Telegraph » 21stCenturyFix.org.uk

How to spot an idiot living in your neighbourhood

common sense, democracy, gilipollas, people, Telegraph, unclassifiable 2 Responses »

May 302013

There is an idiotic article out there at the moment with one – just one – (apparently borrowed) phrase of massively perceptive wisdom:

[...] As has been said, you have to be just clever enough to do it and just stupid enough to believe in it.

As follows, in fact:

It is surely reasonable for Dame Widow Twankey, the former director general of HI5, to call for people to inform on neighbours they suspect of idiocy. To a very limited extent, it happens already. But for the sake of all of us – political and celebrity communities in particular – it needs to happen more.

Also reasonable, on the face of it, is the Government’s desire to do more to discourage the process by which disaffected individuals turn themselves into intellectual lunatics – the job of the proposed task force on Prevent, the counter-radicalisation strategy.

In fact, we already know all we need to know about radicalisation. What the task force needs to focus on is what to do and – equally important – what not to do.

Studies show that it can happen to anyone, that there is no single identifiable profile. That said, the great majority of idiots, unsurprisingly, have been Anglo-Saxon males aged 35-70, a third to a half of whom had always been unemployed in the service of the state, in particular as MPs, and a significant portion of the rest under-employed as company directors or tabloid columnists. Most were unhappily married. Where women were involved, it tended to be in a supportive role, although in the Houses of Parliament and the Lords female representatives were radicalised by the decline of democracy, showing a curious empathy with the dispossessed.

Worldwide, about 62 per cent were graduate idiots, with those of non-British origin generally from the educated but politically frustrated aspirational middle class. British home-grown idiots tend to be less well educated though of a higher socio-economic status. One estimate is that about 31 per cent participated in some form of lower education, studying such subjects as hunting, shooting or fishing. They are not mad: levels of mental illness were roughly in line with world averages. Between a third and a quarter of those judged to be idiots in Britain and Europe had signs of congenital idiocy. A fifth or more of British idiots were also international celebrities, in particular business gurus, lifestyle leaders and think-tank groupies, integrating perfectly with the foolishness of their host culture and often obtaining leave to remain. Throughout Europe, many idiots were and are disaffected second-generation business wannabes on the political make.

Etc etc etc …

And so to our conclusion? Again, as follows:

Rather than ban idiots, the Government should dialogue with, educate and embrace them (as the French often do) along with their hangers-on. It should stress that the proposed Common Idiots Bill (aka the “Promote Graft Charter”) does little more than extend to new idiots existing practices with the old. Above all, officials should pay more attention to “anti-democratic idiots”, the swamp from which the current Parliament and the international celebrity community has emerged. The Prime Minister publicly called for this in his 2011 speech in Munich, but Whitehall largely ignored him, focusing on what one of Dame Twankey’s successors called “the idiots nearest the boat”. It needn’t cost much – a few good dipstick officers here and there – but it would make a difference.

One final observation, this time on a totally serious note: we can always tell where a so-called “white” society is rampantly prejudiced when a crime committed by a “white” man or woman doesn’t merit the epithet of “white”, even as any crime committed by someone of another race, religion or ethnic grouping immediately leads to the latter information being foregrounded in those oh-so-even-handed newspaperly descriptions.

When I was a kid, and when I was occasionally driven to use swear words about people in front of my father, he would tell me – quite carefully and gently – that I should be using the term “indescribable idiot”.

No. It doesn’t sound the same as, for example, “black savage” – but it does allow us to communicate our necessary positions without the tragic interference of otherwise inevitable prejudice.

We ought to listen to my father on this one, I think.

Let’s start calling all those who would destroy the equilibrium of democracy “idiots” – and in the process aim to leave our prejudices properly behind us.

Don’t you think?

The Telegraph tomorrow: that Berlin Wall which didn’t fall

Berlin Wall, Communism, Croatia, End of History, England, English, in a hole, Telegraph, Yugoslavia No Responses »

May 272013

These are the three ideas which dominate the front page of the Daily Telegraph tomorrow. You couldn’t make it up. A case of fact fiercely outgunning fiction really. Let me explain.

A short digression first – a digression the above reminds me of for reasons which shall shortly become self-evident.

My mother escaped Communist Yugoslavia in the early 1960s. After a long period of readjustment, she came to love the country that accepted her. She spent her early years in a small village near Witney and could only receive news from the family she left behind via blue airmailed letters which took weeks to arrive from her homeland.

She always suspected the slow and heavy hand of censorship.

The police state the Yugoslavs operated was real enough though. I remember the rampant paranoia cousins of mine exhibited when we visited them during the summers of my youth. My Croatian family had grown up on the wrong side of the political spectrum. My grandfather apparently owed his life, on one occasion at least, to a friend who also happened to be in the Party – though the Party was never any friend of his.

Even in repressive regimes, human kindnesses were still able occasionally to shine through.

Back to the matters that occupy us tonight, however. The three items you can see on the above front page would not have been out of place in my mother’s Communist Yugoslavia. In their juxtapositioning, in their clever advantage-taking of the recent backdrop of cultural fracture, in the cunning story they weave, they are all beautifully cruel examples of propaganda discourse at its very finest. No matter that reducing welfare will increase the pressure on the police and the armed forces; no matter that spying on neighbours will create more unreasonable suspicion and fear of difference; no matter that the defacing of national symbols is easily performed and most certainly does not deserve the careless oxygen of publicity … the principle goal is to get the message across that the country is under threat from unspokenly wicked but not intangible strangenesses.

In truth, tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph shows us only one thing: when the Berlin Wall fell, it was not the East Germans who found themselves liberated so much as the West (on a very long-burn fuse) which found itself contaminated. No longer able to fight a common enemy which bound us together in joint enterprise, we thrashed about over the next twenty years looking for constancy and focus for our huge infrastructures of counter-surveillance.

No. I’m not saying the threats aren’t now very real.

All I’m saying is there was no real industrial incentive to reduce their presence in time.

In fact, we could even argue that in some curious way the Berlin Wall hasn’t fallen at all: rather, it’s mutated and grown to include the rest of us in a dangerous embrace, an embrace which serves only to normalise the evil instincts – once turned outwards and now focussing inwards – that we had previously managed to contain so effectively elsewhere.

The Wall which was at one time a Petri Dish of a defence – and is now shattered unavoidably on the laboratory floors of recent history.

Forward into neo-Stalinist times with our dear Daily Torygraph

a con, in a hole, Telegraph 1 Response »

Apr 112013

I got a bit of flak yesterday at one of the places I publish 21st Century Fix content to, specifically in relation to my suggesting that 20th century Communism had beaten, hands down, the neoliberal ideologies of Margaret Thatcher. These were the offending phrases (the bold is mine today):

[...] As I have argued recently and consistently of late, if corporate capitalism now has the analytical tools to properly run its internal and external command-and-control economies – tools which the Soviet Union and others did not have in the 20th century – why can we not celebrate not exactly the death of Margaret Thatcher but, rather, the victory of Communism (more here)?

Neoliberalism may have vanquished democratic discourse – made it impossible, in a very divide and rule sort of way, for democratic politicians to promote the ideas I mention above – but in truth, and in business, there is very little difference now between the corporate ways of Mussolini and Stalin and those of Apple, Google and Microsoft. Ideological domination of the world was, and is, all their aims. It’s true that we shouldn’t stretch the comparison in relation to the number of deaths directly incurred in each case. But as corporate capitalism’s march proceeds anon, it still isn’t clear that the massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the already well-to-do and downright wealthy won’t have the kind of consequences we’re now witnessing in countries such as Greece.

Now in my recent pieces on bloodless revolution and disruption, I’ve kind of been playing the role of devil’s advocate. But I do seriously believe that if transnational business can use the old tools of centrally-planned economies to make mountains of cash, then democratic nation-states should be allowed to do much the same. Or, at least, try to do something along similar lines (notwithstanding the errors made thus far).

I may, of course, be showing my total ignorance of these matters, which might explain why most people are ignoring me on this subject. But that neo-Stalinist times rule over us anyway can hardly be in doubt any more, in particular for those with rather more knowledge of the issues – and especially with respect to the tenor of a dreadful article from the Telegraph today (still, it would seem, outwith a neo-Stalinist paywall of its own). The article first reached me via this astonishingly-phrased tweet:

“Disrespectful” – BBC is likely to play anti-Thatcher song ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ on the radio this weekend soa.li/QYKxszT

Remember, we are talking about a song originally composed for a Hollywood musical made at the very end of the 1930s. Over seventy years ago, that is.

Following on from the above tweet, we then get the article itself. Its thesis is made absolutely clear from the very beginning. A quite incredible thesis really, especially when we realise we’re talking about a media corporation peopled with intelligent journalists, who presumably understand how chronological time works:

The BBC is likely to play anti-Thatcher song Ding Dong the Witch is Dead on the radio this weekend as it will not consider taste when making a decision on play lists, the Corporation has admitted.

The article goes on to quote, as authoritative examples of what its readers should be feeling, the very same Twitter-sourced content the right’s been so happy to condemn over the past few days:

The announcement was denounced by users of Twitter.

Joshua Sullyvan tweeted: “If they play it then it is an outrage. Some people are so disrespectful.”

Natalie Maria Taylor added: “If the song celebrating Thatchers death is played by the BBC, regardless of if it’s at number one or not, I will be thoroughly disgusted.”

But what’s most incredible about this neo-Stalinist piece of historical revisionism, where industrial art created with a quite different intention suddenly becomes a musical critique of establishment-threatening proportions, is the following paragraph – the last one I’m going to quote from the Telegraph‘s diatribe – which leaves us in absolutely no doubt:

[...] the BBC are considering whether a reporter might have to explain why a 1930s song is in the top spot as the 16 to 24-year-olds listening are too young to remember when Lady Thatcher was in office.

Ahhh! So that explains it. Our happy-go-lucky conclusion from this vapid historical jaunt? Looks like Lady Thatcher must have been in office in the 1930s!

Clear as mud. Bloody ridiculous. (And, with such a shoddy misinforming bundle of silly prejudice and poorly-crafted journalism, not the way to make your neo-Stalinist paywall work any time soon.)

Improve politics by all means – but don’t confuse authenticity with opportunism

in a hole, political chicanery, political dissonance, political parties, politicians, politicking, politics, shackles of democracy, Telegraph 2 Responses »

Mar 312012

Charles Moore has an interesting piece over at the Telegraph today. His final paragraph defines the current political situation thus:

We have too much debt. We pay too-high taxes. We build too few houses. We are losing old jobs and costs prevent us creating new ones. We are having a bad time, and we want the people who rule us to lead us out of that, and think of little else. It is simple, but not easy.

And whilst I don’t agree with everything he says – I’m not sure it’s costs that are really preventing us from creating new jobs, for example – much as one might sign up with a slightly heavy heart to a manifesto (ie not agreeing with everything you found in it and yet even so agreeing enough), so I am inclined to say: “Yes, in this case, I agree with practically everything you argue.”

As regular readers of this blog will note, I suggested the other day that the Coalition was far cleverer than its public performance might suggest – that, indeed, its public performance might even be a deliberate case of discombobulation. in fact, evidence that this latter scenario might be the case is included in Moore’s article:

[...] now that I have heard the Conservatives’ private explanation, which is being handed down to constituency associations by MPs, I begin to feel angry.

The private message is as follows. “This is our Thatcher moment. In order to defeat the coming miners’ strike, she stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour Party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers’ strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed.”

Moore talks about the difference between Thatcher and these lot by suggesting Thatcher did what she did in the weeks prior to the miners’ strike without inconveniencing very much the public. (Yesterday, meanwhile, it would appear that at least one member of the public was severely inconvenienced by taking the original government advice too literally.)

But where I agree one hundred percent with Moore’s thesis is when he talks about the public’s yearning for authenticity. From Thatcher to Blair, authenticity was clearly the prime driver in a wider public’s acceptance and embracing of powerful figures who obviously had their own minds. You didn’t have to agree with everything they did – you did, however, need to agree with where they were coming from.

And as Moore also suggests, the deception left behind, after Blair’s own breaking of the contract he once forged so strongly with the British voters, is “hanging over British politics like smog”.

Quite rightly too.

Moore also refers to Galloway, though, as an example of authenticity. Here, I think, he gets it wrong. Galloway isn’t a careerist; isn’t a celebrity; isn’t authentic in the least. Galloway, quite simply, is an opportunist who will say what he must. If anti-Semitism is necessary to win an election, anti-Semitism it will be.

With such opportunism, no one should have any truck. Nor confuse it with the authenticity which we may yet yearn for in the future.

Here’s a suggestion, in the meantime, as to where we might attempt to go instead: Ed Miliband started his leadership with an apparently unfocussed keynote speech at Labour Party Conference. This is what I said of it at the time:

Now I’m not saying Ed Miliband has succeeded where Hitchcock did decades before: transgression is not quite where most British politicians are to be found these days. But I do think, in an analogous way, that – in his recent speech at Party Conference – Ed Miliband was at least attempting to break certain moulds in quite a courageous manner. The very fact that many people felt obliged to criticise his delivery – and not see his register as conversational rather than traditionally declamatory – does make me wonder if this poor man doesn’t have the hardest job in politics: to sell grassroots collaboration to a political party wary of, and thus resistant to, all such similar promises.

A political party which claims to be the very essence of grassroots politics – and then consistently finds itself in search of yet another charismatic group of fixers.

A political party which could be perfectly positioned to create a new kind of political, social and business environment (as, indeed, Miliband in his speech promised to fight on behalf of) – and yet which generally finds itself dodging and fudging the most insistent contradictions and incongruences inhabiting its core.

Is Ed Miliband’s speech going to be a Hitchcockian achievement? Misunderstood on its first outing by those who claim to know – yet generally, in the future, to be well received by those who can only vote? Battling against those “vested interests” which make economies in their own image and for their own purposes is an issue he is courageous to raise. In a sense, then, perhaps we could say – with his conversation – that Miliband proposes nothing more nor less than that neo-New Labour I was unhappy with the other day: but in a better and far more constructive register; that is to say, all the unfinished business which New Labour was never brave enough to get round to effecting.

Could this, then, be a way of tying the authenticity of New Labour’s legacy of top-down delivery into a 21st century grassroots approach to devolved empowerment? A way, precisely, of not confusing authenticity with opportunism but – rather – transposing the former to the real people who need supporting. For as Moore quite rightly points out of the Coalition and its leaders:

[...] You are asserting privilege, when you should be dressing your best because you represent your country. You are acting as if you own the place. You don’t.

Our politicians, for far too long, have been behaving in opportunistic ways. To describe it in terms of customer-focussed management systems, politicians’ customers (or clients if you prefer) should be external – that is to say, the voters and their families, friends and support networks – whereas of late (and not just this government either) their customers have been manifestly internal; their customers have become themselves. Businesspeople who don’t simply have the ear of politicians but have actually – suddenly – become the political classes themselves.

Which is why it is, in fact, time to construct a register of communication for politics which does not use the language of business.

Authenticity in politics should really mean service, not ownership. We need, in British politics, to recover that sense of service. And whatever the politics that emerges from such a sea change, it surely cannot be as bad as the politics we now have.

"Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo"

Fraser Nelson, George Osborne, Gordon Brown, in a hole, latterday socialism, New Labour, Telegraph, the Real George Osborne, Tony Blair No Responses »

Jan 272012

A few choice phrases from Fraser Nelson’s latest piece over at the Telegraph:

George Osborne should be having similar thoughts. His old routine is now failing. The embarrassing truth is that, for all his talk about how you can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis, he is now trying to do just that. [...]

And this (the bold is mine):

Treasury officials who have worked for both men are struck not by the differences between them, but the similarities. Brown was nicknamed Macavity for his habit of disappearing at the first sign of trouble; Osborne is known as The Submarine, surfacing only a handful of times a year. Both see economics as a game of political chess, each policy designed to outwit the opposition. [...]

Not a way of making the world a better place, then – more a tool to batter what the rest of us can only define as a proxy enemy. For the real enemy is what we live from day to day.

Nelson also points out that:

[...] The political narrative thus detaches from the economic reality. And this is why a Government that is widely regarded as radical, and hawkish on the deficit, is making virtually no economic progress, while running up the debt like there’s no tomorrow.

And this:

Even Osborne’s critics cannot deny that, politically, his policy has brought devastating success. He has won the argument on cuts, even though – as the monthly spending figures show – he has hardly made any. [...]

Whilst for Labour the comfort is getting forever colder:

[...] The Chancellor told friends that he expected to be the most hated man in Britain by 2012, but there is surprisingly little hatred. Instead, there is ridicule – and it is largely heaped upon a Labour leader whose skills seem not to extend much beyond solving a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds.

Or, indeed, not eating a chocolate orange …

As I sift through Nelson’s piece – as always tightly, pointedly and fairly written (you can tell he worked for a tabloid, can’t you? Nothing better for those with the verbose tendency to write about politics than to have to do so in the context of flashy headlines and tawdry entertainment stories) – I can’t avoid coming to the conclusion that Osborne is actually truly some politician of considerable standing. More adept, perhaps, at the presentational arts than the PR man that is Cameron himself.

What has Osborne – in reality – achieved then? Well. He’s increased the indebtedness of the nation whilst at the same time savaging all manner of social services. “And this is an achievement?” you wonder. Well, yes – mightily so. Because Osborne is a three-dimensional politician who plays the long game. “And what may that be?” you might ask. Why, make it financially impossible – absolutely out of the question – for Labour ever to bring back the socialism by stealth we enjoyed for so many years under the New Labour regime.

Osborne, in his apparent ineptness, has shown himself to be not a son of Blair but a son of Brown. For neither have ever been inept; both are consummate manipulators of the body politic.

This isn’t, after all, a battle between right and left but – rather – between those who would use politics as a tool to do something useful in the outside world – and those who do politics simply to keep the opposition at bay.

The pursuit of power above all is at the heart of Osbornomics. As Nelson so memorably points out in his piece:

[...] Osbornomics: political stardust but an economic placebo.

With one small caveat: whilst the placebo is designed to strategically convince us he’s doing everything he should, in reality it’s there in order for him to have the time to burn all those bridges back to any kind of British socialism. That is to say, on his part it’s not unconscious at all. It’s a deliberate administration of a drug which allows us to die.

And therein my absolute misery this morning.

http://youtu.be/zxg7j6rQDLM

The Telegraph and the Met – definitely not Dixon of Dock Green

Dixon of Dock Green, in a hole, Metropolitan Police, Telegraph, unclassifiable No Responses »

Oct 302011

I was a bit critical of the Telegraph the other day as I questioned its ability to think for itself in the #occupylsx thermal-imaging story. In fact, I wondered if it hadn’t been in unofficial cahoots with a whole train of interested parties. My thesis ran as follows:

Our conclusion? Oh dearie me. The chain of events in question looks like it happened thus: first, some police drew a damning conclusion; then some police told some journalists where to look; then some journalists drew a damning conclusion without checking their facts; then some journalists told a handy politician what they’d incorrectly discovered; then a handy politician declaimed the scandal up on high without doublechecking the veracity of what he was saying; then the protesters decided to doublecheck the scandal and discovered it mightn’t be true; then some other journalists interviewed someone who knew; and then this someone who knew, an expert in the matter, confirmed that what the police had told some journalists who had told a handy politician who had told a lazy media who had told a gullible public which had chosen to lap it all up was all a load of exquisitely structured rubbish – and, quite possibly, deliberately and knowingly fabricated.

But both credit and brickbats should be equally apportioned, where credit instead of brickbats are due. And this weekend it would appear the Telegraph thinks for itself, as a very murky matter is uncovered:

The Metropolitan Police has secret spy planes capable of eavesdropping on mobile phone calls from the sky.

But this isn’t the murky bit – as one would expect, in reality, in such a complex environment as London, for the police to be able to do things like this … or perhaps even more. No. The murky bit comes next, as we discover that the idea of democratic oversight by elected representatives becomes a question of “oversight” in the sense of “ignorance” rather than “oversight” in the sense of “control”:

Last week a Metropolitan Police spokesman refused to discuss its use of the fixed wing aircraft but insisted it has gone through a “full” procurement process.

However members of the Metropolitan Police Authority, which scrutinises the force’s spending said they had never been told of the existence of the aircraft.

According to Civil Aviation Authority records, the aircraft is registered to a firm called Nor Leasing.

There is no trace of the firm on any other official record and its business address registered with the CAA is actually a branch of Mail Boxes Etc, which offers a virtual office services and mail forwarding, in Surbiton, south-west London.

The story which the Telegraph, to all its credit, unearths has a definite sting in its tail:

The pattern of hidden spending is believed to have been established by Tony Williams, a former assistant finance director at Scotland Yard, who established a secret web of companies for use in specialist undercover operations.

But Mr Williams also used the same techniques to steal millions of pounds from the force to set himself up as a bogus Scottish “laird”. Williams was accused of stealing more than £4 million from Scotland Yard. He was jailed for seven years in 1995.

Thus it is that the pattern repeats itself. Institutions which at least people like myself wanted to believe in are shown to be absolutely riven with corrupt behaviours: first, Parliament and MPs’ expenses; second, Murdoch’s (but not only Murdoch’s) control of the British body politic; third, the awful revelations of #hackgate and the apparent connivance of British law enforcement authorities; now, at least one secretive company operating below the radar of democratic control with the apparent objective of allowing the Metropolitan Police to chase the coattails of MI5.

And this quite apart from the Coalition government’s total inability to show it cares for the wider population it claims to want to get onside.

Definitely not Dixon of Dock Green, this green and unpleasant land of ours.

The charms and dangers of headlines, industrial poetry, tweeting and not-sharing

copyright, Guardian, headlines, industrial poetry, linguistic strategies, news-gathering, newspapers, publishing, Telegraph, Twitter, unclassifiable No Responses »

Sep 232011

Is a headline a coherent and discrete enough an item to warrant copyright protection? To be honest, I’ve always felt the skills of the sub-editors responsible for flagging up the content of a story in no more than half a dozen well-fashioned words deserve far more recognition from almost everyone than ever seems to be the case. It’s just about as close, in fact, as you can get to industrial poetry as I think you could fairly manage. Whether this needs to go as far as receiving the protection I mention above, I don’t really know. Though others would beg to differ. At least in certain, very specific and money-making contexts.

But whilst copyright would appear to be having a significant impact on how the open web can operate, it’s not the only force at work. We’re already aware of the language created around the tools of SMS texting. But then there’s Twitter and its imperious tendency to remove articles, the word “and” in favour of “&”, the blessed full stop and a whole host of other abbreviating strategies which lead you to wonder if a decade of this isn’t going to bring us a totally different English language.

And so I wonder if the strategies we instinctively use with Twitter to communicate in less space and time – the liberties we take with the otherwise hard-and-fast rules of a language we should love rather more gracefully than we do – will be used as assertively (I resist the temptation to say “aggressively” – even as I know I shouldn’t) by those who pull the strings of money. I’ve already noticed, in a curiously subversive and unacknowledged sort of way, that mainstream newspaper articles from at least the Telegraph and the Guardian seem to be acquiring a new and consistent internal structure which makes snipping their meaning concisely and briefly for use in my posts an evermore difficult task. I do wonder if there isn’t some software out there – or, at the very least, a journalism school in-the-making – which is beginning to allow one to protect one’s content better against the kind of quoting, sharing and remixing the last decade of blogging and social media has accustomed us to.

For I do wonder, you see, whether the open web is on its way out whatever we do. Capitalism may be stumbling (arguments for and against this thesis can be found from Chris here and from the BBC here) – but money will always attract money; and if capitalism isn’t to be the way, then something else will eventually be found to channel those instincts – base as they may be.

Perhaps the key to monetising the web lies precisely in developing such linguistic strategies which make it impossible to cut and paste as we have until now preferred.

A different kind of industrial poetry then? An industrial poetry that uses the very nature of the language itself to protect its writers and authors from the very human, and otherwise admirable, instinct of their readers to copy and share amongst themselves?

An industrial poetry writ so humongously large, in fact, it can even encompass news-gathering businesses across the globe – and protect their business models from the kind of seepage and leakage the open web has encouraged to date?

Just as well that companies like Amazon are currently involved in doing this sort of thing. Otherwise, I’d be inclined to throw in the towel – and give up entirely on humanity.

(Oh I do hope this idea I’ve stumbled across today isn’t already irreversibly changing the way we communicate online.)

Gove, the cane and (not) being the boss

a con, cane, corporal punishment, education, in a hole, Michael Gove, Telegraph No Responses »

Sep 162011

The Telegraph obviously thinks a Friday is a good day to beat up on teachers. First we have the story that forty-nine percent of parents want the cane back in schools. My immediate reaction was that it mightn’t be a bad idea to introduce the cane to the British Cabinet. But since most of them are probably public (ie private) school bods, they’ve most probably already been using it with gusto on each other.

I also wonder if the above-mentioned forty-nine percent of parents aren’t the ones who have persistently used corporal punishment on their offspring from infancy – and have thus contributed to the problems that teachers and the social care system now have in convincing these bullied adolescents not to behave like bullies themselves.

But that’s almost certainly the bleeding-heart liberal in me looking for reasons to excuse the inexcusable.

Then the Telegraph decides to take a different bite at the apple. Instead of writing feature articles on how good teachers now are in Britain (we do get this short set of quotes from opposing sides of the political fence – but little more to indicate the paper appreciates the difficulties and achievements of the profession), we get this sort of puff-pastry glorification of what perfect teachers might be. J K Rowling, Albus Dumbledore, Carol Vorderman and Stephen Fry all get top marks in the eyes of children and/or parents. Interestingly enough, I can’t imagine any of these four sanctioning the use of physical violence on their charges.

Can you?

Meanwhile, Gove, in his very best Mr T-mode, is quoted as saying the following:

“The right every child deserves to be taught properly is currently undermined by the twisting of rights by a minority who need to be taught an unambiguous lesson in who is boss.

http://youtu.be/NySN_plfiNI

The problem is that being boss in the 21st century is a far more complex role than the 19th-century mindset ever required. And here I mean not in an educational context but, rather, in straightforward business. Crowdsourcing companies; responsive multinational corporations; massive organisations with teams that collaborate under much flatter hierarchies than before – these are all realities people like Mr Gove will find resistible when they declaim their soundbitten shorthanded prejudices.

What’s missing in education systems is not the violence of a Victorian bully – and if we’re really trying to prepare our children for work in the real world, that’s definitely not the message which is going to convince them that work is worth betting on in the least.

What’s missing in education systems is the sensation that at the end of the process there is true reward. And the Coalition capitalism that consigns university graduates to a miserable life of uncertain job security, of low- or unpaid internships and of research grants that have to be fought over as if we were hyenas at the lion’s kill – this removes all reasonable sense of potential achievement from anyone considering a proper integration into society.

Not to speak of the McJobs which, whilst providing useful transitional employment for a lot of workers, often end up being the long-term destination of too many worthy and intelligent people.

Let me be clear. I’m not excusing bad behaviour. But we have to reach back into the beginnings to properly understand the end.

If we do not want violence to rule the streets, we cannot contemplate aggression of the kind Mr Gove appears to be in favour of in our education system. Otherwise our education system will serve to inculcate precisely this circumstance: that bosses don’t need to be better than us, they just need to be more violent.

And if forty-nine percent of the parent population is regularly using corporal punishment on their children - from the day, that is, they burst into tears – he surely need look no further for the real reason British society might be as brutish as he claims.

It would seem the Telegraph’s writers can’t decide if the British are scum or not

in a hole, mainstream media, plurality, social media, Telegraph No Responses »

Aug 132011

The Telegraph doesn’t seem to know this evening who – in its stable of writers – is saying or thinking what. I guess that’s par for the course – lately, none of us really seem to.

So I’ll be charitable then, and put it down to a desire for a generously post-modern plurality.

On the one hand, we have Tim Stanley, a research follow in American History, using the academic equivalent of “scum” about the British people in general (the bold is mine):

Now that the dust has settled, it’s time for the historians to bring some perspective to the August riots. David Starkey started on Friday by suggesting that mob violence was a cultural import from Jamaica. He wasn’t being racist; Dr Starkey stressed that the nihilistic attitude found among rioters was manufactured and bi-racial. But he was wrong if he meant to suggest that mob violence is historically atypical in Britain. Students of history should have seen last week coming. The British are not a very nice people and we’ve been looting, rioting and pillaging for centuries. The patterns are horribly familiar.

On the other hand, we have Damian Thompson complaining that when the current president of the NUJ calls clean-up volunteers “scum”, Twitter doesn’t fall out of its now habitual trolley:

OK, here’s a name for you: Mr Donnacha DeLong, the new president of the National Union of Journalists. On Tuesday he described the “broom army” of middle-class volunteers who cleaned up Clapham Junction as “scum”.

Yes, you read that right: scum. DeLong said so in a Facebook comment; I rang DeLong to check that it was authentic. “Yes, but I was referring to a particular exclusivist crowd,” he explained.

Now I have to say that the latter set of remarks doesn’t ennoble anyone on the left. But then neither do the far more measured and politely couched emissions of Mr Stanley describe the British in any significantly different way – except inasmuch as that nasty word “scum”, and the register it occupies, has been distanced through clever choice of substitutional vocabulary.

The underlying message and intent, however, is pretty much the same. Essentially, use the broadest brush strokes to help generate the distasteful message that the British are very much a lost cause.

I’d have thought that Britain needs neither very much of Mr Stanley nor very much of Mr DeLong. Nor, indeed, the confused sense of plurality which – in all this mad confusion – more than one news media organisation is probably sharing with our dear Telegraph.

(As a footnote to this post, both these articles came to me without irony from exactly the same Telegraph-related Twitter feed. My only recommendation for the future is that – in feral pursuit of headlines that hurt the opposition – you might want to doublecheck first of all the internal coherence of the content you’re selling. Just a thought, anyhow. Just a thought.)

On not herding readers back into the "creed"

Britain, burning bridges, Fraser Nelson, on a high, Peter Oborne, riots, Spectator, sword and shield, swords into ploughshares, Telegraph No Responses »

Aug 132011

mulberrybush makes an excellent couple of points in an exchange of tweets we had yesterday evening. The first as follows:

@politicsworld @eiohel with the riots, papers are back to trying to herd readers into the “creed”. Need to get beyond this.

Whilst the second continued the theme:

@eiohel @politicsworld I am certain it is important to build bridges. Have spoken to a number of Teleg readers who think so too

Meanwhile, also yesterday evening, and in response to comments from tris on my post on this awful story from Wandsworth (more here from Munguin and Co, and further background here), I couldn’t help myself bleating just a little woefully this sadness on our current state of affairs:

The quality of our political class, and the ability of our institutions to engage with ordinary people, is definitely wanting though.

This clearly has a history behind it, and it truly makes you want to get your own back on the political miscreants involved.

But there’s something else: I didn’t start writing about life and politics to turn into some vengeance-seeking male harpy. I’d far rather we were able to create a society which supported its members, was intelligent in its actions and institutions – and relatively free of corrupt and ingrowing practices. Unfortunately, we simply don’t seem to be any closer to such a society at all – if anything we are moving away from it.

With my Croatian background, I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually I turned into a nationalist of some kind myself. No small can ever be as ugly as big and lumbering London-centric style.

And I suppose I resist the impulse because I’ve seen the damage it’s done in my mother’s homeland.

Even so, it’s a temptation when you see all this disconnected mediocrity.

I’ve already mentioned Peter Oborne’s courageous writing from the heart of Tory thinking over at the Telegraph. I first noticed this “getting it” during the Cameron-Coulson-Murdoch matrix of half-truths at the centre of the News of the World phone-hacking scandals. It was almost as if a certain threshold of evidence – a watershed of truths – had been uncovered. This allowed certain honourable souls to accept that the legacy of spin – which has led us all to doubt any theses about public behaviours, as well as acquire a corrosive cynicism which concludes every accusation has an angle – did not necessarily mean that everything said about top-level governance was inevitably going to be the spoutings of the envious mob.

That people like Oborne are able to tell us home truths the political class feel unable to is both worrying and heartening. Worrying, because our politicians ought to be braver and more principled; more convinced of their own ability to persuade a frightened populace that societal cohesion is still worth pursuing. Heartening, because at least there are some prepared to put their reputations on the line.

Even if, objectively speaking, they speak what we can only describe as blindingly obvious and self-evident truths.

In the modern world of spin, 24-hour rolling news and social media, however, such truths are often the first casualties of this killing-field where reality is edited.

And so I come to another heartening piece – again, from the heart of Tory thinking; again, from a writer of note. This time we find Fraser Nelson concluding in the Spectator with the following even- and open-handed appeal to cross-party cooperation:

The LA report was called “To Rebuild Is Not Enough” – a very good title, which applies to Britain. The report led to the unlikely Clinton/Gingrich welfare reforms. An inquiry is a Labour idea, but if there is to be consensus on any issue in British politics, it should be over tackling poverty, joblessness and lawlessness.

As with the Oborne article, this is well worth a read and careful consideration in full.

Enough has been burnt in the past few days. This is not a time to also burn bridges with aimless self-justifying rhetoric.

Swords into ploughshares? How about enemies into friends? And if friends is not possible, then at least functional colleagues …

David Cameron finally says sorry – and gets it wrong yet again

a con, BBC, David Cameron, flip-flopping, in a hole, London, riots, saying sorry, Telegraph, unclassifiable No Responses »

Aug 082011

Whilst Reuters reports the following on the riots in Tottenham this weekend …

Anger at high unemployment and cuts in public services, coupled with resentment of the police, contributed to an explosion of violence and looting in a deprived London neighbourhood, residents said Sunday.

… Mr David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, finally says sorry – and gets even this wrong:

Prime Minister David Cameron has returned to an Italian cafe to make amends for failing to tip a waitress.

Last week, he and his wife ordered two cappuccinos at the Dolcenero cafe in Montevarchi, but did not leave a tip.

The reason? The waitress in question explained thus:

She said the prime minister had ordered two coffees and asked for them to be brought to an outside table – but she had told him she was too busy and he should collect them himself.

He later left without tipping, but returned on Sunday with daughter Nancy to clear up the misunderstanding.

I find this a really weird story, to be honest. Out of this world and quite off the planet, in fact. Firstly, its prominence in today’s British media, juxtaposed as it is up against the riots I mention, is only worthy of the most superficial kind of editorial judgement possible; and I can hardly believe the BBC - along with the Telegraph – is in the hands of such ineffectual and imprecise agenda-setting tendencies as that.

Secondly, by not leaving a tip, Mr Cameron did precisely what he should have done. The service was poor – and tipping is one of the few tools a customer has, short of making a formal complaint to management, of expressing an appropriate disapproval.

If Mr Cameron cannot avoid flip-flopping even when he is right, and in something as easy to understand as when to tip and when not to tip, the Lord only knows what he’s got prepared for us in the near future as the nightmare of financial ruin approaches his happy homeland.
____________________

Update to this post: some further reading, via a blog providing a police officer’s own personal perspective, can be found here.

In a society where decline is clearly on the horizon, all I can conclude is that no one is going to end up a winner; what we will end up having to simply accept, meanwhile, is that loss and degradation is to become a common lot for us all.

Intertextuality bites back

Damian Thompson, David Allen Green, David Rose, Johann Hari, John Naughton, Telegraph, unclassifiable No Responses »

Jul 092011

The Telegraph reports tonight on an ongoing detective story which has nothing to do with the News of the World but does relate to journalism.

If it’s true, I’m really sad because of its implications (my position in June and early July can fairly be reflected in these two pieces here and here). On the other hand, it vindicates – to a certain degree – the techniques of intertextual journalism which Johann Hari himself has been accused of using. The detective work involved combines remotely accessed data and judicious conclusion to triangulate a reality which is becoming evermore self-evident – even to the emotional and, dare I say, romantic sorts like myself.

But the purpose of this post isn’t really self-flagellation. Rather more, I am interested in a reaction from the original poster, the lawyer David Allen Green, whose blog post was picked up by the Telegraph‘s Damian Thompson (@holysmoke on Twitter) and thus duly reported on in the paper itself. The tweet that caught my eye went as follows:

@holysmoke I should be grateful if you only reproduce a smaller portion of my post, or confirm that the Telegraph will pay a licence fee.

It’s my firm belief that all of us have a right to define the copyright terms we wish to apply to our work. I do myself, using the Creative Commons copyright you can find at the bottom of this blog – even as under the terms of that copyright I reserve the right to except anyone from its legalese if I so choose. (Interestingly, if I remember rightly, there are some countries like Spain and France where copyright is seen to be intrinsic to an author – that is to say, it cannot be shrugged off nor needs to be asserted; though, of course, it’s always wise to be able to provide evidence of first use – if, that is, this is the kind of game you prefer to play).

I do however think that where a blog is concerned, full quotation, where duly attributed, can serve useful and constructive purposes – and deserves to be freely allowed. And there are notable blogs, for example John Naughton’s always excellent Memex 1.1, where the original function of blogging – that is to say, logging the web in some easy-to-find and follow place to ensure that relatively impermanent content finds a safe and searchable home – clearly continues to be their prime reason for existing.

We come back, therefore, to the power of cumulative content and the meaning that intertextuality and juxtaposition can add. Some of us write columns – closer to more traditional journalism – where the hierarchy between writer and reader is pretty clear. David Allen Green seems to do and believe in this – and will naturally conceive the ownership of his content in such terms. Others post a sequence of shorter links couched in explanatory cocoons – Twitter has picked up the gauntlet on this one and made it a particular strength of its ideology and functioning – and here we have blogs like Naughton’s, already mentioned above.

My own particular view is that a train of thought belongs to no one – and anything we write or create can only exist because of its ancestors. The Internet was well named when it was called a worldwide web. And what none of as can deny any longer is that meaning as accumulated, generated and established by the promiscuous content-hopping a modern browser allows is as intertextual and juxtapositional as it’s ever going to get. Indeed, it is going to be very difficult in such an environment to avoid ever “plagiarising” someone else’s thoughts. The quantity of information, sources and websites any evening of surfing gets through simply makes it impossible to track the audit trail of every “original” thought one has.

And then, of course, there’s the reality and power of convergent evolution in human progress – of which I am a fervent believer.

So to summarise. Copying is hard-wired into the human brain. Children learn by copying their peers and parents. Until human beings reach exam-age, our education systems mightily approve of the strategy. It’s only when we get to the point where money becomes more important than principle – when the daily dollar becomes more important than the recognition of truth – that a glory of human thought processes suddenly becomes a disagreeable technique which the law must prohibit.

And if not prohibit, then at the very least limit its consensual sharing by charging an entry fee for everyone who wishes to participate in the adventure of imagination.

Myself, I would be proud for someone to fully quote something I had written. Partly because I would know I didn’t invent it all by my lonesome.

A final thought to be going away with. There are of course occasions when value can truly be added to content through its processing and framing – a case in point sadly being this piece of investigative intertextuality.

But I stand by the general principle that no thought – that is to say, no thesis – belongs to anyone at all. And as far as I can see, this principle is not widely accepted anywhere that money defines first and foremost how we care to think about thought and its development.

A bit of MSM crossover

Dave Semple, on a high, paywall, Shane Richmond, Telegraph No Responses »

Apr 192010

A nice write-up in the Telegraph today on a piece I wrote not long ago. I can’t take all the credit for it – it was actually Dave Semple, excellent editor that he is, who suggested I wrote a rebuttal to Reuben’s piece on how good Rupert Murdoch’s paywalls really are. I did send it off to Dave, but got no response, so ended up publishing it on 21stCenturyFix.org – and thus it is that it found its way onto Shane Richmond’s blog.

Sometimes this blogging lark is really fun. Especially when you get a bit of constructive feedback.