The Virtual Stoa

The Gaping Silence on the Italian Left.

My brother Michael, over here.

It’s not an especially striking opinion, but having bollocksed up the election last Autumn, the 10p rate this year, and now the local elections, it’s hard to see why he should hang around, and I’m already bored of reading “Brown prepares fightback” headlines on the news websites. It’s probably time for him to invent a non-existent medical complaint and retire to full-time fatherhood — and then we can have the leadership contest the Labour Party was denied last year.

Although I thought, more or less, that Brown deserved to become Prime Minister last year, after the long dark night of Tony Blair, I certainly don’t think he deserves any sympathy or indulgence now he is Prime Minister, or any excuses being made for what has been a pretty unimpressive go at the job.

I think that my maternal grandmother wanted there to be a general election campaign on all the time, and while I wouldn’t quite go that far, I do think that in general we should be having more votes and more elections than we do, and party leadership contests are an OK second-best substitute for more frequent general elections. (We should certainly, for example, have a new Triennial Act, to make sure that we get these.)

I’m not yet entirely fatalistic about the prospect of crushing Conservative victory at the next election. When people try to tell me that the Government might be re-elected, they tend to say that British governments always do badly in the mid-term polls, but I’m inclined to believe that that’s nonsense. But here are two (fairly banal) observations.

One is that after about eight years or so of Thatcherism, I sometimes wondered what the point of a two-party system was if the other party didn’t get a turn from time to time, and it’s probably true that those non-Tories who had thoughts like that in the late 1980s and 1990s should be fairly sympathetic to people of any or no party affiliation who might be having similar thoughts today. If we’re going to have two-party politics, I’d rather that the parties alternated every five to ten years or so, than that they had these incredibly long runs at Government, which just leave everybody pissed off.

The other is that a lot of sensible people think that (with the wisdom of hindsight, admittedly) the Labour Party was lucky to lose the election in 1992, given what happened to the Tory victors almost immediately afterwards; and I wonder whether the re-election of the Labour Party for a fourth term in power might not necessarily turn out to be altogether a good thing for it over the longer term.

(Alright, maybe I am entirely fatalistic.)

[See also my old colleague Mike Smithson.]

[Oh, and Ed Balls is an honourable man. (So are they all, all honourable men.)]

Ever since I started reading the Vatican’s excellent website about ten years ago I always thought it odd that you could get it in English, French, Portuguese, and so on, but not in Latin. Now the BBC is reporting today on the launch of the Vatican’s Latin website and suggesting the Pope’s enthusiasm for Latin might be the reason for its belated appearance. I’m quite pleased with this. Not so pleased that I’ll forgive the Church for its appalling record on child abuse or contraception or for closing down Amnesty International groups in its schools in Northern Ireland because Amnesty thinks rape victims should be allowed to have abortions, or anything like that. But, still, I’m quite pleased.

I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but I did this one last year, and Josh asked me if I’d post this year’s version. It’s over the fold…

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Robert Jospin, French pacifist, socialist, Lavaliste, and father of Lionel; born 9 June 1899, died 9 May 1990.

Stella Browne, socialist feminist campaigner for the reform of abortion law. After Somerville College, Oxford and spells as a teacher and librarian she began to make a name for herself in the debates concerning women’s sexual desire before and after the First World War. She conducted a twenty-five year correspondence with Havelock Ellis and translated a number of works of continental sexology in the interwar period. An active participant in the work of the Malthusian League, she was a significant champion of birth control and far-reaching abortion rights, as well as campaigning around divorce law and against the stigma still attached to illegitimacy. At various times she was a Communist, Fabian, member of the Chelsea branch of the Labour Party, and – for a few years – member of the Eugenics Society, though she opposed its preferred criterion of ‘fitness’, and her ODNB biographer remarks that she probably joined the society “to represent the interests of the Abortion Law Reform Association of which she was a founder”. A page with links to some of her writings is here. Born Halifax, Nova Scotia, 9 May 1880, died Sefton Park, Liverpool, 8 May 1955.

Margaret Cole, Fabian socialist and wife of G. D. H., with whom she wrote detective novels. Born 6 May 1893, died 7 May 1980. Some quotes over here.

Ian Mikardo, Labour MP, born 9 July 1908, died 6 May 1993.

Norm points out that Willie Nelson has recently turned 75…

A very strange clip here combining the Stoa’s interest in Monday Marseillaise Blogging, and Lego…

Over at the new-look Harry’s Place (where they have decided that the increasing problems with the site were those of form rather than content, style rather than substance), David T suggests that Ken Livingstone is a sort of Coriolanus figure, whereupon “mastershake” in the comments replies that “You have clearly never read, nor seen, Coriolanus.”

The disagreement raises a good question — just why is Coriolanus a tragic figure? If it’s just that he’s a great man brought down by his tragic flaw, which is his pride, as David T basically suggests, then we’d have to conclude that Coriolanus isn’t a terribly tragic tragedy, as his kind of pride is just odious, getting in the way of generating anything like the kind of affective sympathy for Martius which might make his predicament a compelling one. And it can’t just be that he’s a great man who just isn’t appreciated by an ungrateful mob or by two politicking tribunes, either. That would give us a dull right-wing interpretation of the play — which isn’t to say that it isn’t an interpretation that’s been offered many times in the past, and encoded into several well-known productions, including those staged in Nazi Germany.

But Coriolanus is a great play, and one of my very favourites (along with The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure). And the clue to the tragedy, it seems to me, comes in Cominius’s remark in Act Two Scene Two that “It is held / That valour is the chiefest virtue, and / Most dignifies the haver: if it be, / The man I speak of cannot in the world / Be singly counterpoised.” “If it be…” — note the conditional. Martius’s tragedy is that valour is no longer the chiefest virtue in public life. He’s been brought up by his mum to be a typical Roman hero, but that kind of Roman hero is now an anachronism, for Rome is entering the phase of her existence in which the elite must master the skills of peacetime as well as the arts of war—which in practice means learning how to manage the domestic class struggle, just as it does for politicians today—and this is what Coriolanus is particularly badly-equipped to do.

Tony Blair — who is, happily, now one of yesterday’s politicians — used to like to talk about “traditional values in a modern setting”, though that was just by way of providing rhetorical cover for his left flank as he wrestled the Labour Party ever further to the Right. Coriolanus is the tragedy of what happens when you really are living out of your time, and the modern setting is a lot less hospitable to the traditional values than you’d really prefer it to be. And this general approach to reading the play is reinforced by Aufidius’s remark right at the end of Act Four, “So our virtues / Lie in the interpretation of the time”. (And it’s true; they do.)

So it’s hard to read the mayoral election through the lens of Coriolanus — if we did, we’d have to argue that Ken Livingstone is crucially an anachronistic figure, but that Boris of the Bullingdon is not. But it’s easy to see why the Decents might be attracted to this erroneous interpretation. The political confrontation at the heart of the play, after all, is that between Coriolanus and the tribunes of the plebs, who have some influence over public opinion, and who do everything they can to bring him down. And since Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford, and David Cameron’s Conservative Party) can’t possibly be cast as a tribune, these are the parts to be filled by the scribes of Decency — Nick Cohen, Martin Bright, and their friends on the blogs — with their relentless campaigns against Citizen Ken.

Nick Cohen might have made a plausible T of the P back in his Cruel Britannia days; but it’s weirdly implausible to see him occupying that role today, with his campaigns for the return of the grammar schools and for the Labour government to be doing more for people on £100K p.a.. (See also today’s column, which, since we’re being Shakespearian, is something rich and strange.) But within the discourse of Decency, which is what matters here, Cohen remains firmly a Man of the Left, and casting him and his ilk as Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus gives the guys at Harry’s what they need — a perspective on the election that puts the vitriolic, personalised anti-Livingstone polemic centre-stage, and shoves the ultimate victor, Boris Johnson, firmly into the wings.

UPDATE [5.5.2008]: David T replies.

From tehgraun [via] :

“This is like the March on Rome in 1922,” one shadow minister said as [Boris] Johnson inched towards victory.

I wonder which shadow minister that was? For pictures of some fascists celebrating victory in the mayoral election in Rome last week, try over here.

And here’s the banner that was unveiled at G. A. Cohen’s Valedictory Lecture here in Oxford, photographed by Chris Bertram:

He also got one of me being the Warm-Up Guy over here.

Here’s the dramatic hammer-and-sickle effect that appears on the campus of the University of Chicago round about noon on May Day, photographed by Abbi Eichhorn:

[thanks! PM]

Barbara Castle, the “Red Queen”, born 6 October 1910, died 3 May 2002.

National press: “Labour suffers worst electoral defeat for 40 years”

Local press: “Labour has taken control of Oxford City Council after a hugely successful election night.”

There are many nice things about living in Oxford, and one of them is that political culture here is lively. We have vigorous five-party politics (if you include the Tories), and what happens here is often pleasingly disengaged from the rhythms of the national scene.

Jericho, however, is rapidly becoming a one-party-statelet. Four years ago, the Lib Dems won by 846 to 716; and in the three contests that have taken place since then in 2005, 2006 and 2008, Labour has won by 713 to 437, 1100 to 704 and 907 to 301 respectively. That’s not bad at all.

Pierre Bérégovoy, French socialist and Prime Minister, 1992-3; born Déville-lès-Rouen in Normandy, 23 December 1925; shot himself 1 May 1993.

Happy May Day, everyone!

Here’s the Internationale scene from Bertolucci’s Il Conformista, which was playing in Oxford last week:

[Older Stoa May Day coverage is here.]

As you might have seen elsewhere, Charles Tilly has died.

One informal Tilly text I liked was a response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Four days later, he circulated a series of predictions among sociologist colleagues as to what would happen, or what we might learn about the plot itself. “Am I sure these dire predictions are correct?”, he asked. “Of course not. I write them out both to place myself on record and to encourage counter-predicitons from better informed colleagues.”

Over the fold for the full set:

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Martin O’Neill, over here.

Beatrice Webb, Fabian, born 2 January 1858, died 30 April 1943.

Over here, at Tim Lambert’s.

Raj Patel, over here. And he calls Stephen Pollard a cretin for good measure, too.

In other Raj-related news, people in the UK can now buy his excellent book Stuffed and Starved in paperback, and the US edition has been published over there, too. Buy it and read it, if you haven’t already. (Even the Daily Mail liked it!)