The Virtual Stoa

John Lanchester, in the LRB:

There is one fascinating counterfactual to emerge from Prezza. It concerns the incident when he punched an egg-throwing protester in Wales during the 2001 general election. He includes a photo of the punch, a solid left jab right on the man’s chin. There was a furore, which Prescott survived because the public (not the papers, not at first) were largely on his side. But Prescott was an amateur boxer in his youth, and on page 118-19 there is a photo of him landing what looks like a knockout punch on an opponent. He is right-handed, and the knockout punch was a right. Here is the counter-factual: if 16-stone Prescott had hit the egg-thrower with his right, he would have knocked him out, and quite likely have broken his jaw. If either of those things had happened – if the man had ended up in hospital – Prescott would have had to resign. Whoever Blair appointed as his new deputy prime minister would have had much less pull with the party, because no one had as much pull with the party as Prescott. So when the crucial vote on the Iraq war came, Blair wouldn’t have had a deputy able to bring the party onside in the way that Prescott did. Instead of 139 Labour MPs voting against the war, a majority of them would have voted against, Blair would (as he said in private) have had to resign, and we wouldn’t have gone to war. And all because, for once, a New Labour figure didn’t lean to the right.

Hmm. I thought that Caroline Spelman would be forced out before Wendy Alexander, but apparently I was wrong. Still, can’t be long now.

(Perhaps Gordon Brown could go off and lead the Scottish Labour Party, now there’s a vacancy, and then the rest of us can be spared his wretched Britishness obsession?)

National details over here. Here’s what’s happening in Oxford. Click here to give your money to Oxford’s excellent Asylum Welcome. Here’s Bill Morris making the case for why asylum seekers should have the right to work restored. And here’s a bunch of things from MigrantVoice over at OpenDemocracy.

At the gathering on Saturday organised by Compass, aka the Ruth Lister Fan Club, Ruth Lister said that the super-rich are spending their money on buying submarines. Is this true? I hadn’t heard this before. If they are buying submarines, is it part of a kind of James Bond super-villain strategy for taking over the world, or is it just fun to own a submarine?

While I’m on the subject of the Poles in the UK Parliament, I’ve got a question. Has Denis MacShane’s slide into absurdity been a gradual, steady thing, or has it gone in fits and starts? If the latter, are there key moments that one needs to know about? I can remember that I once used to think he was a more intelligent than average politician whose opinions were worth paying attention to — but that seems like a very long time ago now. Maybe it was just because he appeared to know something about European social democratic politics, and I have an unreasoned prejudice in favour of people who appear to know something about European social democratic politics?

Should we have a new Bank Holiday to celebrate Britishness Polishness? Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski makes the case this morning on the radio, over the fold.

(What is it about the voters of Shrewsbury, anyway, who first sent the great Lib Dem erotic poet Paul Marsden to Westminster, and now this chap?)

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I clearly haven’t been following politics closely enough recently, as the news that Labour attacked the Tory candidate in Crewe & Nantwich for living near llamas has only just caught up with me, thanks to popbitch.

This is just weird. It’s not violently grotesque, the way the “make foreigners carry ID cards” leaflet was violently grotesque, but it is very, very strange. Everyone I know is strongly pro-llama. (I think that everyone I don’t know is strongly pro-llama.) And the slow take-over of the English countryside by camelids is very much to be welcomed.

In a genuinely socialist Britain, we would probably all live close to llamas, what with the disappearance of the distinction between the town and the country; and we wouldn’t need lawn-mowers any more. (Charles Fourier probably said something about this.)

Under the Tories’ new plans, can lesbians just write “David Cameron”, “George Osbourne” or perhaps even “Andrew Lansley” in the bit of the form where they have to mention a “male role model”, or is it a bit more complicated than that?

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.)]

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.

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.

Martin O’Neill, over here.

I’ve only just noticed that the vaguely repulsive English Democrats have selected the overtly repulsive Matt O’Connor of Fathers4Justice as their candidate for Mayor of London. They probably deserve each other.

Shamelessly stolen from Ted:

Certainly there cannot be a method devised at once more ineffectual and iniquitous than a federal oath. What is the language that in strictness of interpretation belongs to the act of the legislature imposing this oath? To one party it says, ‘We know very well that you are our friends; the oath as it relates to you we acknowledge to be altogether superfluous; nevertheless you must take it, as a cover to our indirect purposes in imposing it upon persons whose views are less unequivocal than yours.’ To the other party it says, ‘It is vehemently suspected that you are inimical to the cause in which we are engaged: this suspicion is either true or false; if false, we ought not to suspect you, and much less ought we to put you to this invidious and nugatory purgation; if true, you will either candidly confess your difference, or dishonestly prevaricate: be candid, and we will indignantly banish you; be dishonest and we will receive you as bosom friends.’

If the Government is keen to revive ideas from the late seventeenth century as part of its “citizenship agenda”, how about a new Triennial Act, which would be a great improvement on what we have at present, rather than a Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, which wouldn’t?

In her speech to the IPPR this morning, Margaret Hodge said this:

Next year will also see the anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne. Given some of the less savoury parts of his reign, it’s not an obviously straightforward event to commemorate. But understanding his reign is essential to understanding England. He is an iconic figure, a well-known personality in our history. And whether in separating state and religion, or in instituting English as the common language, or in being the first to clearly define and map our boundaries, a deeper understanding of his reign may help the important debate on England which is emerging.

Emphasis added. Her last contribution to the important debate on England wasn’t such a good one, either.

The reference to “Sir Charles Darwin” is slightly curious, too. His ODNB entry says that “Many thought it shameful that the British establishment signally failed to honour him” with a K, but no doubt Hodge knows better. Unless she was referring to this chap.

The indefatigable Dan Hardie writes:

Do you like reading fine words? Here is the Prime Minister on the subject of Iraqi ex-employees of the British Government, speaking in the House of Commons on October 9th, 2007:

“I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of our civilian and locally employed staff in Iraq, many of whom have worked in extremely difficult circumstances, exposing themselves and their families to danger. I am pleased therefore to announce today a new policy which more fully recognises the contribution made by our local Iraqi staff, who work for our armed forces and civilian missions in what we know are uniquely difficult circumstances.”

Fine words. What about deeds?
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Tristram Hunt:

Now, I have no problem with a ministry of all the talents, but when the big tent ushers in the former Tory party chairman Kenneth Baker, the progressive consensus has truly lost the plot.

Young people today probably have little idea who Kenneth Baker is. (Curiously, this Wikipedia article doesn’t mention his major contribution to British Government, which was his prominent role in the early stages of the poll tax fiasco.) Perhaps we need a Museum of Britishness that could, among other things, explain his career to current and future generations? A gallery given over to the twists and turns of the Death to the Dogs crisis of May 1991 would be an excellent idea, for example, and children could be given free copies of the 1986 Green Paper, Paying for Local Government.

Michael White, in tehgraun:

[Gordon] Brown is a Shakespearian tragedy in the making, says one MP: Othello’s jealousy, Hamlet’s indecision, the futile rage of Lear and Brutus’s weakness for bad advice. “But at least we’ve got rid of the Macbeths.”

So, Mr Blair’s become a Catholic, and there are a billion pop explanations in play — that Blair’s keen to wallow in guilt for his disastrous foreign policy, and nobody does guilt better than Catholics (cf going straight into the Middle East job after doing so much, and in such a well-intentioned way, to bollocks up the region) — that it’s the long-term result of being married to Cherie Booth, once you’ve jumped through all the Carole Caplin papaya-flavoured hoops that have been set up along the way — that you can’t quite keep that much moralism bottled up inside you without letting it spill out all over something, and now he doesn’t have the British people anymore he might as well absorb himself into the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church. (I’m sure we can always come up with more: if you do, pop ‘em in the comments).

But it seems to me there’s a more interesting, longer-term trajectory at work in what we can usefully for the purposes of this post call Blair’s mind, and I’ll say a bit about that over the fold.

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Daniel Davies, no stranger to internet flamewars, explains why blogs are likely to spell the death of both far-left and far-right politics in the UK:

Blogs are rather like sodium pentathol or Stella Artois in their effect on social inhibitions, so when you add them to a scene which is largely composed of people with poor impulse control at the best of times, then you are basically lighting the blue touch paper…

To watch the SWP/Respect bust-up, Socialist Unity is the place to go; the BNP is self-destructing in blogland over here.

I basically tuned out the Lib Dem leadership contest. Did I miss anything? Is there anything worth knowing about Nick Clegg? Did anyone write anything interesting about the contest / Party during the last six weeks or so? I suspect the answers are “no”, “not really”, and “no, I don’t think so”, but it would be nice to have confirmation from more informed Stoa-readers out there.

Dan Hardie writes:

David Miliband is the Minister responsible for Government policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, including those in fear of their lives. In a recent webchat on the Number 10website, Mr Miliband was asked the following question by Justin McKeating:

‘I would like to ask the Foreign Secretary why the assistance being offered to locally employed staff in Iraq, who are being threatened with reprisals - including torture and death - from local militias, is being rationed according to length of service. Isn’t it perfectly possible for an Iraqi employee who has only been employed for five months to face the same dangers as a colleague who has been employed for twelve months or longer?’…

[Read the Foreign Secretary’s reply, and more, over the fold.]

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