Michael Young, principal author of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, “Let Us Face the Future“, author of the funny novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy [see his later remarks on his neologism here], co-author of the classic study, Family and Kinship in East London, inspiration behind the Consumers’ Association, the Open University, et cetera, et cetera, born 9 August 1915, died 14 January 2002.
Since we’re mostly focussing on Right-Wing Britons today, here’s another snippet, from the Guardian: [via]:
The Backbencher hears that Kilroy’s increasingly desperate search for a political home may be about to come to an end. Having been narrowly rejected by both the English Democrats and the New Party - a tax-cutting, British trucker-loving outfit whose logo depicts five blue people conducting a seance - Kilroy is apparently now hoping to lead a putative party called Veritas, set up by four disaffected members of the New Party’s national executive. The New Party “knows nothing about it” and Kilroy isn’t answering his mobile, but the Backbencher hopes to be able to confirm the wanderer’s latest perch shortly.
A moment of lucid reasoning from the English Democrats, as they realise that they shouldn’t touch RKS with the proverbial barge pole. Who’d have thought it?
Not a pretty combination, I know, but Peter the Great links to this fun story about how some Welsh Tories from a place I’ve never heard of called Delyn are trying to wrest their website domain name back from the clutches of evil pornographers.
(Why is it that Welsh Tories are vulnerable to this kind of thing, anyway? Lots of the spam messages that appeared at the VS over Christmas allegedly contained links to some Vale of Glamorgan Conservatives site, which was presumably going to sell me viagra or phentermine or low cost meds or something equally useful.)
Anyway, the detail I like is the “Email Alerts” box in the middle of the CNN page, which allows you to request notification about stories that appear about the “British Conservative party”, on the one hand or “Porn”, on the other. It’s a nice binary, though perhaps not quite the exclusive-and-exhaustive kind of non-deconstructable binary we like over here at the Virtual Stoa.
Listening to British radio in general, Radio Four in particular, and the Today programme in particular in particular has a tendency, even over a fairly short period, to induce various forms of self-loathing. This morning’s 8am news bulletin provided a splendid exception, with a lead story about Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi, followed by the news that Mark Thatcher’s pleading guilty, followed, shortly after that, by an interview with Michael Howard at his lying worst on the subject of burglars and householders and the significance of the difference - which he never defined with any precision - between “unreasonable” and “grossly disproportionate”. So I arose in a very good mood to go and make the first cups of coffee of the day.
(In normal circumstances, I’d add Charles Clarke, on after Howard, to this succession of jokers. But, in fact, Citizens Windsor, Thatcher and Howard are more ridiculous figures than Mr Clarke, and, on this occasion, the Home Secretary was being sensible.)
The Guardian points out that the theme of the party Prince Harry attended was “natives and colonials”. I know he’s supposed to be thick, but can it really be the case that he can’t read more than the first two letters of each word?
UPDATE [12.20pm]: What’s going on? Mel P has something sensible to say, for the second time in the space of a week. Have I changed? Has she? Is it some New Year’s Resolution to stop barking like a lunatic on her blog and/or in her columns? As I say, what’s going on?
UPDATE [12.40pm]: Jamie, (in common with Melanie), has good things to say, too, but focussing on Harry rather than Howard.
James Joyce, the author of the greatest novel of all time, and the greatest short story of all time, and of some other things as well, born 2 February 1882, died 13 January 1941 in Zürich.
As I wrote on this day a couple of years ago, “James Joyce isn’t a familiar figure on the list of Dead Socialists, and it took me a long time to realise the extent of Joyce’s socialist politics, given the apolitical pose he liked to strike from time to time. But a useful passage in Vincent Cheng’s Joyce, Race and Empire, pp.129-134 summarises the evidence, which includes the testimony of his brother (”He calls himself a socialist, but attaches himself to no school of socialism”), the contents of his library in Trieste (he owned a great deal of socialist and anarchist literature), and a consistently anti-imperialist politics in his various writings.”
Nick Barlow’s found some ignorant bigots.
Mike over at Political Betting has posted a handy set of numbers:
The following show the average annual opinion poll ratings from ICM for the Conservatives over the past ten years and although there has been a small improvement the figures remain pretty consistent.
1995 29%
1996 30.4%
1997 29.2% (General Election 31.4%)
1998 29.6%
1999 30%
2000 32.5% (excluding petrol crisis surveys)
2001 31.25% (General Election 32.7%)
2002 31.2%
2003 31.7%
2004 32.25%
Has there ever been this degree of stability in a major Party’s polling numbers? (Mike’s data go back to 1995, but I don’t think there’s much change in the 1994 or 1993 numbers: we can date the Tories’ opinion poll slump fairly precisely to September 1992, when Mr Heseltine announced his pit closures.) Having grown up in the 1980s, when polls bounced up and down wildly between elections, and no Parliament was complete without the Government having a twenty-point deficit in the polls somewhere along the line, I still find these unchanging numbers strangely gripping.
It’s somewhat alarming to discover that on the Jerry Springer issues sensible people are in more or less full agreement with both Melanie Phillips and Stephen Pollard. Pollard, however, still can’t write prose very well:
“I cannot think of a single rational reason why the BBC should not have broadcast the opera. I am, as regular readers will know, the first to criticise the Beeb. This, it seems to me, is one of the rare recent instances of the BBC doing exactly what a public broadcaster should be doing.”
Oh, and Matthew Turner has a good point to make, and makes it well.
From the people over at Media Watch UK, the organisation that seems to be devoted to (i) the memory of Mary Whitehouse and to (ii) keeping Jerry Springer The Opera off our screens. Here’s how their letter to the BBC ends:
Bearing in mind that there is already mounting public concern and an absence of any assurance regarding compliance, we believe that the decision to show ‘Jerry Springer The Opera’ should be urgently reconsidered at the highest level within the BBC. There must be other West End productions that would be more enjoyable and appreciated by a far greater number of licence-fee payers? Why not, for example, screen a seasonal pantomime, with well-known and liked television and radio personalities, currently showing at provincial theatres across the country?
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have stayed up for a BBC2 pantomime last night. It would also (I observe) have been less suitable as the climax of an evening given over to Jerry Springer-themed programmes.
To Enetation, the people who provide the comments facility at the Virtual Stoa, and who have finally installed what would appear to be effective anti-spam measures…
… Phew…
… I think this means that if you post comments at a rate of many-a-minute you’ll probably be banned as a likely spambot, and the same might happen if you post comments that are full of links to sites which purport to sell you cheap Rolex watches, phentermine or viagra.
This looks splendid, and the kind of thing that the internet was invented for, though I will need more time than I have at the moment to explore it properly and push back the frontiers of mediaeval tapestry design.
Good stuff, via Early Modern Notes.
I don’t really follow any football teams. I almost decided to become a mild Newcastle United partisan a couple of years back, but the day after I made that half-hearted resolution Bobby Robson decided to sign Lee Bowyer, and that rather killed that courtship stone dead. But I do have a very soft spot for AS Roma, and was sorry to hear that they lost to Lazio 3:1 at the weekend.
The politics of facial hair are always interesting: Peter the Great (no, not that one) banned beards, the Taliban mandated them, etc.
On a slightly different but no less political register, I’m still wrestling with the bit of British Politics Trivia which maintains that there were no beards in the Cabinet between the fall of the Labour Government in 1931 (Sidney Webb, aka Lord Passfield, was heavily bearded) and the election of the Labour Government in 1997, which brought the beards of Dobbo and Cook to the Cabinet table. But can there really be no beardies in between? Sixty six years is a long time in politics (over three thousand weeks, in fact, each week being a long time on its own), and it does seem unlikel, or, at the very least, regrettable. Counterexamples, real or imagined, are more than more than welcome in the Comments below.
Friends are emailing me from across the Atlantic to ask me whether I’ve seen this. It seems that the North Korean government has misunderstood the basics of socialist politics — again — by launching a TV series with the imperishable title, “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle”.
I will be going for a haircut over the next few days, but it will not be for this reason.
The North Korean News Agency remains highly recommended, as ever. Don’t smoke N. Korean cigarettes, though: they’re crap. (A former student posted a pack to me when he was last in Pyongyang. They really aren’t very nice.)
I’ll play the non-fiction version, via Normblog:
Rules: ‘You copy the list [of books] from the last person in the chain, delete the names of the authors you don’t have on your home library shelves and replace them with names of authors you do have. Bold the replacements.’
1. David McLellan
2. Ellen Meiksins Wood
3. Ian Kershaw
4. Alasdair MacIntyre
5. Primo Levi
6. Raymond Chandler Epictetus
7. C.L.R. James
8. Ralph Miliband
9. Brian Barry
10. Pierre Bayle
No bloody David Horowitz for me, thank you very much. I bet Norm’s got more Primo Levi than I have, too. And it’s still a fact I should be a bit more ashamed of than I am (i.e., ashamed enough to actually do something about it) that apart from the complete novels of Raymond Chandler, each read several times (apart from Playback, only twice, because it’s shite), I’ve read practically no American fiction (though I keep meaning to make a start on Moby Dick).
UPDATE [5pm]: Some people may have noticed that I’m not too solid on the distinction between non-fiction and fiction in the list I posted, above (and before anyone makes rude remarks, it’s the Chandler that’s fiction, not the MacIntyre…) So I’ve made a slight correction.
I woke up this morning expecting to find news reports of BBC Television Centre having been burned down by Christians and Mail-readers, what with the unprecendented levels of outrage, etc. That would have been dramatic, but it was not to be.
And wasn’t JS:tO fun? (Not to be confused with JSTOR, which is useful but not much fun.) I saw it last Summer in the West End, and thought it transferred very well onto the small screen with two exceptions, one minor, one major.
The minor problem was that it seemed to me that Jerry’s inner Valkyrie didn’t work so well on TV. The inner Valkyrie is great — everyone should have one — but she makes a far greater impact in the theatre.
The major problem was that the real stars of the show are Satan’s shoes, and they were barely visible in the TV broadcast. Satan has a splendid pair of red shoes that create a fine devillish-hooves effect, and which deserved several lingering close-ups, which they didn’t get. Instead, often the shots of Satan either cut him off at the knees or had his shoes in shadow. You could see them a few times during the show, but not nearly enough. And that, for me, was a problem.
(I also can’t find a photo of a shod Satan to link to on the intrawebmesh in order to prove my point, which shows that the conspiracy to deny the viewing public their rights runs deep, alternatively that I’m not terribly efficient with Google Images.)
I hear that the Birmingham Rep has a slot to fill now that they’ve pulled one of their productions. Perhaps JS:tO could play there for a bit?
I approve of cricket in South Africa, which seems always to start around 8.30 in the morning, which is a very good time to have cricket on the telly. And the last hour’s been great fun: five wickets, two chances that really shouldn’t have been missed (Jones dropped catch, Vaughan missed run-out) as South Africa have gone from an overnight score of 184-3 to 222-8 dec. This hour of incompetence shouldn’t stop them winning the match quite comfortably, unless something very surprising happens, but, as I say, it’s been fun to watch.
Right: time to go to the library.
Tim Fiskin’s blog’s a quite fun place to visit this January. He posted his thoughts about the difference between Girls Aloud and Carrie Bradshaw the other day (which prompted something of a spat with his co-blogger Rachel), and now he’s got some interesting things to say about the oft-drawn comparison between Tony Blair and the Grand Old Man:
Tony Blair invites (sometimes explicitly, all the bloody time implicitly) comparisons with Gladstone; but these comparisons only show what a bloody failure Blair and New Labour more generally are. What made Gladstonian Radicalism a success was his political modernism. He looked to the future for his political validation in the sense that his appeal was to a political subject to come; he rode the wave of social change that would later bring the Labour party into being and see off both Whigs and Radicals.New Labour is the precise opposite of this project. In the face of the exhaustion (and out-and-out destruction) of the traditional working-class political subject, New Labour has no idea what to do. It cannot see anything other than the precise details of the prevailing political constellation, and so can do nothing other than chase after whatever seems to be the most organised political block of the moment. Tony Blair�s repetition of Gladstone is an examplary piece of post-modernism, where �modernisation� means a subjectively directionless reorganisation, which, of course, ends up being objectively a reorganisation in capital�s interests. Unfortunately, for this reason, New Labour�s lack of a future may ensure that they remain the natural party of power for some time to come.
All of which reminds me of another debunking-of-a-comparison I rather enjoyed once upon a time, which was Ross McKibbin’s takedown of Mr Blair in the LRB, back in the days when he (TB, not RMcK) went around comparing himself to Asquith:
The Prime Minister is alleged to admire the old Liberal Party and to regret its demise. One wonders whether he knows anything about it, for its whole history was one of making enemies among the country’s élites, often deliberately. The Asquith Government, not normally deemed to be a failure, won the enmity of the House of Lords, the Army, the Protestant Irish, landowners, protectionists, the City, much of the Church of England and King George V. No Labour Government, not even Attlee’s, faced such a coalition. There was, of course, an unintended element to this; but it was the inevitable outcome of a strategy which originated with Gladstone and was continued by his successors: that you won elections by mobilising voters around pieces of large-scale legislation which benefited many, but which were also partisan and contentious. What was good for Mr Gladstone is good for Mr Blair - as I am sure he would be the first to admit. The Prime Minister is also said to admire Lady Thatcher, and Gladstone’s was exactly the same strategy as the one she followed. Followed, indeed, to the point of recklessness. But she did win three successive elections.
And despite the fact that all three of the main political parties are in a pisspoor state at the moment, so might he.
Here’s a snippet from Michael Howard’s speech on this, that and the other (see also here [pdf], and thanks to Matthew Turner for the links):
Third, we have to restore order to Britain. The decline of responsibility and the proliferation of so-called “human rights” have left us in a moral quagmire, unable to get a grip on rising crime and disorder.
Setting aside the fascist overtones to this kind of remark, and setting aside the question of whether crime and disorder are rising or not, my question’s this one: is this the first time a supposedly leading politician in this country has used a phrase as nasty as “so-called human rights” in what’s being billed as a major speech?UPDATE [5 minutes later]: Ah, I see that, in the manner of “political correctness gone mad”, this is a phrase Mr Howard is running with: he used it back in August, too, when I wasn’t paying attention, repeated it in November, and other Tories picked up on the direction that Tory rhetoric was going and dropped the phrase into their conference speeches. So I expect we can expect to hear quite a bit more of it. Yuck.
Betty Reid, British Communist, born 1 May 1915, died January 4 2004.
As I mentioned below, Immanuel Kant wrote a handful of essays on earthquakes, following the famous quake that struck Lisbon in 1755. One of them, his 1756 “History and Phsyiography of the Most Remarkable Cases of the Earthquake which towards the end of the Year 1755 Shook a Great Part of the Earth” exists in cyberspace over here.
As Immanuel Kant had done before him, though not on a blog, Norm’s been worrying about what earthquakes (of which more later) and theology might have to do with one another (see here, here and here), and he’s just posted a few remarks on Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opium of the poeple. Now a part of the point of these remarks is to draw attention to the context in which Marx says this about religion, at the start of the (marvellously named) Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but Norm doesn’t draw attention to the most puzzling aspect of that context, which is Marx’s claim a little further on down the same page that “If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs…”
I finally got around to seeing Clint Eastwood’s film, The Outlaw Josey Wales the other evening, and wasn’t terribly impressed. Partly, I think, I didn’t much like it because it was so heavily indebted to another film I don’t much like, John Ford’s The Searchers, as it piles on reference after reference and parallel after parallel, saving the most blatant for last, when the distinctive shapes of Monument Valley make an appearance in the background of one of the final shots. But I was interested enough to see if the internetweb had much to say about this kind of thing, and dug up this (solid but ungripping) 2003 essay on the subject by Robert C. Sickels, which kicks off with the remarkable claim that “what virtually every critic has failed to recognize is its [= TOJW’s] undeniable relationship to John Ford’s The Searchers…” That can’t be true, can it? Film writers surely haven’t been that blinkered? Or is Sickels just exaggerating a bit to get his own essay off the ground? I know there are (i) film buffs and (ii) Western enthusiasts who read this page, so any information posted in the Comments will be cheerily digested.
If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t yet read Jason Burke’s Al-Qaeda, do pop out and buy a copy and give it a read. It’s really very good indeed, and doesn’t seem to have dated badly at all (having been first published around 18 months ago now).
