Today is going to be a good day. I have a meeting to discuss a fun joint paper on masculinity, jazz and the modern novel. I have a presentation to write for my colleagues on Twitter for Academics, and Grant Shapps is in more trouble for being a small-time chiseller. And the Olympics have finished - sad in a way but also a reminder that I had a wonderful time as a volunteer at the fencing.
So here's one of the songs that's always made me happy: Shonen Knife covering 'On Top of the World'. Japanese female indie rock: what's not to love (see also: the frankly unhinged and wonderful Melt Banana)?
Monday, 10 September 2012
Friday, 7 September 2012
You can't touch me…
'cos I'm part of the union: a rather neat old Unison advert for the benefits of solidarity:
Scraping the bottom of the oil barrel?
I wonder if Newsnight will bother to reply…
Dear Newsnight,
Dear Newsnight,
after Peter Lilley's appearance on Newsnight to discuss the economics of climate change, could you answer a couple of questions so that I can decide whether to take this matter further?
1. Was anyone at Newsnight aware that Mr Lilley is non-executive chairman of Tethys Petroleum Ltd?
2. Does Newsnight have a policy of asking guests about potential conflicts of interest before booking them?
3. If Newsnight was aware of Mr Lilley's position, why was the discussion not foregrounded to inform the readers?
As it stands, Mr Lilley's violent attack on renewable energy appears to have been framed as an appearance simply by an expert who'd written 'a report' rather than as an individual with an economic interest in one particular energy industry.
Yours etc.
My students eat dinner at noon
The Guardian has done a data exercise to analyse the social composition of Britain's universities. As you might expect, dripping is not on the menu at the Russell Group universities: Oxford manages a magnificent 11.5% of students from manual/occupational and few of its peers manage more than 30%. The Hegemon is near the top, with 53% of the intake drawn from what's traditionally known as the working class.
Obviously there are problems with classification here: there are several working classes and beneath them, a 'non-working' class which seems to have been abandoned. In a post-industrial society, it's always more complicated than the old days of a white male mas-industrial proletariat. And of course the posh universities aren't entirely to blame for having a socially-elevated intake: as they keep pointing out, getting working-class people to apply to Oxford is difficult. Though I think they protest too much: I read that Oxford's 'outreach' programme last year took a roadshow to such benighted, aspiration-free and deprived places as… Eton College, Manchester Grammar School (private) and other sink-holes of social exclusion.
I'm enormously proud of our 53%. As a socialist, I know that education is power. We open our doors to the majority of the population which has never been able to pull its economic, cultural and political weight, thanks to the entrenched privilege of the jealous middle and upper classes. But it's also complicated. I worry when I hear the law students and others talk about getting rich - encouraged by people like Constance Briscoe, who told them that being rich = victory. Yes, I want my students to have a greater share of the economic pie, but I'm not at all interested in encouraging individual greed. For me, the purpose of mass education is to enable what we'll call the working class to access the social, cultural, political and economic goodies previously reserved for their supposed superiors.
The debate around mass education has been around for a long time. Matthew Arnold felt that it was the only way to stop the swinish mob rising up and smashing art and culture to pieces. Nietszche and his followers felt that the mob was incapable of education, and that offering it to them only encouraged them to disobey their enlightened Masters. Some on the hard left suspect that a bourgeois education is simply a hegemonic tool for conveying anti-proletarian ideology. Not me: I know that getting access to culture doesn't mean forcing them to accept dominant interpretations - we're way past that kind of hypodermic needle model of transmission. My students are - or are potentially - independent, critical thinkers, despite eating dinner at noon and sending the port round the wrong way.
However, there is a down side to mass working-class education. Some of my siblings went to élite universities (Cambridge, Imperial, Durham). Visiting them, I realised what exactly everybody else is excluded from. Not just the networks which ensure a gilded and powerful life (social capital, it's called), but the sheer resources. Art on the walls. Any book you might ever want. Nobel prize-winners reading your work. Subsidised holidays (oh yes) and food. Tiny classes and one-to-one tuition. My siblings felt that they'd earned it through getting good A-levels. I felt that it illustrated the maxim 'to those that have, shall be given more'. I look at my students, juggling jobs, and child-care, and money worries, turning up to a university bursting at the seams, and wonder what they could do if we had one-to-one tuition, if we could send them off on cultural adventures, have seminars of fewer than thirty students, or a free creche, or star researchers on the books, and the globe's movers and shakers nurturing them. Perhaps they need it more than the kids who've gone from Eton to Oxford.
What I'm saying is this: there are two educational systems. The élite one is wonderful, but it's a bespoke model in a culture which really believes that there is an intellectual aristocracy which deserves all the treats. Then there's a warehouse or factory educational model in which as many kids are crammed into knackered buildings as possible. The élite take degrees in PPE, Art History, Medicine and the like. Many of mine do 'vocational' courses designed to fit them into the neoliberal economy, rather than train them for power. They are discriminated against, and excluded.
So it's a dilemma. I want mass, working-class education. I want it for social justice. I want working class students to do Medicine and Anglo-Saxon and PPE, but I want them to be independent of the cultural and ideological positions inherent in hegemonic educational structures. I don't want them tossed the crumbs of a 'good-enough' training scheme which fits them for lower-management. I also want people to choose non-academic training and be proud and respected.
How? Er… Now you're asking. Certainly pre-university education must push students to aspire, but the university system currently seems like a vehicle for retarding social mobility rather than enhancing it. Personally, I'd abolish them all. Seriously: I'd amalgamate them and distribute subjects and expertise nationally. If Russell Group teachers are so great, let's see them teach my students. I'd end the REF research funding structure, which only exists to make sure serious funding goes to Russell Group universities, and I'd end pre-results admissions and interviews. No cosy chats designed to establish whether a student is 'one of us'. I'd also abolish the private schools, of course, or at least remove their charitable status.
Curriculum is essential too: the major contribution of progressive humanities departments is widening the canon from texts approved by the cultural elite to the sum of human cultural activity. Thanks to Raymond Williams, Cultural Studies, Reader-Response, Post-Colonialist, Feminist and Queer Theory, we insist that all cultural artefacts and practices are inherently worthy of study. I put working-class writing, Welsh writing and all sorts of overlooked gems on the course lists without feeling tokenistic or patronising. This might seem obvious to you, but have a look at Palgrave's The Short Story in Britain by Maunder, Robbins and Liggins. One chapter is devoted to the short story in Scotland. One sentence of the chapter on Scotland mentions Wales. That is a perfect example of elitist, metropolitan exclusion-by-canon: the short story is central to Scottish and Welsh literary culture, for a wide variety of reasons - yet if you took this book, with it's exhaustive title, you'd never know.
And that's why we need to worry about class and education.
Obviously there are problems with classification here: there are several working classes and beneath them, a 'non-working' class which seems to have been abandoned. In a post-industrial society, it's always more complicated than the old days of a white male mas-industrial proletariat. And of course the posh universities aren't entirely to blame for having a socially-elevated intake: as they keep pointing out, getting working-class people to apply to Oxford is difficult. Though I think they protest too much: I read that Oxford's 'outreach' programme last year took a roadshow to such benighted, aspiration-free and deprived places as… Eton College, Manchester Grammar School (private) and other sink-holes of social exclusion.
I'm enormously proud of our 53%. As a socialist, I know that education is power. We open our doors to the majority of the population which has never been able to pull its economic, cultural and political weight, thanks to the entrenched privilege of the jealous middle and upper classes. But it's also complicated. I worry when I hear the law students and others talk about getting rich - encouraged by people like Constance Briscoe, who told them that being rich = victory. Yes, I want my students to have a greater share of the economic pie, but I'm not at all interested in encouraging individual greed. For me, the purpose of mass education is to enable what we'll call the working class to access the social, cultural, political and economic goodies previously reserved for their supposed superiors.
The debate around mass education has been around for a long time. Matthew Arnold felt that it was the only way to stop the swinish mob rising up and smashing art and culture to pieces. Nietszche and his followers felt that the mob was incapable of education, and that offering it to them only encouraged them to disobey their enlightened Masters. Some on the hard left suspect that a bourgeois education is simply a hegemonic tool for conveying anti-proletarian ideology. Not me: I know that getting access to culture doesn't mean forcing them to accept dominant interpretations - we're way past that kind of hypodermic needle model of transmission. My students are - or are potentially - independent, critical thinkers, despite eating dinner at noon and sending the port round the wrong way.
However, there is a down side to mass working-class education. Some of my siblings went to élite universities (Cambridge, Imperial, Durham). Visiting them, I realised what exactly everybody else is excluded from. Not just the networks which ensure a gilded and powerful life (social capital, it's called), but the sheer resources. Art on the walls. Any book you might ever want. Nobel prize-winners reading your work. Subsidised holidays (oh yes) and food. Tiny classes and one-to-one tuition. My siblings felt that they'd earned it through getting good A-levels. I felt that it illustrated the maxim 'to those that have, shall be given more'. I look at my students, juggling jobs, and child-care, and money worries, turning up to a university bursting at the seams, and wonder what they could do if we had one-to-one tuition, if we could send them off on cultural adventures, have seminars of fewer than thirty students, or a free creche, or star researchers on the books, and the globe's movers and shakers nurturing them. Perhaps they need it more than the kids who've gone from Eton to Oxford.
What I'm saying is this: there are two educational systems. The élite one is wonderful, but it's a bespoke model in a culture which really believes that there is an intellectual aristocracy which deserves all the treats. Then there's a warehouse or factory educational model in which as many kids are crammed into knackered buildings as possible. The élite take degrees in PPE, Art History, Medicine and the like. Many of mine do 'vocational' courses designed to fit them into the neoliberal economy, rather than train them for power. They are discriminated against, and excluded.
So it's a dilemma. I want mass, working-class education. I want it for social justice. I want working class students to do Medicine and Anglo-Saxon and PPE, but I want them to be independent of the cultural and ideological positions inherent in hegemonic educational structures. I don't want them tossed the crumbs of a 'good-enough' training scheme which fits them for lower-management. I also want people to choose non-academic training and be proud and respected.
How? Er… Now you're asking. Certainly pre-university education must push students to aspire, but the university system currently seems like a vehicle for retarding social mobility rather than enhancing it. Personally, I'd abolish them all. Seriously: I'd amalgamate them and distribute subjects and expertise nationally. If Russell Group teachers are so great, let's see them teach my students. I'd end the REF research funding structure, which only exists to make sure serious funding goes to Russell Group universities, and I'd end pre-results admissions and interviews. No cosy chats designed to establish whether a student is 'one of us'. I'd also abolish the private schools, of course, or at least remove their charitable status.
Curriculum is essential too: the major contribution of progressive humanities departments is widening the canon from texts approved by the cultural elite to the sum of human cultural activity. Thanks to Raymond Williams, Cultural Studies, Reader-Response, Post-Colonialist, Feminist and Queer Theory, we insist that all cultural artefacts and practices are inherently worthy of study. I put working-class writing, Welsh writing and all sorts of overlooked gems on the course lists without feeling tokenistic or patronising. This might seem obvious to you, but have a look at Palgrave's The Short Story in Britain by Maunder, Robbins and Liggins. One chapter is devoted to the short story in Scotland. One sentence of the chapter on Scotland mentions Wales. That is a perfect example of elitist, metropolitan exclusion-by-canon: the short story is central to Scottish and Welsh literary culture, for a wide variety of reasons - yet if you took this book, with it's exhaustive title, you'd never know.
And that's why we need to worry about class and education.
Thursday, 6 September 2012
Just for you…
As I gather my Vice-Chancellor is an avid reader of Plashing Vole, here some educational material for the benighted Black Cat:
Derridean Insights
Thanks to Unlucky Dip for spotting this one. Not an entirely accurate paraphrase of Derrida, but not too far off. Added irony of course because the actor who cites Derrida was subsequently convicted on child pornography charges.
Contains naughty words.
Contains naughty words.
Graduation is upon us once more
Hi everyone. Amidst all the political and social gloom, The Hegemon starts a week of graduation ceremonies today. No, I don't know why we do it in September either. It's all very lovely though: hundreds of people dressed up to the nines beaming proudly. Being a widening participation institution, graduation's even more special than at the élite places: so many of our students are returners, or the first people in their families every to get to university, or have struggled against the odds to get here. It's also a much more diverse crowd than many universities, so the week's festivities highlight what I think is important about what we do: social mobility in action. I know that our non-white students, and our working-class students are far less likely to reach the top of their professions than their posh white counterparts, but we're doing our bit.
If you leave your office, you're guaranteed to find yourself press-ganged into taking photos for people and randomly congratulating graduates. I love it, actually. I manage not to mention the jobs market or any of the other clouds hanging over these people's lives, now more than ever. Just for a day, our graduates deserve to bask in their own achievements. It's great to be reminded of how much optimism is still out there. I was always a worrier - I worried about passing my degree, then about getting a job, then about passing the next degree and worried a lot about passing the one after that. I'm not, you may have gathered, a person who finds it easy just to relax and luxuriate in achievement, so I find it (albeit temporarily) uplifting to spend time with uncomplicatedly happy people.
That's why I encourage my students to go to their graduation ceremonies even if they think it's cheesy or silly, or the institution is compromised by dubious links: there will be very few days in the rest of their lives in which they're wholeheartedly praised for their achievements. Don't miss out on one of them because you're too busy/cool/shy or whatever. Don't be all 'yeah it's just for the parents' and blasé about it. Leave being cool for tomorrow. I went to all of mine - the parents were quite bored by the end and were quite relieved when I excused them from the PGCE ceremony, mostly because I didn't rate the course myself. But the others were definitely worth coping with the flummery and formality. Even if one of my friends (or so I thought) announced in public that I didn't deserve my degree. Embarrassment all round that time…
Graduation mirrors my thoughts about being a student in general. For most people, post-graduation life will involve a lot of tedium and misery. You may well find yourself in an unfulfilling job coping with pompous or simply non-simpatico people, if you get a job at all. As a student, you're asked to read and think about things which (in theory) you're already enthusiastic about. The hours are good, you can take risks and go off in different directions, you'll meet a wider section of society than you grew up in, you can re-shape your personality, appearance and beliefs, and all the world's knowledge is at your finger-tips. The main activities involve arguing about ideas with similarly passionate people. In short, it's brilliant. Work, on the whole, is rubbish. Even my glamorous job has its tedious elements! Whereas being a student is roughly three years of just thinking about stuff. You'll miss it when you leave…
One more thing. Female graduates: like your male colleagues, you all look great. But tell me: when did we as a species, decide that footwear no longer had to be shaped like, well, feet?
If you leave your office, you're guaranteed to find yourself press-ganged into taking photos for people and randomly congratulating graduates. I love it, actually. I manage not to mention the jobs market or any of the other clouds hanging over these people's lives, now more than ever. Just for a day, our graduates deserve to bask in their own achievements. It's great to be reminded of how much optimism is still out there. I was always a worrier - I worried about passing my degree, then about getting a job, then about passing the next degree and worried a lot about passing the one after that. I'm not, you may have gathered, a person who finds it easy just to relax and luxuriate in achievement, so I find it (albeit temporarily) uplifting to spend time with uncomplicatedly happy people.
That's why I encourage my students to go to their graduation ceremonies even if they think it's cheesy or silly, or the institution is compromised by dubious links: there will be very few days in the rest of their lives in which they're wholeheartedly praised for their achievements. Don't miss out on one of them because you're too busy/cool/shy or whatever. Don't be all 'yeah it's just for the parents' and blasé about it. Leave being cool for tomorrow. I went to all of mine - the parents were quite bored by the end and were quite relieved when I excused them from the PGCE ceremony, mostly because I didn't rate the course myself. But the others were definitely worth coping with the flummery and formality. Even if one of my friends (or so I thought) announced in public that I didn't deserve my degree. Embarrassment all round that time…
Graduation mirrors my thoughts about being a student in general. For most people, post-graduation life will involve a lot of tedium and misery. You may well find yourself in an unfulfilling job coping with pompous or simply non-simpatico people, if you get a job at all. As a student, you're asked to read and think about things which (in theory) you're already enthusiastic about. The hours are good, you can take risks and go off in different directions, you'll meet a wider section of society than you grew up in, you can re-shape your personality, appearance and beliefs, and all the world's knowledge is at your finger-tips. The main activities involve arguing about ideas with similarly passionate people. In short, it's brilliant. Work, on the whole, is rubbish. Even my glamorous job has its tedious elements! Whereas being a student is roughly three years of just thinking about stuff. You'll miss it when you leave…
One more thing. Female graduates: like your male colleagues, you all look great. But tell me: when did we as a species, decide that footwear no longer had to be shaped like, well, feet?
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Sighberspace
Groan. Here we go again. A bunch of self-appointed moral arbiters from the reactionary right are demanding that the government makes ISP's block all pornography automatically so that the little kiddies are protected: adults wanting a little visual stimulation will have to tell their ISP that they want to opt in.
Here's the argument against censorship, for dummies.
1. Very basically: it won't work. Any teenager hunting for filth will be way, way ahead of their parents. How long will it take, do you think, between the National No-Naughtiness Curtain being instituted and a bright teen uploading a YouTube video showing his friends how to 'opt-in'. On an even simpler level, filters never work. My university tries to block spam email based on textual analysis algorithms, but just this morning I've deleted invitations to access dictators' billions, save £££s on items of tat and increase certain sections of my anatomy beyond all proportion. So I can't quite imagine an ISP's filter managing to decide that Francis Bacon's nude portraits count as Art whereas Katie Price's la-la's are Filth.
2. Why should a porn-loving adult (and shock horror: some parents like to watch strangers doing the nasty) have to tell their ISP that that's what they plan on doing after bedtime?
3. What's next? First they came for the grumble fans (and the definition of pornography really isn't as simple as pro-censorship forces suggest). Then they came for the guns-and-ammo kids. Then for the Islamist dissidents. Who's to say that a government won't decide that anyone wanting access to robust communist discussion boards shouldn't have to notify their ISP, in case Portia and India catch sight of cynical subversion?
3. Pay attention. This is the big one. The last time some Tory MP moaned about having to worry about his little darlings watching some plasticised Californians get on down because THE GOVERNMENT WOULDN'T STOP THEM, I wrote him a letter. A letter which received no response. I pointed out the the Tories are the party of the family (they claim) and parental responsibility. I then suggested that rather than asking the state (which they habitually excoriate as a bureaucratic, remote monster) to protect the kiddies, they could try doing some bloody PARENTING.
I don't just mean that a savvy parent should occasionally check the History cache, or sit behind their pride and joy making sure they don't see anything stronger than Peppa Pig. I mean that Mummy and Daddy might consider acculturating their offspring: make sure they understand the bewildering experiences of puberty and discussing the impulses they might encounter. Then they could explain that the internet is the repository of everything they might imagine and quite a lot of things beyond their imaginations (I'm told) and that there are psychological, moral and social consequences bound up with viewing this stuff. Let each parent decide what's OK, not some - presumably very busy, red-eyed - civil servant.
Mater and Pater don't need to be a police force, nor should they demand that the government police their children's web activity. They simply need to play an active role in educating their children about the pleasures and pitfalls of pornography and the internet as a cultural space.
It's like the give-a-man-a-fish/teach-a-man-to-fish argument. Keep your daughter in a bubble of ignorance and she'll be utterly screwed up when some nasty little brat shows them a Brazilian Fart Porn (© South Park) clip in the school toilets on his mobile phone, whereas a carefully-educated kid will understand the emotional, moral and social context and make wise choices. Duh!
But that's obviously too hard. So we'll get the Daily Mail to start a moral panic instead.
Here's the argument against censorship, for dummies.
1. Very basically: it won't work. Any teenager hunting for filth will be way, way ahead of their parents. How long will it take, do you think, between the National No-Naughtiness Curtain being instituted and a bright teen uploading a YouTube video showing his friends how to 'opt-in'. On an even simpler level, filters never work. My university tries to block spam email based on textual analysis algorithms, but just this morning I've deleted invitations to access dictators' billions, save £££s on items of tat and increase certain sections of my anatomy beyond all proportion. So I can't quite imagine an ISP's filter managing to decide that Francis Bacon's nude portraits count as Art whereas Katie Price's la-la's are Filth.
2. Why should a porn-loving adult (and shock horror: some parents like to watch strangers doing the nasty) have to tell their ISP that that's what they plan on doing after bedtime?
3. What's next? First they came for the grumble fans (and the definition of pornography really isn't as simple as pro-censorship forces suggest). Then they came for the guns-and-ammo kids. Then for the Islamist dissidents. Who's to say that a government won't decide that anyone wanting access to robust communist discussion boards shouldn't have to notify their ISP, in case Portia and India catch sight of cynical subversion?
3. Pay attention. This is the big one. The last time some Tory MP moaned about having to worry about his little darlings watching some plasticised Californians get on down because THE GOVERNMENT WOULDN'T STOP THEM, I wrote him a letter. A letter which received no response. I pointed out the the Tories are the party of the family (they claim) and parental responsibility. I then suggested that rather than asking the state (which they habitually excoriate as a bureaucratic, remote monster) to protect the kiddies, they could try doing some bloody PARENTING.
I don't just mean that a savvy parent should occasionally check the History cache, or sit behind their pride and joy making sure they don't see anything stronger than Peppa Pig. I mean that Mummy and Daddy might consider acculturating their offspring: make sure they understand the bewildering experiences of puberty and discussing the impulses they might encounter. Then they could explain that the internet is the repository of everything they might imagine and quite a lot of things beyond their imaginations (I'm told) and that there are psychological, moral and social consequences bound up with viewing this stuff. Let each parent decide what's OK, not some - presumably very busy, red-eyed - civil servant.
Mater and Pater don't need to be a police force, nor should they demand that the government police their children's web activity. They simply need to play an active role in educating their children about the pleasures and pitfalls of pornography and the internet as a cultural space.
It's like the give-a-man-a-fish/teach-a-man-to-fish argument. Keep your daughter in a bubble of ignorance and she'll be utterly screwed up when some nasty little brat shows them a Brazilian Fart Porn (© South Park) clip in the school toilets on his mobile phone, whereas a carefully-educated kid will understand the emotional, moral and social context and make wise choices. Duh!
But that's obviously too hard. So we'll get the Daily Mail to start a moral panic instead.
Fired Up, Ready To Go!
REF looms threateningly above us, teaching starts in a couple of weeks and the world seems to be moving very quickly compared with my summer, which mostly consisted of wearing Olympic-volunteer polyester and reading random books.
So in the spirit of ACTION, I've spent the morning cleaning my desk. I've shredded those essay from 2009 which my newly-graduated students never bothered collecting. That was fun; their characters don't seem to have changed though their standards of literacy mostly - and mercifully - have. Reading colleagues' comments was highly enjoyable too. 'Eh?' appeared frequently, as did 'please do some research', while 'your ideas are good but what's with the NUTTY FACTS?' amused me no end (apparently it's very important to know that Eliot wrote 'The Waste Land' in October. And no doubt there's a PhD thesis out there proving that very point.
I also found birthday and thank-you cards going back three years, four mouldy mugs ('Go Away, I'm Blogging', a Steve Bell Jubilee one, the Steve Bell royal wedding one, my 1986 'Boycott News International' mug) and a clean Moomins mug which is now obviously my favourite. I unearthed several books I forgot I owned (Eric Gill's Typography, a Norton Anthology of English Literature and a fantastically boring book on Franco-American relations 1973-4: free to a good home), a self-help guide sent to me by my imposed 'educational consultant', and a massive pile of ripped-out newspaper cuttings. Never lend me your paper: it will return looking like a victim of a deranged Blue Peter presenter on a killing spree. So I spent a happy few hours tracking down digital versions of the articles I wanted to keep, and buying all the books and CDs which caught my eye: a very expensive pursuit, though some of the books in the lower strata of cuttings are now old enough to be available second-hand. Those on the lowest level are unfortunately now in the 'antiquarian' section and thus extortionate - I'm ashamed to say how much I just paid for Ian MacLeod's The Summer Isles, but it had to happen.
Sadly, no completed, REF-able articles were unearthed in the hunt for the surface of the desk, so that's the plan for the rest of the day, followed by the first fencing session of the year. Huzzah! Now I just have to reply - rather belatedly - to my sister's wedding invitation.
So in the spirit of ACTION, I've spent the morning cleaning my desk. I've shredded those essay from 2009 which my newly-graduated students never bothered collecting. That was fun; their characters don't seem to have changed though their standards of literacy mostly - and mercifully - have. Reading colleagues' comments was highly enjoyable too. 'Eh?' appeared frequently, as did 'please do some research', while 'your ideas are good but what's with the NUTTY FACTS?' amused me no end (apparently it's very important to know that Eliot wrote 'The Waste Land' in October. And no doubt there's a PhD thesis out there proving that very point.
I also found birthday and thank-you cards going back three years, four mouldy mugs ('Go Away, I'm Blogging', a Steve Bell Jubilee one, the Steve Bell royal wedding one, my 1986 'Boycott News International' mug) and a clean Moomins mug which is now obviously my favourite. I unearthed several books I forgot I owned (Eric Gill's Typography, a Norton Anthology of English Literature and a fantastically boring book on Franco-American relations 1973-4: free to a good home), a self-help guide sent to me by my imposed 'educational consultant', and a massive pile of ripped-out newspaper cuttings. Never lend me your paper: it will return looking like a victim of a deranged Blue Peter presenter on a killing spree. So I spent a happy few hours tracking down digital versions of the articles I wanted to keep, and buying all the books and CDs which caught my eye: a very expensive pursuit, though some of the books in the lower strata of cuttings are now old enough to be available second-hand. Those on the lowest level are unfortunately now in the 'antiquarian' section and thus extortionate - I'm ashamed to say how much I just paid for Ian MacLeod's The Summer Isles, but it had to happen.
Sadly, no completed, REF-able articles were unearthed in the hunt for the surface of the desk, so that's the plan for the rest of the day, followed by the first fencing session of the year. Huzzah! Now I just have to reply - rather belatedly - to my sister's wedding invitation.
Tuesday, 4 September 2012
A stupid question for the super-researchers
Here's a simple question for my colleagues, friends and all the academics I know who seem to churn out learned articles all the time. It's one I've never heard discussed and it's probably quite naive, but here goes anyway.
Quite simply, how do you keep up with the volume of critical work produced?
Call it citation anxiety.
I work in literary studies. There are probably a couple of hundred thousand others across the world, most of them writing books and articles. There are probably a couple of thousand writing pieces more or less relevant to my focus (masculinity, Wales, the interwar period), including those producing works of theory. If they each produce one paper a year - at a conservative estimate - which I need to read to make my own output relevant and up to date, how do I find the time?
Whenever I write anything, I worry that it's already been done, or that I've missed something really relevant that my readers all know about. I can narrow the search to particular journals, but there are also publications I'll never hear about, or have access too.
And yet my esteemed colleagues must have a solution to this. They find the time, amongst teaching, and admin and developing new research interests and sleeping, to keep abreast of their fields. How do you find the texts, then decide what not to read, then process it all?
Spill the beans!
Quite simply, how do you keep up with the volume of critical work produced?
Call it citation anxiety.
I work in literary studies. There are probably a couple of hundred thousand others across the world, most of them writing books and articles. There are probably a couple of thousand writing pieces more or less relevant to my focus (masculinity, Wales, the interwar period), including those producing works of theory. If they each produce one paper a year - at a conservative estimate - which I need to read to make my own output relevant and up to date, how do I find the time?
Whenever I write anything, I worry that it's already been done, or that I've missed something really relevant that my readers all know about. I can narrow the search to particular journals, but there are also publications I'll never hear about, or have access too.
And yet my esteemed colleagues must have a solution to this. They find the time, amongst teaching, and admin and developing new research interests and sleeping, to keep abreast of their fields. How do you find the texts, then decide what not to read, then process it all?
Spill the beans!
Move over, Kissinger
When Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that political satire was dead, so grand was the gesture of giving it to the architect of the Cold War, Vietnam and the institution of murderous tyrannies in Spain.
David Cameron's reshuffle shares some DNA with the Peace Prize committee. Take Health, for instance. Formerly in the hands of Andrew Lansley, a man who couldn't see an incubator without outsourcing it to Virgin, it's now in the hands of Jeremy Hunt. Yes, the Jeremy Hunt who behaved as the Minister for Murdoch, the Jeremy Hunt who hides behind trees in case journalists spot him and - most relevant - the Jeremy Hunt who believes in homeopathy. The 'treatment' which believes that distilled water cures all ills. I suppose it's not dissimilar to having a Chancellor who believes the secret to a healthy economy is to have no jobs and no money.
Then there's the new minister for the Environment, Owen Paterson. As Northern Ireland Secretary, he resembled nothing so much as a 19th-Century Viceroy, a conduit for the most reactionary Unionist views. What's his take on the environment? Well, he's against it, despite owning a large chunk of it. He fundamentally opposes regulation, and he's a very strong support of environmental destruction: fracking, new airports and the like. He's keen to get on with the Badger Holocaust (the landed gentry don't like anything living on their land which doesn't come with an EU subsidy attached, even though they hate the EU). He's fought wind farms and called for all renewable energy subsidies to be abolished. His brother in law is Matt Ridley, doubly famous as a wack-a-loon environment sceptic and the man who crashed Northern Rock Bank. So we're in for a fun time.
The new Justice Secretary is Chris Grayling, who wants to abolish the Human Rights Act. Apparently we humans have too many rights for this government's liking.
The new Tory chairman - and therefore Cameron's representative on earth to the faithful is Grant Shapps: three of the best businessmen in the country, if you include the pseudonyms he uses to market really stupid and occasionally fraudulent 'How To' guides.
So there you have it: the intellectual and moral level of the Tory Party has finally been detected, right at the bottom of the (oil) barrel. We have a Health Secretary who doesn't believe in medicine. A Justice Secretary who doesn't believe in human rights and an Environment Secretary who wants to abolish the environment. And to think I despaired of the government 2 years ago. How very premature. Still, at least Paul Uppal didn't get a job. They're not that desperate - unlike him.
David Cameron's reshuffle shares some DNA with the Peace Prize committee. Take Health, for instance. Formerly in the hands of Andrew Lansley, a man who couldn't see an incubator without outsourcing it to Virgin, it's now in the hands of Jeremy Hunt. Yes, the Jeremy Hunt who behaved as the Minister for Murdoch, the Jeremy Hunt who hides behind trees in case journalists spot him and - most relevant - the Jeremy Hunt who believes in homeopathy. The 'treatment' which believes that distilled water cures all ills. I suppose it's not dissimilar to having a Chancellor who believes the secret to a healthy economy is to have no jobs and no money.
Then there's the new minister for the Environment, Owen Paterson. As Northern Ireland Secretary, he resembled nothing so much as a 19th-Century Viceroy, a conduit for the most reactionary Unionist views. What's his take on the environment? Well, he's against it, despite owning a large chunk of it. He fundamentally opposes regulation, and he's a very strong support of environmental destruction: fracking, new airports and the like. He's keen to get on with the Badger Holocaust (the landed gentry don't like anything living on their land which doesn't come with an EU subsidy attached, even though they hate the EU). He's fought wind farms and called for all renewable energy subsidies to be abolished. His brother in law is Matt Ridley, doubly famous as a wack-a-loon environment sceptic and the man who crashed Northern Rock Bank. So we're in for a fun time.
The new Justice Secretary is Chris Grayling, who wants to abolish the Human Rights Act. Apparently we humans have too many rights for this government's liking.
The new Tory chairman - and therefore Cameron's representative on earth to the faithful is Grant Shapps: three of the best businessmen in the country, if you include the pseudonyms he uses to market really stupid and occasionally fraudulent 'How To' guides.
So there you have it: the intellectual and moral level of the Tory Party has finally been detected, right at the bottom of the (oil) barrel. We have a Health Secretary who doesn't believe in medicine. A Justice Secretary who doesn't believe in human rights and an Environment Secretary who wants to abolish the environment. And to think I despaired of the government 2 years ago. How very premature. Still, at least Paul Uppal didn't get a job. They're not that desperate - unlike him.
Victory is (almost) mine
Very pleased this morning. British Fencing held an Olympics photo competition to find good pictures for a poster campaign. Overall winner gets a GB jacket signed by the team, subsidiary winners get their poster signed by the fencing team. Of my 737 images, it was torture deciding which three to go for, but I eventually plumped for these (click to enlarge)
The last of these three won the epee competition, so it'll feature in the poster campaign. Very pleased.
Monday, 3 September 2012
Dydd Llun Glas
I don't normally do advertising, but I was impressed by the Festival No 6 line-up and location - in Portmeirion, the bonkers architectural fantasy used as the set of The Prisoner. I particularly love their stunningly powerful Welsh male voice choir's cover of New Order's 'Blue Monday', by Cor y Brythoniaid
Welsh male voice choirs are great, but the material is often awful. Not this time. And if you like Welsh translations of Joy Division/New Order, try Rheinallt H Rowland's cover of 'New Dawn Fades', 'Gwawr Newydd yn Cilio', which is ravishing:
Welsh male voice choirs are great, but the material is often awful. Not this time. And if you like Welsh translations of Joy Division/New Order, try Rheinallt H Rowland's cover of 'New Dawn Fades', 'Gwawr Newydd yn Cilio', which is ravishing:
Pay attention at the back: Michael Green has something to say
Meet Michael Green. He's written the 'must-read guide to bouncing back from recession to growth'. I don't know who said that, because there's no quote attribution, but I strongly suspect it was Michael Green, because - as will become clear - attribution is somewhat tricky with 'Michael Green'.
In case you're not good with metaphors, there's an illustration to go with 'Michael Green's' text:
In case you're not good with metaphors, there's an illustration to go with 'Michael Green's' text:
It's a fascinating book - breezily (and illiterately) written with a healthy dose of distrust for 'The Experts' and a rock-solid faith that 'There Is Daylight Ahead', 'a penny saved is a penny earned', and that you should 'Make Lemonade From Lemons'. It's a mix of very familiar clichés, Alan Sugar-style bluster and Alcoholics Anonymous positive thinking ('Decide To Recover'). Then it veers into a kind of Internet Scamming for Dummies.
The origins and extent of the recession take up all of two pages (no complicated or subtle economic theory needed here), and the perpetrators appear to be 'foreigners', quickly followed by 'the government', which is firmly in the 'Experts' (always within scare quotes) camp. And anyway, the recession has been good for us all - it's just that our moaning means we can't see the benefits to us as well as to the '1%':
Get up off your arse and MAKE MONEY! And in case you're worried that all those around you are suffering, GET A LIFE. Out comes the classic Tory/Samuel Smiles line: 'Be as good to you as you can - do not sacrifice yourself for everyone else's comfort all the time'. Because FTSE CEO's definitely didn't take a 43% pay rise the year after the crash. No sir.
Anyway, Bouncing Back continues in this platitudinous vein for 34 pages. Why am I delighting you with the insights of 'Michael Green'? Well, it's because he's got form. Firstly, 'Michael Green' runs a company called TrafficPaymaster, which will sell you software to fool Google's algorithms to up traffic to websites and therefore increase advertising revenues. You know the kind: you Google something, hit a promising link only to discover that it's a random accretion of other people's work scraped together to drive ads for more protuberant genitalia and so on. It's not, to put it mildly, a classy way to make a living. The word 'spiv' springs to mind. But it is the kind of 'get rich quick' scheme beloved of people who'll try to sell a book advising you to make lemonade from life's lemons. How quick? Well, 'Michael Green' told his marks customers that they could
"make $20,000 in 20 days guaranteed or your money back" – if they spent $200 buying his bespoke software.
even though Google has some strong words for this kind of parasitic behaviour:
Its AdSense policy says: "Sometimes we come across sites that are using software to generate automated content. These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarised. Scraping content and passing it off as one's own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies."
But you're probably still wondering why I'm devoting space and time to the seedy spivvery of some no0mark internet scamster. The truth is that 'Michael Green' doesn't exist. He's a pseudonym for one Grant Shapps. That's Grant Shapps MP. Grant Shapps, Minister of State for Housing in the UK Government. The Grant Shapps who is tipped for promotion in tomorrow's Cabinet reshuffle.
It's funny, I grant you. It reinforces all my previous prejudices about the kind of shady types who become Tories, and about Mr Shapps in particular. But it's also profoundly depressing. In public, Shapps makes speeches about investment, and the 'real economy', and innovation - all the usual buzz-words. But with his secret identities - several, adopted, he claims, to keep his business and political lives separate, and I can see why - he abandons the public good, society, 'all in it together' and tells the suckers who listen to him that the real way to prosper is to abandon everyone else, forget making or designing things, and simply pull off a scam.
Sadly, 'Michael Green' hasn't entirely managed to prevent his shady and dishonest tactics from crossing the barrier between his brain and Grant Shapps'. Anyone perusing @GrantShapps might notice that for a busy MP and Minister, he follows an awful lot of people - over 24,000, with roughly 55,000 followers. That's a lot of reading even for a Twitter obsessive such as myself. And that's not all: busy Grant follows and unfollows about 300 people a day, presumable while he's on his tea break. It is of course entirely coincidental that his (now technically his wife's) company recommended an app called TweetAdder for the purposes for getting a 'BIG' following by, er, automated mass following and unfollowing.
As he's a government minister, he's presumed to be amongst the best 25 or so brains in the combined parties' ranks. Now that's a scary thought.
So far we've had David Laws fiddling his expenses. Jeremy Hunt hides between trees and secretly promotes the interests of Rupert Murdoch over the public good, Michael Gove using his wife's email address to hide his dodgy and partisan dealings in the education sphere (in an attempt to evade the Freedom of Information Act), and Liam Fox forced to resign after he failed to make any distinction between his friends' arms-dealing and intelligence businesses, sinister military-industrial pressure groups and his responsibilities as a government minister.
This isn't just a matter of competence or political differences: the recurrence of very similar cases in which government ministers are found operating in the grey areas legally and morally suggests that after only two years, this government is rotten. It can't seem to find a minister able to elevate the public interest over and above his own pursuit of money, power or influence. At the top, of course, is a prime minister incapable of making the right kinds of value judgements. No wonder we're in a mess.
Friday, 31 August 2012
The Zipless F…ootball game
But I'm becoming utterly fatigued by major sport. It's too relentless. I'm not allowed to forget about soccer for the summer: the off-season months are filled with speculation, transfer rumours, meaningless tournaments and marketing opportunities. Other sports are becoming cheapened in the pursuit of more of your money: Rugby League's teams all acquired stupid names like the Stoke Silverfish or Essex Ebola Viruses. Cricket's been infested with 20/20, which is essentially the crystal meth compared with the real thing's complex smoky Islay malt. Formula 1 is, to me, the essence of non-sport: high-speed advertising with added pollution and no possibility for the fans to get anywhere near participating other than buying similarly advertising-festooned clothing. And don't get me started on the Red Bull Air Race. Not a sport. Just a promotional device in search of an audience.
Most of all, I hate the portability of sport. All the rich sports are now playable anywhere without regard for origins or audience. Take American Football. Like baseball, it's long been confined to continental North America, with outposts in countries American troops have occupied, like Japan. This weekend, Navy are playing Notre Dame in… Dublin. That's right, the capital of Ireland. The home of hurling and football (Gaelic), of Lansdowne Road for the rugby fans and even of a couple of soccer teams. But not, historically, a hotbed of American Football.
Who's going to be in the stands? Americans. 35,000 of them flying in from, well, America to watch some other Americans play American football. Why? It's a promotional gimmick. No doubt the NFL and College organisations think (wrongly) that they might spark interest in the 'sport', but mostly it's a cynical - and very clever - Irish gimmick: get the Yanks over, stuff them full of Guinness and blarney, unearth a few ancestors and hope they invest in the country, or at least come on holiday again. You can locate the cultural level of this event simply by glancing at the billing. It's the Emerald Isle Classic. Three words to make you vomit: the sickening sentiment of 'Emerald Isle' which takes us back to the 19th century, and the arrogant appropriation of the word 'classic'. Surely it's up to the fans to decide afterwards whether or not the game was a 'classic'?
This isn't sport. Sports have origins, histories and obsessive fans who passionately support one side or the other for sometimes very tenuous reasons like geographical accident. How will any stray Irish spectators decide between Navy or Notre Dame? Perhaps Notre Dame's Catholic origins and 'Fighting Irish' nickname will sway them, but it's a bit weak. Despite my personal opinion that American Football shares all the excitement of a prostate exam, I can't help feeling sorry for the sport and its fans. Thousands of Americans are having their support hijacked to generate cash for hoteliers and unscrupulous ticket agents, while their beloved sport is rendered meaningless. It's a sham. It's a commodity: the game's on because those teams took the cash. If the organisers had been able to get a couple of boxers, Premiership soccer teams, Aussie Rules sides or top canoeists, they'd have done so if the money was right.
Rather than the visceral physical and emotional experience of seeing a meaningful match of interest only to the teams and their supporters, this kind of peripatetic mega-even takes on both more and less significance. The purely local, Navy v Notre Dame, may have history and purpose within the sport's structure. Perhaps there's a long-standing rivalry there - but in Ireland, this weekend, that's entirely meaningless. The game is the equivalent of a UFO landing, addressing a couple of trees and leaving in a huff - there's no attempt to add American Football to the Irish sporting landscape in any permanent way: even the 'garrison' sports of soccer and rugby made more effort than this.
The game 'means' nothing culturally, and yet everything economically and politically. It announces that Ireland is open to the world (e.g. it has hotels up to American standards and doesn't ask too many questions about taxation and employment laws), and that American Football is similarly 'global', despite the evidence that it really, really isn't. The event's little different from hosting the International Convention of Sanitary Engineers, underneath the glitter and hype.
What does the match say to American Football fans? It tells them that their participation is merely ancillary. They can come along for the ride, but the game itself is simply a tool in a global PR exercise. And for Irish sports fans? It rejects their own sporting affiliations and histories. It prostitutes itself to them by assuming that fandom is easily transferable between sports and countries and cultures. Forget that fact that GAA is played by battered amateurs who'll be teaching, or roofing or selling insurance back in their home counties on Monday morning, and watch multimillionaire drugged-up freaks smash each other to pieces before variously spending their downtime raping, murdering, endorsing products or organising dogfights.
I don't really have any objection to the game itself - it's got a history and a genuine fanbase. My objection is to the way all of this is ignored in the pursuit of other goals, largely capitalist globalisation. To be of any use, the sport has to be stripped of meaning, made shiny and smooth, tamed for TV and made available to advertisers and sponsors - mostly be removing what makes it unique and replacing these features with other narratives entirely. This applies equally to the 'Ireland' visible to the visiting fans: not a living, breathing, complicated place with a culture of its own, but a plastic stew of ancestors, golf, Celticism, leprechauns and romance (and for businessmen, a Romantic fairyland of low corporate taxes).
This game is the equivalent of Erica Jong's 'zipless fuck', the no-strings, emotion-free encounter which appeared (wrongly) to be the high point of women's liberation. 'Come on in', it says. 'Pick a side, any side, and Bingo! You're a Football Fan'.
Sport - like any cultural activity - shouldn't be this easy. If it is, you're being sold a pup.
Thursday, 30 August 2012
A strange unearthly beauty
Isao Hashimoto took the acknowledged data on nuclear detonation and turned it into an computer game simulation. It works visually because it reminds us that while we haven't been paying attention, nearly 3000 thousand nuclear bombs have exploded on this planet. We fetishise Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but any alien observer would have concluded that we spent 1955-1992 at least in a state of global thermonuclear warfare. Hashimoto's use of computer graphics neatly encapsulates the layer of techno-disassociation we use to avoid thinking about it. The discourse of nuclear war is carefully scientific: yields, collateral damage, MAD, kilotons and so on, while the distance between decision and impact is more than geographical: it's moral too.
The way Hashimoto's use of beeps turns the animation into a strangely beautiful piece of music - a Death Disco - which calls to mind the fascination high and low culture has for massive destruction. Oppenheimer's response to the first test was to recite a line from the Bhagavad Gita: 'I am Vishnu, Destroyer of Worlds', in awe at what he'd unleashed.
This is why I'm still a member of CND.
London Met: it couldn't happen here… could it?
London Met university has lost its state licence to sponsor visa applications by non-EU students: under the system, the government waived its duty to scrutinise applications on the understanding that the university would do the work, a scheme disguised as a streamlined service to students and institutions. Essentially, this means it can't recruit any more, and every single one of its current 3000 extra-EU students will be deported, because Borders Agency checks revealed that 25% of them had no leave to remain here, an unspecified proportion do not have sufficiently good English to manage a course, and the university hasn't been tracking lecture attendance.
The fear is that the university system is being exploited as a soft way to immigrate into the UK - sign up for a course, then melt away. I suspect it's not that much of a problem, especially at university level. These students are paying £13,000 per year for their degrees, and there are cheaper ways to get here. No doubt there's some abuse, but not too much.
The universities are in a difficult position: overseas students' fees subsidise those of the home students, though of course the new regime in which the home student takes on a lifetime of debt may alter the ratios a little. I don't suppose there's a university that looks too closely at their overseas recruitment procedures. We all know that in early September, we welcome hundreds of students with IELTS Level 6 English proficiency courses who can hardly string a sentence together. Someone's passing these tests, and it's not always the student sitting in front of us. Usually they're quite intelligent enough to pick up enough English to get through the course, and there's no benefit to prying too closely. Quite frankly, we need the money, and the recruitment agents have no incentive to fail people at their end.
More widely, I resent being turned into either a salesman for an educational 'product', or into a border guard. London Met wouldn't have this problem if the state took its own responsibilities seriously. Visa sponsorship (which applies in limited numbers to staff too: I've twice had to pressure the university on behalf of colleagues faced with deportation) was sold to universities as a way of making international recruitment easier in the pursuit of UK Degrees Plc. Then the tabloid sensibilities of the anti-immigration lobby took over and we're suddenly expected to police these students - to track their visa status and march them into our offices if they've missed a lecture. It's a classic case of market forces meeting neoliberal, outsourcing state ideology.
My home and EU students don't have to attend lectures compulsorily. It would be better for most of them if they did, but they have to be given the chance to work independently, or to fail. My own lecturers made this clear in lecture 1, first year: turn up, or don't turn up, they said - managing your own development is part of being an adult. I try to understand the myriad causes behind non-attendance, and tailor my support according to the student's position. Someone juggling jobs, children and study gets support. Someone too stoned to attend who suddenly demands all my time when panic sets in gets rather less sympathy. But in neither case do I feel the hand of the state on my shoulder. I deeply resent being told that my class registers (which I keep so that I can spot patterns of attendance/non-attendance) form part of the security state's defence against the Foreign Hordes (especially as the UK's history is largely one of ignoring everybody else's borders).
There's fault on all sides. There are some fraudulent enrolments. There are corrupt recruitment agents, paid on commission and running a neat sideline in forging test scores or providing skilled linguists to pass tests, and there are universities forced to marketise and which therefore have no incentive to look to closely, allied with a natural and admirable reluctance to become an outsourced arm of the state's shambolic immigration agencies.
In any case, this crackdown won't work: those hardworking students who turn up to lectures will politely, if resentfully, leave the country when the letter comes - careers and educations wrecked. Those who were gaming the system will have already disappeared. The result will be injustice to individuals and a worldwide recognition that the British approach consists of hypocrisy, high-handedness and willingness to pander to newspaper headlines. It'll look like something has been done, but it won't be the right thing, on closer inspection. Where will all those potential students go? Elsewhere, and we'll be all the poorer for it.
(PS: I don't have much sympathy for LMU as an institution: this is the university which wants to outsource most of its activities and transfer its staff to some dodgy subsidiary company).
The fear is that the university system is being exploited as a soft way to immigrate into the UK - sign up for a course, then melt away. I suspect it's not that much of a problem, especially at university level. These students are paying £13,000 per year for their degrees, and there are cheaper ways to get here. No doubt there's some abuse, but not too much.
The universities are in a difficult position: overseas students' fees subsidise those of the home students, though of course the new regime in which the home student takes on a lifetime of debt may alter the ratios a little. I don't suppose there's a university that looks too closely at their overseas recruitment procedures. We all know that in early September, we welcome hundreds of students with IELTS Level 6 English proficiency courses who can hardly string a sentence together. Someone's passing these tests, and it's not always the student sitting in front of us. Usually they're quite intelligent enough to pick up enough English to get through the course, and there's no benefit to prying too closely. Quite frankly, we need the money, and the recruitment agents have no incentive to fail people at their end.
More widely, I resent being turned into either a salesman for an educational 'product', or into a border guard. London Met wouldn't have this problem if the state took its own responsibilities seriously. Visa sponsorship (which applies in limited numbers to staff too: I've twice had to pressure the university on behalf of colleagues faced with deportation) was sold to universities as a way of making international recruitment easier in the pursuit of UK Degrees Plc. Then the tabloid sensibilities of the anti-immigration lobby took over and we're suddenly expected to police these students - to track their visa status and march them into our offices if they've missed a lecture. It's a classic case of market forces meeting neoliberal, outsourcing state ideology.
My home and EU students don't have to attend lectures compulsorily. It would be better for most of them if they did, but they have to be given the chance to work independently, or to fail. My own lecturers made this clear in lecture 1, first year: turn up, or don't turn up, they said - managing your own development is part of being an adult. I try to understand the myriad causes behind non-attendance, and tailor my support according to the student's position. Someone juggling jobs, children and study gets support. Someone too stoned to attend who suddenly demands all my time when panic sets in gets rather less sympathy. But in neither case do I feel the hand of the state on my shoulder. I deeply resent being told that my class registers (which I keep so that I can spot patterns of attendance/non-attendance) form part of the security state's defence against the Foreign Hordes (especially as the UK's history is largely one of ignoring everybody else's borders).
There's fault on all sides. There are some fraudulent enrolments. There are corrupt recruitment agents, paid on commission and running a neat sideline in forging test scores or providing skilled linguists to pass tests, and there are universities forced to marketise and which therefore have no incentive to look to closely, allied with a natural and admirable reluctance to become an outsourced arm of the state's shambolic immigration agencies.
In any case, this crackdown won't work: those hardworking students who turn up to lectures will politely, if resentfully, leave the country when the letter comes - careers and educations wrecked. Those who were gaming the system will have already disappeared. The result will be injustice to individuals and a worldwide recognition that the British approach consists of hypocrisy, high-handedness and willingness to pander to newspaper headlines. It'll look like something has been done, but it won't be the right thing, on closer inspection. Where will all those potential students go? Elsewhere, and we'll be all the poorer for it.
(PS: I don't have much sympathy for LMU as an institution: this is the university which wants to outsource most of its activities and transfer its staff to some dodgy subsidiary company).
RIP the Proto-Mensch
So, Sir Rhodes Boyson is dead.
For you young folk, the Tories didn't always have professional trolls like Louise Mensch to amuse and vex us. They had pop-eyed loonies like Sir Richard Body, of whom the exasperated John Major said that 'whenever I see him approaching, I hear the sound of white coats flapping'; the sadly still elected Bill Cash who substitutes intelligence for hideous sports coats and finally Sir Rhodes Boyson, a living, breathing embodiment of the bigotry, selfishness, know-nothing attitude, small-mindedness and viciousness at the heart of the Conservative Party.
Thankfully, he was too divorced from humour and popular culture to spot a wind-up, and so I present to you his finest moment:
And unlike Mensch, he had staying power.
For you young folk, the Tories didn't always have professional trolls like Louise Mensch to amuse and vex us. They had pop-eyed loonies like Sir Richard Body, of whom the exasperated John Major said that 'whenever I see him approaching, I hear the sound of white coats flapping'; the sadly still elected Bill Cash who substitutes intelligence for hideous sports coats and finally Sir Rhodes Boyson, a living, breathing embodiment of the bigotry, selfishness, know-nothing attitude, small-mindedness and viciousness at the heart of the Conservative Party.
Thankfully, he was too divorced from humour and popular culture to spot a wind-up, and so I present to you his finest moment:
And unlike Mensch, he had staying power.
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
These people are the official representatives of one of America's great parties
Before we begin, an historical footnote: the Republican Party was founded in 1864 and soon joined by Abraham Lincoln to unite the disparate anti-Confederate, anti-Slavery forces in American politics.
Today, delegates to the Republican Party's National Convention behave like this:
and like this - towards members of their own party, apparently for being, well, Latina:
Not to worry you, but the gap between the candidates is currently 1%. I'm not that bothered that Mitt Romney wears special religious underpants and believes that Jesus visited America. I am bothered that his party hates women, believes weird things about their biology, promotes the most vicious forms of capitalism, thinks it's OK that a Presidential candidate keeps his millions in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland etc - he wants to run the government, not contribute to its maintenance - and believes that electing representatives whose faces contort with racial hatred is apparently fine.
(Puerto Rico was seized by the US at the end of the Spanish-American war. It's a dependent territory, essentially an offshore possession in which citizens can't vote for the Presidency but do have an elected governor).
Today, delegates to the Republican Party's National Convention behave like this:
An attendee to the US Republican party convention was removed from the conference after allegedly throwing nuts at a black camerawoman from CNN, saying "this is how we feed animals".
and like this - towards members of their own party, apparently for being, well, Latina:
Not to worry you, but the gap between the candidates is currently 1%. I'm not that bothered that Mitt Romney wears special religious underpants and believes that Jesus visited America. I am bothered that his party hates women, believes weird things about their biology, promotes the most vicious forms of capitalism, thinks it's OK that a Presidential candidate keeps his millions in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland etc - he wants to run the government, not contribute to its maintenance - and believes that electing representatives whose faces contort with racial hatred is apparently fine.
(Puerto Rico was seized by the US at the end of the Spanish-American war. It's a dependent territory, essentially an offshore possession in which citizens can't vote for the Presidency but do have an elected governor).
Oh Nick. Nick Nick Nick
It's almost comical how Nick Clegg gets it wrong even when he gets it right. This time, he's proposed a 'time-limited wealth tax' on the mega-rich (which includes him of course: he's a multi-millionaire, while the median wage in this country is £26,000).
Obviously everybody other than the Tories have made one simple point: Clegg voted to cut the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p on earnings above £150,000, so proposing a new wealth tax seems a bit odd.
However, despite this stupid and regressive tax cut, Nicky's on to something here. The reason hedge fund traders, Mitt Romney (apparently it's OK to run for President of the US while keeping your millions in various other countries) and every rich bastard you've ever heard of avoids paying most of their taxes is quite simple: they don't pay income tax like you or I. I have a salary and savings account and an ISA. I pay tax via PAYE, so no chance to avoid it there even if I wanted to. My savings account is taxed each year automatically (I think the government took £12 last year) and my almost empty ISA is tax-free.
Up in the realms of serious money, there's none of this nonsense. Rather than take salaries, these people acquire cash through 'capital gains' (taxed much lower), investment income, dividends and various other mechanisms. They don't buy houses: opaque offshore trusts and companies buy their houses for them. They are 'non-doms', like the owner of the Daily Mail, who built a (predictably) appallingly reactionary £20m mansion in Wiltshire yet is officially domiciled in France, and therefore avoids all taxes on it and all his other financial dealings. There are entire streets and blocks in central London worth £billions which have no individual owners, just Cayman Island companies
So the Lib Dem idea of a wealth tax is actually a good one. It doesn't discriminate between income and gains, but taxes the lot. It's easy to hide a salary behind a 'service company' (as lots of civil servants and BBC executives have been doing - it avoids income tax and national insurance) but it's harder to hide a mansion, and if extended slightly, taxes the offshore companies used to hide ownership. No cheque in the post? Send in the bailiffs.
I'd forget the 'time-limited' aspect of his plan, reinstate the 50p rate (even Thatcher had a 65p upper band) and tax all financial transactions, particularly the speculative kinds which bankrupted the world. I'd also abolish all benefits for people with jobs. I know that sounds a little rightwing, but hear me out: it's actually a progressive socialist policy. Providing benefits for the working poor isn't good for them: it's a subsidy for the greedy and evil corporations which employ them on such low wages. It raises their profits, which go to shareholders who hide the money away from the taxman. So we pay for the benefits while those who profit don't share the burden. If we stopped paying benefits but massively increased the minimum wage, the employees would still be needed to do the work, but some of the profits would be diverted to their salaries. They'd spend the money on necessities and the economy would improve, while the state's expenditure would drop. All it needs is for us to decide that profit margins can and should be lower. The executives and shareholders have fed off us like leeches for a hundred years: time for them to adapt to changed circumstances.
Poor old Nick. Even when he comes up with a good idea, it's laughed out of court.
Obviously everybody other than the Tories have made one simple point: Clegg voted to cut the top rate of income tax from 50p to 45p on earnings above £150,000, so proposing a new wealth tax seems a bit odd.
However, despite this stupid and regressive tax cut, Nicky's on to something here. The reason hedge fund traders, Mitt Romney (apparently it's OK to run for President of the US while keeping your millions in various other countries) and every rich bastard you've ever heard of avoids paying most of their taxes is quite simple: they don't pay income tax like you or I. I have a salary and savings account and an ISA. I pay tax via PAYE, so no chance to avoid it there even if I wanted to. My savings account is taxed each year automatically (I think the government took £12 last year) and my almost empty ISA is tax-free.
Up in the realms of serious money, there's none of this nonsense. Rather than take salaries, these people acquire cash through 'capital gains' (taxed much lower), investment income, dividends and various other mechanisms. They don't buy houses: opaque offshore trusts and companies buy their houses for them. They are 'non-doms', like the owner of the Daily Mail, who built a (predictably) appallingly reactionary £20m mansion in Wiltshire yet is officially domiciled in France, and therefore avoids all taxes on it and all his other financial dealings. There are entire streets and blocks in central London worth £billions which have no individual owners, just Cayman Island companies
So the Lib Dem idea of a wealth tax is actually a good one. It doesn't discriminate between income and gains, but taxes the lot. It's easy to hide a salary behind a 'service company' (as lots of civil servants and BBC executives have been doing - it avoids income tax and national insurance) but it's harder to hide a mansion, and if extended slightly, taxes the offshore companies used to hide ownership. No cheque in the post? Send in the bailiffs.
I'd forget the 'time-limited' aspect of his plan, reinstate the 50p rate (even Thatcher had a 65p upper band) and tax all financial transactions, particularly the speculative kinds which bankrupted the world. I'd also abolish all benefits for people with jobs. I know that sounds a little rightwing, but hear me out: it's actually a progressive socialist policy. Providing benefits for the working poor isn't good for them: it's a subsidy for the greedy and evil corporations which employ them on such low wages. It raises their profits, which go to shareholders who hide the money away from the taxman. So we pay for the benefits while those who profit don't share the burden. If we stopped paying benefits but massively increased the minimum wage, the employees would still be needed to do the work, but some of the profits would be diverted to their salaries. They'd spend the money on necessities and the economy would improve, while the state's expenditure would drop. All it needs is for us to decide that profit margins can and should be lower. The executives and shareholders have fed off us like leeches for a hundred years: time for them to adapt to changed circumstances.
Poor old Nick. Even when he comes up with a good idea, it's laughed out of court.
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