Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Vibes

At school I studied, if that is the word, Sociology. 

 We had a text book. Themes and Perspectives in Sociology by Michale Haralambos. I believe proper graduate level sociologists look on it with some horror. They think it reduces complex research and nuanced theoretical debates into bite-sized bullet points that can be swallowed and spewed up over exam papers. I remember reading an exasperated examiners' report on an A level paper: it said that no matter what question about the Sociology of Education candidates were asked, a large number of them would reproduce Haralambos's chapter about the underperformance of working class school-children from memory. 

Sociology has a reputation for being a "Mickey Mouse" college subject that guarantees a life-time of unemployment. It has now largely been replaced by Media Studies in the conservative demonology. I didn't take it beyond A level: my degrees are in the much more practical English Literature and Medieval Studies.

But in retrospective, O and A Level Haralambos had a good deal to be said for them. It asked questions that it might not have occurred to us to ask: questions where the answers seemed so obvious that we might not otherwise have noticed that they were questions. "Why do humans live in families?" "Why do communities punish wrong-doers, and how do they decide what counts as wrong?" That was the "themes" part. And unlike everything else on the 1980s Comprehensive School arts syllabus, Mr Haralambus encouraged students to entertain the possibility that there was more than one possible answer. That was what he meant by "perspectives". A French Functionalist would say that Society works like a machine; and we can see various ways in which families and prisons keep that machine running smoothly. No, say the German Marxists, Society is a struggle between rich people and poor people (I have never been able confidently to spell bourgeoisie) and families and prisons are techniques for keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. There were also phenomenologists, who, I think, said that "why" questions didn't matter and it was sufficient to just study families and school and prisons in the way that botanists studied weeds; and symbolic interactionists who.... Truthfully, I have never known what symbolic interactionists do. This was all doubtless very simplistic and I am sure that a lot of the time we repeated what the book said without actually understanding it. I seem to recall that Teacher thought that I was being a bit of a girly swot when I actually ordered some Durkhiem and some Wilmott and Young from the library and found out what they actually said. 

English teachers and History teachers also asked us questions of course, important questions like why Hamlet delayed and the identity of Godot and what caused the English Civil War. But they told you the correct answer (purgatory, death and the king, if I remember correctly) and marked you down if you didn't agree with it. We were rather discouraged from seeing actors doing Shakespeare in the theatre in case the Producer confused us by incorporating wrong answers into his production. I was told very clearly that I was not allowed to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; and an honest attempt to explain why I disliked the character and found it hard to engage with the book was dismissed as 'waffle.

Note: Fanny Price is in fact a sanctimonious prig.

I expect this is why Sociology -- and in fact Media studies -- are so often mocked by small and capital C conservatives. If you are editor of the Daily Mail or Sky News, you don't want young people asking questions about how media functions and what effects it has on the people who consume it. If you are Minister for Education, you definitely don't want young people asking "What would a Marxist say schools are for? How would that differ from a Phenomenological Symbolgist." Whoever you are, you don't want young people thinking that there are different, equally valid, perspectives on the big questions.

At any rate, that's what a Marxist would say. I suppose a Functionalist would say that it is good for society to have harmless scapegoats and essays in the Times about sociology being a waste of time are the modern equivalent of burning the devil in effigy.

At university, it turned out that there were themes and perspectives in English Literature as well; only there it was called Critical Theory. Critical Theory is another thing small c conservatives think is a bit of waste of time.

In practice, Sociology was one of those those subjects that music teachers and PE teachers gravitated towards, not because they cared about it but because they needed a second string in their academic bow. Geography was the other one. Many of us still believe that it is impossibly to read a map unless you are wearing an Adidas tracksuit with a whistle round you neck. Lazy and disengaged teachers often encouraged students to Express Themselves about General Issues, during the lesson, meaning that those of us who were quite articulate and quite literate ran away with the idea that we were Good at sociology. If you read books outside school, it wasn't too hard to improvise a good essay on whether gender was nature or nurture without actually having read the required chapter of the Big Blue Book.

It was a long time ago, and memory is not always entirely charitable. They literally pulled my old school down a few years ago. 

I am thinking of the occasion when the sociology teacher thought it would be a wheeze to invite a local police officer to address the class on the subject of Crime and Deviancy. I don't know whether the officer in question was a Functionalist or a Phenomenologist; but it is safe to say that he wasn't a Marxist. For all I know it could have been a member of the local Am Dram society, doing a stereotyped caricature of an English Copper for satiric effect. He began by saying that as a policeman he was not allowed to express, or even have, any political or religious opinions, before explaining that there was no crime whatsoever on the Isle of Man or Saudi Arabia because they still chopped the hands of thieves. (Right up to 9/11, the theory that Johnny Muslim and his good old fashioned discipline had got it just about right was very common among people who didn't have political beliefs.) Pausing only to do a bog-standard "never did me any harm" routine, he explained that there weren't any murders in the 1950s when they had had hanging and there wouldn't be any murders today if hanging were brought back. This was in Margaret Thatcher's golden days.

Now, I wasn't having this. We had Done Punishment and Deterrence in the previous lesson. The text book included a graph of the number of murders in possibly Australia. Possibly Australia had abolished hanging for a while, and then brought it back, and then abolished it again; and it was clear from graph that the presence of absence of a hangman had no correlation to the murder rate.  

PC Plod wasn't having me not having it.

Oh, I'm not interested in statistics, he said, you can prove anything you like with statistics.

It may have been Winston Churchill who made the joke about there being three kinds of untruth: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Checks notes: Actually it was Mark Twain, who was quoting Disralli, who may have been quoting the Duke of Wellington. Let's assume it was Oscar Wilde to be on the safe side. A proper mathematician had written a best selling book called "How to Lie With Statistics": I suspect a lot of people who hadn't read it had heard the title. 

"You can prove anything you like with statistics" could be taken as the prime dogma of the populist right. You may have a gut feeling that vaccination doesn't really do any good. You may once have known a heavy smoker who lived to a ripe old age. You may be pretty sure that there have been more traffic jams in London since Tony Blair invited all the Muslims to live there. If your belief system doesn't allow you to count up the number of smokers who get sick; or look at police records to find out if the roads get snarled up more often than they did in the racially homogenous days, then you haven't go anything apart from gut feeling and anecdote to go on. So anything which challenges you gut is suspect.

We're freer and better off since Brexit because I feel freer and better off. And since I am a fan of Brexit, I was likely to feel freer and better off or at least say that I did, regardless of what the facts on the ground happen to be. You tell me the standard of living has actually gone down? Oh, you can prove anything you like with facts.

Populism is ultimately the worship of vibes. 

It is perfectly true that if you generate a sufficiently large quantity of data and spend a sufficient time staring at it, you are going to be able to find some trends and some correlations which back up your side of the argument. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that his opponents used facts as a drunk man uses a lamp-post: not for illumination, but for support. (Wrong again: It was Andrew Lang, the fellow with the multicoloured fairy books. But we can go with Oscar Wilde.)

I am not talking about seeing the result of the chariot race in the entrails of a chicken; or doing computer searches of billion-character Biblical acrostics, But it is highly unlikely absolutely everything is completely terrible and appalling, even after fourteen years of Conservative government; and equally unlikely that everything is uniformly wonderful, even a whole fortnight into the glorious new Centrist utopia. It's the job of Kier Starmer's spinners to find some numbers which make the Tories look bad, and the job of Rishi Sunak's spinner to find some numbers which make them look good.  

So: that is my prediction for 2029. Regardless of what happens in the real world, Kier Starmer will be able to quote figures that prove that Things Have Only Got Better under his premiership. Wages will have gone up, inflation will have come down, health service waiting lists will be lower, children will be better educated, summers will be longer, women will be braver, soldiers will be more beautiful. And we can also be sure that Priti Patel (I assume it will be Priti Patel I prefer to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised by the marginally less bad) will be able to quote figures proving that 2024-2029 have been an economic and social catastrophe: that ordinary decent people can't afford to put food on the table; that scarcely anyone coming out of tertiary education can read or write, much less do simple arithmetic and that in many towns old people dare not leave their houses for fear of the mobs of cannibal immigrants eating human flesh because they can't afford baked beans, that...

One of the least edifying aspects of the last election campaign were the gladiatorial debates and vox pops in which the Opposition pointed to a health service on the point of collapse and the government said that it was even more on the point of collapse in Scotland where the Opposition were in charge and the government said that the Opposition were in charge in Wales where things were even worse. One side could quote figures that said that waiting lists were coming down and the other side said that they were only coming down because they had gone up so much and the first side said that they were going up more slowly than they would be if the other lot were in power. Most of us mortals don't have the time or the effort to work out if either side is in the right. Probably the truth is that things are quite bad; not as bad as they could be; and better in some places than others. 

 Which is why a certain number of people will always vote for the big orange fellow who doesn't know much about figures but is quite sure it's the immigrants fault. 

It doesn't matter what Kier Starmer achieves: what matters is what people perceive him  to have achieved. 

This is not quite such a cynical remark as it may seem at first glance. If you are a political wonk, then your facts and figures matter a good deal: and if you work in a niche area then an incremental boost to your niche is very important indeed.

 Barak Obama said that nice thing about working at a state or city level was that relatively small actions could make relatively big changes to the lives of specific groups of people. A small change in the rate of tax on tractor fuel can be the difference between staying in business and going bankrupt to a few thousand farmers. 

I get why Labour Wonks go on and on about the fact that, yes, Tony Blair got us involved in a, yes,  futile war, but on the positive side, he put a lot of, yes,  money into nursery schools. And I am not being cynical. (Well, in fact, I am being cynical, but at least I admit it.) If you've actually seen and lived the positives of SureStart then it must have hurt a great deal when people like me said we were withholding our vote over a dodgy dossier and two hundred thousand dead civilians. And it must be really painful to hear the Left use terms like Tory Lite and say that both sides are as bad as the other one. 

Both sides are not as bad as each other. 

I am not rich; but I am definitely not poor. I can't truthfully say I have noticed that prices in the supermarket have gone up. I have noticed that since Brexit and the Pandemic, empty shelves are much more common. Not even the big shops can be relied on to have all the things I want every time I go shopping. I absolutely admit that "since Brexit there are no tinned anchovies to be had at Lidl, not even for reading money" is so much a first world problem that it barely registers as a problem. I have noticed my fuel bill going up. I have definitely noticed that certain Little Luxuries can be indulged in slightly less often. Pre-Pandemic I used to say "I probably shouldn't spend a fiver on my lunch every day, but it's nice and convenient". Post-Pandmeic I find myself saying "Ten quid for a nice coffee and a bowl of soup, I am not quite sure I can run to that." But honestly, in the economic down-turn is mostly something which has happened to other people. (I paid off my mortgage when I came into some money, so Liz Truss didn't directly harm me. There is a wobbly line on the website of my financial adviser, and it seems to be going steadily upwards, although there was a dramatic dip in September 2022. The fact that I have a wobby line to consult may make you challenge my "I am not rich" assertion.)

In the 1970s, we felt that if we called for an ambulance, one would probably come; and if we turned up at a railway station; there would probably be a train;  even if the guard would be officious, the food would be disgusting; and Hattie Jaques would ask me impertinent questions about my bowel movements. I now feel that if I had a heart attack I would be put on a three week waiting list for an ambulance; which would be diverted via Wivelsfield due to leaves on the line, and by the time I got to my destination I would be inconveniently dead.

Five years is quite a long time; if in five years we have a sense that we can trust the health service and the public services again; we will probably think that Starmer is doing an okay job and give him another chance. If he has to go through the numberwang cycle, then the Emperor has already won. 

You can't prove anything you like with statistics. You can only prove the things which the statistic prove. But the difference between a world where Kier Starmer steps down from the Premiership in 2040 and one in which Nigel Farage enters Downing Street in 2029 will ultimately come down to Starmer's ability to generated good vibes. 

This is also true of the nice American lady who is trying to beat Donald Trump. 



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 Deleted unread means "deleted unread".

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Feedback

Dear Andrew

Here we go! There is not the slightest evidence that our beloved Fuhrer was ever a racist; in fact, he fought racists all his life and trying to tar him with the same brush proves that you are as I have always thought a woke snowflake working for the demise of civilisation. People like you should be locked up. 



Dear Andrew

It is absolutely typical that you would give a moment's thought to considering whether people on the far far away with the fairies right wing have a good point and trying to distinguish different shades of bastardy among the bastards: your attempt to give a fair hearing to [insert name of right wing person in this space] makes about as much sense as trying to get sense out of the ravings of [insert name of anti-vax flat earther here] and reveals that you are as we have always believed a racist. People like you should be forcibly reeducated.



Dear Andrew

Were you not aware that possession of such a book alone was punishable by death?



Dear Andrew

Yes but have you considered that Congressional sub-document plural double ex zeebra shows that in the third quarter between 1896 and 1897 the calories consumed by the average former slave was in the fact nought point nought nought three percent higher than that consumed by an Irishman who lived entirely on peat clippings at the same time and that therefore the only true liberals were the Kappa Alpha Fraternity? People like you should be openly mocked. 




Dear Andrew

I think that you should take the new season of Prime Ministers Question Time on its own terms, as as bit of light entertainment with some pseudo-science thrown in, and not try to read too much into it. People like you should be ignored. 



Dear Andrew

Has it ever occurred to you that you are in fact completely mad? I have a small pink Pangolin named Napoleon and he agrees with me. People like you should join me in Moscow where I we are intending to retreat. 


Dear Andrew

Your tax rebate has been approved for the 2023/2024 tax year.

Claim it here: [Link]


Substantive Digression: Are All Tories In Fact Bastards?

There's a very good story about an elderly Blitz veteran who was caught up in the 2005 London bombings. As he was being taken to hospital, he remarked "Don't worry: I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!" 

It almost certainly never happened, but it is still a very good story.


I have a book on my shelf by Mr Enoch Powell. When he wasn't quoting the Aeneid at people who probably wouldn't be able to identify quotes from the Aeneid, he wrote some very interesting essays on the Christian Bible. 

One of the essays in the book had a significant effect on my own intellectual and spiritual development. The essay is called Bibliotary. He's writing about Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Saint Mark, he day, goes to some lengths to establish that Jesus has walked some distance away from the disciples, and that the disciples have fallen asleep. Mark can't possibly know what Jesus said; there were no witnesses. He must have made it up. "The narrative and its truth is not that of history; it is that of poetry, or imagination". At some point, some early Christian imagined that Jesus was reluctant to die and introduced it into the story. The question isn't "why did it happen like that?" but "who imagined it happening like that, and when, and for what reason?"

Never mind if the great man's reasoning is correct. (C.S Lewis thought that the evangelist was recording the first few words the witnesses overheard, just before they fell asleep.) The point is that Powell's essay was the first one I read which showed me that you could have a critical approach to the Bible without being a debunker: that you could be a Christian and still treat the Bible as a collection of texts with a history.

Granted, most of his religious theories are plain wrong. He insisted on the priority of Matthew -- the idea that Matthew's Gospel was written first and that Mark's shorter text is a rather inept summary of it. No reputable scholar would now subscribe to this theory: the battle lines are between those who think that Matthew and Luke independently expanded Matthew and those who think that Luke used Matthew directly. But Powell's essay on what he calls the archaeology of Matthew was the first time I had seen someone putting verses from one gospel alongside verses from another gospels and making informed speculations about why they differ.

He also had a theory, that I could summarise but won't, that Jesus was executed by stoning rather than by crucifixion.  [1]

The book is called Wrestling With the Angel. I have a large print of Jack Kirby's drawing of a super-heroic Jacob wrestling with a Celestial angel above my writing desk. I very much hope that is just a coincidence.

Having this forbidden tome in my collection, I have, in fact, also read the political chapters. Some are better than others. I am very unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that since the Church can't do miracles, it has no right to read into the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand a moral imperative to feed the poor; although I kind of take the point that clergy who think that the main point of Jesus healing the blind man is that National Health opticians are a jolly good idea are stretching their texts.

The essays on nationhood and immigration seem to be coming from rather a different place from "rivers of blood". I don't know whether we should think in terms of clever man who once lost his temper and said some vile things, or a vile man who was good at hiding behind a veneer of scholarship. The Birmingham speech is, of course, indefensible. But the essays I have read seem to be coming from a more intelligible position. 

A country is a group of people with a shared identity: it is defined by it's institutions; flag, Queen, church, literary canon. I would add, though he certainly would not have done, the BBC and the NHS. Also folk music. What makes you British is not your passport or your nationalisation papers or even a good score in a multiple choice citizenship test. And it's not who your parents were and what colour your skin is. It's whether or not you identify with those institutions. You can absolutely be a British person with Ruritanian heritage. What you can't be is a British Ruritanian. And you definitely can't be a British person who feels loyalty to the Ruritanian flag and holds Ruritanian street festivals and feels more affection to Prince Rupert than to King Charles. I don't know if Powell would have admitted the existence of British Communists or British Republicans. I strongly suspect that if you scratched the surface you would find that the Conservative Party was one of those institutions that defined your Britishness. All real Americans support the Republican Party because if you don't support the Republican Party you are not a real American. 

There certainly is or was a widespread belief among the clergy that the Established Church of England was a national Church. If you are English you are a member. If Evangelicals had been allowed to insist that people getting baptised and confirmed and buried had to make some profession of Christian faith, they would have reduced the Church of England to the status of a sect.

Which is pretty much just a posh-school version of Norman Tebbit's infamous cricket test. A person whose parents came from Ruritania can certainly be English; but a person who cheers for the old country in a England vs Ruritania Test Match clearly doesn't think of himself as English. And if he was properly English he would know that cheering at Cricket matches isn't the done thing. [2]

Now: many people have spotted that the current Tory leader and several of the contender to replace him have dark coloured skin. Several of them are second generation immigrants: Rishi Sunak's parents were Punjabi; Suella Braverman's came from Mauritius and Kenya; Priti Patel's parents emigrated to England from Uganda; Kemi Badenoch was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria. 

Nothing in Rishi Sunak's Prime Ministership became him as the leaving of it. Outside Downing Street on the day after the election he spoke movingly of how a second generation immigrant, albeit a very rich one, could rise to the highest office in the land; and how his young children had placed Diwali candles outside 10 Downing Street. That was one of the reasons that Britain was the greatest nation in the world, he said. 

Bravo, said I. If only you'd spoken like that during the election, I might have voted for you. 

Note: I would not in fact have voted for him.

But during the election, the Tories very much nailed their colours to the anti-immigration mast. The dotty scheme about putting asylum seekers planes to Rawanda was the main thing they wanted to talk about in the election and the main stick with which the right wing press wanted to beat Kier Starmer. 

So a lot of liberals were naturally tempted to say: "Ha-ha. You think there are too many immigrations and want to send them back where they came from. But guess what! Your parents were immigrations! Bet that never occurred to you before! Gotcha!"

But this seems to be fully covered by Powell's theory of virtuous institutions: which he himself regards as the essence of Conservatism. The opponent isn't dark skinned people or people who say "Allah" rather than "Jehovah". The opponent is multiculturalism. There are good immigrants and bad immigrants. The good ones have totally identified with Britain; the bad ones still see themselves as French and Irish and Ruritanian. If I am correct about the Established Church, it is perfectly consistent for someone whose actual faith happens to be Buddhist or Hindu to sincerely believe that "our" country was built on Christianity; that "our shared" Christian values define who "we" are; and that Muslims are watering down "our" identity. The old joke turns out to be political position: the question isn't whether Rishi Sunak is a Hindu; the question is whether or not he is a Church of England Hindu. 

And I don't really get the whole nationalism thing. I think of myself far more as a "person" than I do "a white person". Which is why I am perfectly happy for football to come home, but don't particularly mind if it doesn't. I grok that it is easier for a white person to say that he doesn't do race than for a black person, in the same way that it is easier for a cis-male person to say that he doesn't do gender than for a woman or a transgender person. I can't get my head round the mindset of someone who is annoyed every single time a non-white is shown eating a big mac in a McDonalds commercial. I don't know what is going on in the head of someone whose reaction to Ncuti Gatwa or Paapa Essiedu or Chadwick Brosnan or Kamala Harris is to talk about "box ticking" and "DEI appointments". 

That's the answer to "can you be friends with a conservative". If by "conservative" you mean "a person who says 'us' when he means 'light skinned' people and 'them' when he means 'dark skinned people'" and wants his country back, then no, I don't think I could be.

But I look at the current Reform party and the current Tory party and then I look at Enoch Powell.

And I think "In ye olde days, we used to have a better class of bastard."




[1] Why is Pontius Pilate so important to Christian tradition? Why do people in church to this day chant "crucified under Pontius Pilate" rather than, say "betrayed by Judas Iscariot" or "buried by Joseph of Arimathea"? Answer: because it was essential for the early Christians to pinpoint the time of Jesus's death. You could prove that Jesus was the Messiah because the Passion coincided with the time table laid out in (a particular interpretation of) the prophecy of Daniel. Time and time and half a time and all that that entrails. It is highly unlikely that the historical Jesus's death really did cohere with those particular texts. So Pilate must have been retrospectively written into the story for didactic purposes. But if Pilate is a ret-con -- and if there is no evidence outside of didactic Christian sources that he was even involved -- then do we have any reason to think that the Romans were involved in proceedings at all? Don't the texts make it clear that it was the Jewish authorities thought that Jesus must die, must die, this Jesus must die, because he was a blasphemer and threatening to their position? The Gospels acknowledges that "Pilate" was relatively uninterested in the case. So it doth follow as the night the day: the historical Jesus was killed by the Jews, not the Romans. And only the Romans crucified.

[2] And through the world over, each nation's the same/they've simply no notion of playing the game/They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won/And they practice beforehand which spoils the fun.


Monday, July 29, 2024

I don't often change my mind, but when I do, I do.

I don't very often change my mind: but when I do, I do.

About big things, I mean. I change my mind about whether I ought to order pancakes or a burger in the Boston Tea Party and whether it would be more fun to head over the road for a pint or stay in with a cup of tea and the new Acolyte several times in a minute.

I recall an pal of mine being slightly miffed because in or about 2000 I recommended that he read Hero With a Thousand Faces, and in or about 2010 I wrote a series of articles saying that Joseph Campbell was a snake oil salesman and charlatan.

I recently wrote an article saying that I had stopped watching a particular TV show that I used to watch rather assiduously, and you'd be surprised how many people ask me what I thought of the last series. "I didn't watch it. I thought I made this fairly clear; I'd decided to make a clean break for the sake of the kids. It's only a TV show, after all."

I've occasionally changed my mind about friends. Not usually after having a catastrophic row: if you can be bothered to have catastrophic rows you are probably still friends. ("You can really only hate people if you love them" as my mother once sagely remarked.) More kind of coming to the conclusion that neither of us are finding hanging out together very enjoyable any more and its probably time to give it up. But you'd be surprised how often people say "I suppose you'll be going out for a drink with Hezekiah when they're next in town" and I'll be, like, "Well no, we're kind of not friends anymore; I thought you knew that." I understand that people who do the romance thing call this process "breaking up" although I think in that case it generally does involve catastrophic rows.

But I think in practice most of us are more like the Pope. Our opinions and tastes and beliefs are not the same today as they were a decade ago: why would they be? But we are inclined to suddenly and infallibly declare that we never liked the restaurant that over-charged us for the undercooked fish, and we always thought the food there was terrible. And we always thought the goatee beard was a terrible idea; and always knew that Neil Gaiman was a wrong 'un and indeed never thought Sandman was very good to begin with. 

I am pretty sure that I thought that Harry Potter was kind of okay but not worth all the shouting before JK Rowling came out as a deeply unpleasant person; and I still think that Harry Potter is kind of okay but not worth all the shouting now JK Rowling is engaged in a race to the bottom on So Shall Mee Jah.

So Andrew: have you changed you mind about Jeremy Corbyn; are you still a socialist; or have you in fact admitted that you never believed in any of that nonsense to begin with?


It's complicated. 

I think perhaps Gloria Swanson summed up my position. I am still a socialist. But the movies got conservative.


Like the Bellman, I have said this several times before. I think that there are two ways of running a country. There is the approach which says that everyone must contribute some of their money to a Great Big Kitty, and that the money in the Great Big Kitty should be used to buy nice things which everyone can share: hospitals, schools, colleges, pensions, prisons, atom bombs, etc. And there is the approach that says that no-one has any business taking other peoples money and putting it in a communal pot; and that people should be free to buy the nice things they actually want with the money they have actually earned. (If one of the things they choose to do with their money is "donate it to help poor people" then that's their business. With great power doesn't necessarily come any responsibility at all.)

Hardly anyone has ever been 100% committed to the most extreme forms of either position. Of course, the Red Party (or the Blue Party, in America) are going to claim that the Blue (Red) Party think that taxation should be zero, that poor people who get sick should be shovelled into communal graves and kids whose parents can't afford school fees should be handed over to Jonathan Swift's new chain of landlord friendly fast food joints. (Look it up.) And of course the Blue Party (or the Red Party, in America) are always going to claim that the Red/Blue Party want to take 100% of your money, give most of it to black lesbian sociology collectives and force everyone to eat borscht at communal state funded kitchens while chanting passages from Owen Jones' Little Red Book. In real life the distinction has generally been between people like me who want slightly higher taxes, and slightly more nice things and the majority who want slightly lower taxes and are prepared to live with slightly fewer nice things.

That's the answer to the question about "have you ever had tea with a socialist?" and "would you ever kiss a Tory?" If by "Conservative" you mean "someone who would cut the Higher Rate of Income Tax" and by Socialist you mean "someone who would increase the Basic Rate" then of course the Plowboy and the Cowman can be friends. There are very good people on both sides. Not all socialists are Kobynites and not all Konservatives are Kunts. 

God help me, last time around I knocked on doors on behalf of Thangam Debonaire. And from what I can tell, she was a perfectly nice person and a perfectly hard working MP. (I am sure people who pay attention to these things will now send me letters pointing out that she was too far one way or the other way on Gaza and not far enough one way or the other way on Gender, but the point stands.) I knocked on doors because I wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister, or, failing that, to be the strongest possible leader of the opposition.

This never happens.

I fairly quickly formed the opinion that it could never have happened. I do not exactly say that Jeremy Corbyn -- and Tony Benn and Michael Foot and indeed Harold Wilson -- were errors which should never have occurred; and I definitely do not think that Tony Blair is right, or even intelligible, on anything at all. But I do now think that there is no point in campaigning for socialism (on any definition) in this country.

If the issue had been Jeremy's personal electability then things would be a lot muddier. Sadly, Labour didn't lose the 2019 election because Jeremy was telling Romanian spies about Mrs Thatcher's preferred breakfast cereal; or because he wore a donkey jacket to the National Anthem or didn't sing the words of his bacon sandwich. He didn't even lose the election because he was an existential threat to all the Jews in Europe. (Whenever I hear something referred to as an existential threat, I imagine a threat in a black polo neck jumper with a French accent which shrugs a lot, but that is probably just me.)

If any of that had been the case the Fight Would Go On. It would just be a matter of finding a Better Jeremy. My New Labour Friends ("of whom I have none") still believe that I, and everyone else who thought that Jeremy was in with a shout of getting the through the doors to 10 Downing Street, were bewitched by his magnetic personality. We apparently have a Thing about old beardy guys with cardigans. No one can look into their own hearts or see there own secret motivations. Probably some 1980s Tories really did support radical monetarism because they had a thing about being told off by strict nannies. Maybe a certain number of Starmerites would run screaming into the arms of any charismatic prosecutor with a knighthood.[1] But at any conscious level, I supported Corbyn because Corbyn was putting forward the kind of policies which I agreed with an have always agreed with. Charge people more and buy more stuff with it. I would no longer support Corbyn because I no longer think we can have a country where the rich pay more and everyone shares the nice things. Unlike the Right, I don't think there is a sinister anti-woke mob who control everything; I don't believe there is a cabal of Cultural McCarthyites hidden away in a secret base in Frankfurt plotting the upfall of civilisation. I do think that the press, including the supposedly unbiassed elements of the press like the BBC and the supposedly left wing elements of the press like the Guardian all presented Corbyn in the worst possible light. 

But mainly, I think that the Labour Party is a loose coalition of left wingers and social democrats; and that the Tory party is a loose coalition of right wingers and social democrats; and the social democrats in the Labour Party would much rather the Tories got into power for a bit than that the left wing faction in their party should get into the ascendency. There was never any point in getting a newer and shinier left wing standard bearer to replace Jeremy. All the moderates would have upped and formed their own party which would have split the opposition vote and kept the Tories in power. There is certainly no point in the Left breaking away and starting a new party; that party would not win any elections, and it would make it easier for the Tories to win them. Even Jezza himself -- who did win his own seat as an independent, god bless him -- talks in terms of starting a movement, not forming a government.

I voted for Darren Jones, the official Labour candidate, who not only won, but celebrated his victory by making a quite good joke. I'm fine with that. We voted the Bastards out and that's the main thing. Darren Jones is a suspiciously working class name. I wonder what he's really called?

But I am left in an uncomfortable position. 

("That's because you've been sitting at the Mac typing since eight o clock this morning, Andrew. Why not get up and walk round the room for a few minutes?")

During every election debate, Rishi Sunak accused Kier Starmer of believing in the exact things I think he should believe in, and during every election debate, Kier Starmer denied that he believed them, and indeed, insinuated that saying that he believe them was a vile slurs. Don't vote for this man, we kept hearing, because if he gets in he will put up taxes and spend the money on welfare. 

And I did beat my chest and wail exceedingly and cry unto the TV screen saying "I would to God that that were true."

Maths and logic and ideology tells me that you can tax more and spend more or you can tax less and spend less. 

Or you can borrow. I am not clever enough to understand who countries borrow from and where the money goes; but it is generally considered to be not a great idea because you eventually have to pay it back and the only way you can pay it back is by taking money out of the Big Kitty and replenishing it with more tax money. 

However, there is now a consensus around a third position that you can not put up taxes and still have money to spend on nice things Because Growth. To that extent we're all on the same page as Liz Truss's cabbage. If everyone makes more widgets and sells more coffee (and especially, I think, builds more AI Net Zero Windmills) then money will money will flow into the kitty and we can have all the nice things we need.

I do not not want this to work. Kier Starmer absolutely seems like a competent guy and I think he's sincere when he talks about service and making the country better for everyone and his Dad being a toolmaker. I want there to be schools and libraries and roads and eventually student grants and tuition fees and trains you can travel on for less than three figures. I want the poor to be a bit richer and the rich to be a bit poorer: I have always assumed that the Tories are happy for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, as in good Queen Margaret's golden time. Starmer has gambled 2029 on it being possible for the poor to get richer without the rich needing to get any poorer. 

And if he's right, I'm wrong: from each according to his ability to each according to his need was never a desirable goal. Indeed, if he's right, either Jesus Christ was wrong, or else Jesus Christ was right at a personal level but there is no means of applying Christian ethics to the economic or political sphere. If only we made the needles eye wider the poor would no longer be with us. And that would represent quite a radical change of mind on my part. 

See you in five years, God willing.


[*] Did you hear about the lawyer who had a fetish for jurisprudence? He got off on a technicality.

This is me writing about the election

This is me writing about the election. 

So. We have had an election. We have voted the bastards out. There is now no need to go through the horrible process again until 2029. It would be nice to think that the success of Starmer's dull nice reasonable sensible party would mean that five years from now the Conservatives will try to outflank him by being even duller, even nicer, even more reasonable and even more sensible. But all the evidence is that their response to Starmer's nice part is go even further in the direction of being the complete bastard and nutter bastard party.

Someone on the American Twitter recently directed a question at LIBERALS:

Do you actually, personally know any conservatives? Do you really believe that they are as horrible as you say they are? Have you ever just taken the chance, sat down, and just talk with them? You might be surprised to find that they are actually human beings, just like you. You might even be surprised to find that they are exhausted and scared. You might even just discover that they're a lot like you after all.


Which is a nice bit of rhetoric. It's worth deconstructing, slightly. It is, of course, directed at conservatives, not at liberals: the Tweeter and the Tweetee are assumed to agree that LIBERALS don't believe that conservatives are human beings; that LIBERALS as a group don't think conservatives are anything like them; and the LIBERALS, as a point of principle, don't talk to conservatives. In the exact moment of saying "Liberals, don't demonise the other side" the other side is in fact demonising the liberals. They could have framed the question as "do you know any one with the opposite political views to yourself?" But they didn't.

But we long ago proved that most public conservatives utterances are a form of performance art; in which the actual views of conservatives are inverted and comedically attributed to liberals. Conservatives reallt do believe that everyone to the left of them politically are Stalinists and Communists; so they accuse the Left of saying that anyone they don't like is a Nazi. Conservatives are actively engaged in removing books they don't like from libraries, so they claim that the defining feature of the Left is that they don't allow freedom of speech. It's a fine old game. 

Conservatives -- do you actually know any liberals? Do you really believe they are as mindless as you say they are? Have you ever taken the chance to sit down with a member of the woke mob, and just talked to them? You might find out that they are human beings just like you....

Another man on the internet once wrote that Sigmund Freud spoke of "the Nazism of small differences." Rather ironically this was a Freudian slip: what the great man actually talked about was "the narcissism of small differences". But either way, it is a good point. It's a terrible cliche to say that all the political parties are exactly the same and just as bad as one another. But it is also true that more similar two sides become, the more fervently they hate each other. I seem to recall Monty Python wrote a funny sketch around this point. Labour has moved further and further away from it's original left wing principles; they have in fact found more and more common ground with the Conservative Party. And they are understandably reluctant to admit this. I think this post-Brexit centre-right consensus makes the discourse more poisonous than it needs to be. I have an impression that in the olden days when there real, ideological differences between politicians, there was less need to resort to abuse. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn could afford to have a civilised debate about their massive ideological differences of opinion. David Cameron could at least be open about how much he despised Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Right of the Tory Party think that Sunak is woke; the left of the Labour Party think that Starmer is Tory Lite; literally everyone agrees that the Tories have made a shocking mess of everything. It's not an argument about ideology; it's and argument about competence, that the Tories were always going to lose.  The two leaders spent six weeks pretending that they thought the other one was a monster whose election or re-election would instigate an apocalypse cover all the lands of Middle-earth in a second darkness. But under slightly different circumstances, they could very easily have been in the same party.

Andrew thought he had better say something about the election

Andrew thought he had better say something about the election.

When Andrew writes about important subjects like Doctor Who and the Micronauts, he often edits and polishes and checks facts in standard reference works Wikipedia. He generally doesn't start a piece until he has thought up an interesting new angle or spotted something no-one has spotted before. He could perhaps sometimes be legitimately accused of overthinking.

Having just finished a long summation of Tom Baker's ante-penultimate season; he was quite tired. And he was about to go on his annual holiday to Sidmouth. So he thought he would blurt out everything he didn't have to say about the election in a couple of writing sessions and get them out into the world with minimum editing. 

Of course, I know how this goes. I expect that every writer does. You hand a friend some hastily written note and said "This is a very rough draft of the first couple of paragraphs of an idea I had, could you scan it and tell me if it's worth carrying on with?" and the friend will definitely say "I think there is an "e" in phenomenologial, and it would look better with Em dashes." Hand a friend a typescript and say "This is going to the publisher tomorrow; could you check it for any really obvious typos?" and the friend will say "I don't think the main character's dialect was authentic, and it would work better if it was set in the seventeenth century rather than modern times."

At least three times in the last twelve months I have published highly confessional apologia explaining why I am who I am and why I do what I do. No-one appeared to notice. Not that I particularly write in order to be noticed. And the best feedback is that sixty people send me money each month so that I can buy time to carry on doing what I am doing. But I fully expect any off-the-cuff and not particularly well thought through remarks I make about Kier Starmer is likely to be taken as my irrevocable judgement and result in a deluge of six or seven messages from the American internet.

I like both kinds of responses. I liked it when people use my blog as a forum to talk about things loosely related to my blog. Unfortunately, He Who Must Not Be Named killed or curtailed that, as one assumes he intended. I like the other kind, the kind when people give me money, even more. But I am kind of aware that just saying what I am thinking is a hostage to fortune.

I suppose there are always moments when writers start to write about why they write about writing. I know that some people find the Jocycean web of cultural reference points and insider jokes a barrier to reading my nonsense: so let's just say that the forgoing was my equivalent of Howard the Duck issue 16 and move on, shall we?

Thursday, July 04, 2024

July 4th Waste Paper Basket

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