically-poorly children. My wife had to give up to care for them. Cutting their support isn't a route out of poverty. Raising the tax threshold doesn't help: care allowance will have no effect on that whatsoever.
ER: I agree. I don't understand why welfare reform is hitting people like the disabled. The government shouldn't make it more difficult.

Time's almost up! Oh god - feels like we've hardly started.

Q4: Do we trust markets to solve employability or do we look to government to solve the unemployment crisis?
ER: Both. Government sets the conditions. We're losing public AND private sector jobs - this is economic madness. There do have to be spending cuts or tax rises, but too much too quickly puts people on the dole, damaging the public funds. Another quarter of negative growth puts us into recession officially.
KH: It has to be both. My first job was in a government office. There was a lot of waste - nobody seemed to care. Reforms are good but the cuts are too big. Something needs to be done but I do know personally that it's too easy not to work and be on benefits - that needs to be reformed.
JN: I'd like to see government money going into public infrastructure, especially public transport - a win/win approach.
PU: It's a combination. Of course I disagree with Emma. Credibility is the watchword. Governments not seen as credible are dumped by bondholders non-politically [this is utterly naive and/or deceptive]. Bondholders approve of what the UK government is doing. I will lobby for public infrastructure if you want. There is good news out there: the trade gap is lower than since April 2003.

No interest in green questions at all! I didn't realise it was meant to be a theme of the evening: I'm massively concerned about the environment and feel awful when my students scoff at green issues.

Q5: Why is the government not enforcing benefit scrounging crackdowns with harsh punishments? I know people scamming the system who are never punished.
PU: It's at both ends of the scale. People want fairness at the bottom as well as the top. Work should always pay. A lady on Rugby Street told me that [he's used this one before kids] she's ridiculed by her neighbours for going out to work.
ER: I agree with what Paul said. There's a lot of focus on scroungers - but we need to find jobs for people, and tax-evaders get away with a lot more than benefit scroungers.
[Actually - the benefits system suffers from massive errors and minor fraud, and plenty of people don't claim what they're entitled to - but it suits the Tories and New Labour's right wing to bang on about scroungers, something Emma didn't do].

Time's up - so soon.
Final score. 
Jane Nelson: I like Jane. She's got a sharp mind and humanist values tempered by experience and a strategic outlook.

Paul Uppal. I'll admit it up front: I already don't like him. Today saw a tactic I've seen before. When he's amongst friends, he spouts hardline neoconservative viciousness. When he's in front of an audience like this, he attempts to manufacture a post-ideological consensus: he keeps saying things like 'let's not bring politics into this'. Er… he's an MP. What this actually means is 'I'm dealing with reality, you're playing games', and it's a way of closing down debate by making people like me sound rude. I have to admit that I didn't ask my question entirely coherently, but he was rattled, from what others say. He's very smooth and practised.

Emma Reynolds: I'm a Labour member, so you'll probably expect me to be on her side, though I will point out that I'm from the irredentist neo-Trotskyite Time For A Purge wing of the party (or in my tradition, the Party). But - she's brilliant. A really good communicator with a first-class mind but also the human qualities lacking in so many politicians. She also likes a bit of a fight: she clearly believes that with ideology comes competition for ideas and allegiance which we should be proud of. A bit of a star.

Ken Harris: he's the SU President. The institution's been moribund for years, until Ken, who is a very charismatic guy, started the recovery. He's a mature student, working-class with kids, and his politics are populist/centrist: not predictable. Always good value on a panel.

Final event of the evening: the Vice-Chancellor popped up to gloat about Sunderland's win against Stoke. Bah. I almost got to the end of the week without bumping into him. You win, VC!