In Hungary, the European Parliament election campaign is in full swing.

 

 

 

Welcome to the 218th edition of the Britblog Roundup where in a nightmare vision, speakers blare the incessant admonition of our Wise and Glorious Leaders to:

“Keep young and beautiful,

It’s your duty to be beautiful;

Keep young and beautiful

If you want to be loved.

Don’t fail to do your stuff

With a little powder and a puff,

Keep young and beautiful

If you want to be loved.

If you’re wise, exercise all the fat off,

Take it off, off-a here, off-a there”

Al Dubin, 1933

Or, adapting the lyrics somewhat: “If you want to receive treatment on the NHS (though we will probably send you packing on the grounds that your problems are all self-inflicted)”.  Nothing epitomises better the intellectual vacuity of the present Government than its preaching about lifestyles to distract from the assault it has launched on our fundamental freedoms.

Politics

James Purnell, Work and Pensions Secretary’s has come under fire for his latest bright idea to cut the welfare bill by depriving alcoholics of benefits unless they submit to the humiliation of penance on a government treatment programme, a measure, which surely would entail constant interference, monitoring and intrusion if it were to have a hope of being implemented, erasing forever the distinction between public and private.  As if the idea were not offensive enough in itself, Mr Purnell compounds his error by dressing up a punitive measure as an act of compassion: “He said: ‘We need to look through the eyes of the person defeated by an addiction that keeps them out of work and on the outside of the community and give them the help they need.

‘But we can’t abandon anyone to long periods on benefits without help to overcome problems.  So that’s why we are going to look at the arrangements for alcoholics on benefits, just as we did for problem drug users, so that people get the help they need to get sober, to get their life back and get back to work’.

He also condemned Tory proposals to withdraw benefits from unmarried couples.  He said: ‘We know couples don’t marry for money, but often they do split up because of money worries’”.

The implication here is that Labour is less stuffily judgmental as they are only going to punish true social inadequates.  Gordon Brown may peer into the living room, but David Cameron wants to police the bedroom, branding you as deficient for failing to seal your covenant of love with a band of gold.

Unsurprisingly, Purnell has attracted derision from various quarters.  Dr John Crippen of NHS Blog Doctor summarises the general mood in Attacking the drunks: “Another bit of headline grabbing, focus group driven cynical cruelty from this failing government.  Declaring ‘war on the work shy’ is always worth a vote.  And yes, there are some boozers who are both on the piss and taking the piss.  But, mostly, those sad people with chronic alcohol problems are an inadequate lot who need sympathy and support.

‘What is an alcoholic?’ I have not got a clue.  I long since stopped using the word.  I don’t know what it means.  It conjures up pictures of vagrants on park benches with bottles of strong cider and Carlsberg Special brew half concealed in brown paper bags.  And, for sure, some of these people are victims of alcohol.  Some of them are ex-servicemen (Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan).  Some of them are schizophrenics.  How will cutting their benefits help?  Conventional use of the word ‘alcoholic’ does not encompass the housewife drinking two bottles of wine a day; the solicitor who has a bottle of wine with his lunch and two more at night; or the politician and his advisers, drinking the hours away in one of the many subsidised bars of the House of Commons”.

The unacknowledged class dimension becomes pretty apparent here with the ability to maintain a front of respectability crucial to avoiding the scrutiny of the busybodies.  Only the blatant drop-outs would be penalised.  It is more than a little disheartening that the supposed champion of the vulnerable now gets its kicks out of putting the boot into those who cannot retaliate, whose ingenuity and energy are devoted to survival on paltry allowances.

The good Doctor is only too aware of the pernicious effects such a policy would be likely to have, exacerbating shortcomings, which already leave the ailing in the lurch: “There are a number of people who, long before they turn to alcohol, cannot function at any level.  They become reclusive.  They struggle by without engaging with their fellow man.  Some eventually become alcohol dependent.  Alcohol is their refuge, their hiding place.  The alcohol is the symptom of their underlying problem.  It is not the problem itself.  More than half the people with diagnosed psychiatric problems drink too much.  Sadly, those who above all should be there to help them usually let them down.  I talk of course of the medical profession.  Approach a doctor smelling of alcohol and he will begin to lose interest, but not before he has made a pompous remark in your notes: ‘Smelt of C2H5OH at 5.00pm’.  Approach a doctor looking down and out and smelling of alcohol and he will take no interest at all.  Even the psychiatrists are intolerant.  Our local alcohol ’support’ unit throws out anyone who arrives looking or smelling the worse for wear from alcohol.  Talk me through that”.

Neil Robertson at Liberal Conspiracy likewise castigates the stone-hearted secretary in Purnell’s silly plan for alcoholics, pointing to the difficulties besetting the idea, beginning with the definition of an alcoholic, adding up to some fairly insurmountable obstacles: “(…) how is the state going to identify alcoholics?  The people who work in job centres are perfectly good at their jobs, but those jobs only involve following pre-approved computer procedures for eight hours a day.  None of these people are trained in medicine or psychology, and therefore won’t be qualified to label people as alcoholics, much less terminate their benefits for it.

How does the government get around that?  Will they subject every claimant to a full medical?  Will they perform breathalyzers on everyone who walks through the door?  Or will they be more discreet, and just ask staff to walk around council estates with clip boards and ask them to count how many cans of Special brew are left in recycling bins?”

Clairwil of the eponymous blog also takes Purnell to task in a truly spectacular demolition of the plans Benefit Scrounging Scum! , illustrating the reality beyond the Victorian era rhetoric of the “undeserving poor” from her dealings with the proposed victims of his “spongers’” cull: “First up is a fellow, also called James, a lovely man, very polite, reeks of piss, wears a dressing gown as an overcoat, can’t go anywhere without his mother, talks about his cat all the time and would like to join the police force.  For some reason employers seem to be reluctant to employ him.  I’d love Jamesey to tell us where we’ve gone wrong and identify exactly what sort of work this man is fit for because his department declared him fit for work despite him suffering a wee touch of Paranoid Schizophrenia.  he scored zero points on the Incapacity Benefit Descriptors”.

As Clairwil then demonstrates via a link, a benefits medical is far from a pleasant experience. harrowing even to read, reproduce an excerpt (preserving the spelling and style of the original) written by a 41-year-old man, routine humiliation: “He asked if I has seen a Psychiatrist which I said yes he asked when which I said yesterday and showed him a letter to which he said ‘that’s not a psychiatrist that’s a clinical psychologist’ at this point I felt i was being told off he also told my wife when she tried to answer a question to shh don’t answer the questions and who are you I started to get upset as the questions went on he continued in this matter taking no notice of what I was trying to say to the point where I broke down completely and started to cry uncontrollably and become upset sobbing I said I had worked all my life and this is the only time I have asked for anything and I was being treat like this I was sobbing at this time my wife started to cry and said is this really worth your health I would rather do without than you go through this he the just asked the next question then when I couldn’t answer for crying he said if you don’t go on with this you will lose you benefit I said I felt like walking out and he repeated you will lose your benefit do you want to go on.  I muttered yes and we continued however I was not in fit state to continue sobbing and crying.  When I was asked could I wash or shave and I replied due to depression I do not feel like getting shaved and do not have the energy he said what about getting washed I replied I cant do nothing I spending my days in a dressing gown in bed or just throwing something on he then said ‘do you like to smell’ and ‘do you change your underwear’  I replied when im depressed I do nothing I cant face life I feel like I want to dye sobbing all the time”.

The intrepid Clairwil’s coup de grâce is to expose Purnell’s sheer gall in yanking away the safety net to leave those in free fall to hit the sawdust full force whilst milking a slightly different benefits system for all it is worth: “Is there nothing an MP wouldn’t claim on expenses?  Is there no point where they think they might be able to manage to buy something out of their own wages?

I merely ask because the loathsome James Purnell has been claiming £400 per month, roughly double what an unemployed 20-year-old gets a month with which to buy food, pay the utility bills, water and sewerage charge, clothe themselves and travel to and from job interviews.  he was trying to claim £475 per month but apparently that breaks the rules.  Thank God there are some rules otherwise the claims of these scrounging scumbags would run into billions”.

That jolly tune starts playing again…

“Oh, a slim little waist is a pleasure,

And a trim little limb is divine”

If your vice is not that of imbibing but ingesting, there is nowhere to hide, as the Government has its disapproving eye on you too.  Jonathan Calder of Liberal England asks a highly pertinent question in relation to the latest salvo in the war on obesity featuring two images of (slender) children with the kind of hard-hitting slogan hitherto reserved for encouraging smokers to stub out their habit, Government and food companies conspire to denigrate home cooking: “Personally, I find that cake pleasingly old fashioned.  White icing, with a cherry on top.  It’s the sort of cake children scheme to win in the Beano and the Dandy.

When we worry about what children eat these days, we do not worry about home baking.  We worry about things like crisps and fizzy drinks.

So why does this poster show a home-made cake?”

Costigan Quist of Himmelgarten Café follows suit in reacting unfavourably to the woefully misguided initiative in Kids told cupcakes and consoles as bad as smoking: “This whole campaign stinks.  I can understand concern about obesity and inaction, though I don’t think the evidence really supports it (for children at least).

But to be putting out this sort of scary, alarmist and downright nasty advertising you ought to have a damn good reason and they simply don’t.  The message is a lie.

The Government is spending millions of pounds stigmatising our young people.  They’re fat, lazy, unhealthy, anti-social and criminal.  I don’t believe that’s the intention of Labour ministers; but it’s the result”.

However, the most eloquently scathing condemnation comes from Suzi FemAcadem at The F-Word in Fat is the new Folk Devil: “(…) two advertisements from the Change 4 Life campaign, which were run in women’s magazines.  Both threaten the children in those adverts, with premature death, - one for eating a cupcake (girl) and one for playing computer games (boy).  Besides the obvious and irritatingly sexist assumption that only boys play computer games, and only women care about their children’s nutrition and physical activity levels, both adverts are threatening children with dying for doing two very normal childhood activities.

These adverts make me furious on many levels.  As a Mother, it is difficult enough, when my daughter comes home crying because someone at school told her she was fat and ugly (she’s actually ‘underweight’ and always has been.  My son regularly refuses to eat foods because he has been told at school that they are bad for him.

As a Gamer, I am annoyed that once again computer games are being blamed for children not doing more activity.  Just looking at my kids, and their friends, who all have access to at least one games console, not a [single] one of them engages in less than half an hour of physical activity.  We live on a council estate, in an area that is recognised as having health inequalities, and a level of comparatively high deprivation.  The reason those children have access to games consoles, is because their parents will save all year, scrimping on luxuries, walking instead of taking buses and so on, to get them a console as a big Christmas present.  Also, especially with the advent of the Wii and Balance Board-based games, which massively encourage physical activity, and it seems clear to me that once again the Government is falling back on time old and dangerous assumptions.

Finally, as a fat, but healthy woman, I’m annoyed.  This campaign against fatness, which for some of us, is out natural body shape, is infuriating, inaccurate and highly dangerous.  Parents need to be supported to make healthy lifestyle choices, with a focus on Health, not avoiding fat.  It should not be cheaper to go to Iceland and fill your freezer with frozen, processed foods than to be able to buy fresh vegetables and lean meats/fish to cook for your family.  Fat people should not have to suffer humiliation, and be accused of being a drain on resources, just because some idiot in a government department decided that fat was the danger of the day, despite an awful lot of evidence suggesting otherwise”.

What next?  If we exceed a certain weight are we to be issued with ration cards for chocolate and other treats?  Or is unemployment to be alleviated by installing food monitors at every checkout, helpfully unpacking from your carrier bag the items they deem to be extraneous, figure-expanding luxuries?  Or are we simply to be shamed by accusations of a culpable lack of solidarity (by gobbling up scarce NHS resources) in addition to the more traditional prejudices concerning our chronic lack of discipline and self-control, indolence and so on.  What amazes me is the assumption that we are oblivious to the presumed dangers to our health in the midst of a fat-loathing culture.  The Government should not be endeavouring to beat the diet companies at their own game in terms of exploiting our feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

Molly of Gaian Economics continues the moral sermon by exhorting us to pay greater attention to what we stuff into our mouths, advocating self-denial for the sake of the planet in A New Ethic of Consumption: “Let’s start with a cliché:you are what you eat.  I’ve been interested by the growing number of people who have food allergies and digestive problems. Of course some of this results from stress and no doubt post-modern, identity-related orthorexia has something to answer for too, but would it be too fanciful to suggest that we have treated our environment badly and it is now biting back?

Eating is the most direct way in which we come into relationship with our environment by literally consuming bits of it.  In this act we cannot deny our dependence on the natural world around us.  Some of my more consciously spiritual friends remember this by giving thanks to whatever they believe in rather than thoughtlessly tucking in”.

Peter Cranie (who refers to himself as “A Green MEP for the North West”, though surely this must be considered –in charitable mode – as a proclamation of ambition, as the only British Green MEPs in the European Parliament in its present – outgoing – composition are Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert) tackles the question of Donations and the Law, in essence an extended criticism of Liberal Democrat Councillor Steve Hurst: “Our democracy and the integrity of our political process is dependent on being able to trust that political parties will uphold the law, will not bend or break the rules on donations, and will not bring the results of previous elections into disrepute.

This is an absolutely key issue.  If a political party is not to be trusted on making a full declaration of their donations, then just how do we account for how that money is spent?”

Sarah Cope welcomes the reappearance in showrooms of G-Wiz electric cars, but laments their price tag putting them beyond the reach of all but the few, who content themselves with flaunting them as a trendy accessory rather than acquiring genuinely Green credentials through a more radical change in lifestyle in Gee…that’s NICE: “I do have a problem though with the city exec with the two private regged Range Rovers, tootling into the city in his/her G-Wiz but using his/her gas guzzlers at all other times.  ‘Look at me, I’m down with the kids,’ he/she seems to be saying.  ‘I am so Green it hurts.  Ouch’.

No mate, stop deluding yourself.  You probably have solar panels (because your neighbours can see them) but no loft insulation (because they can’t).  Why not take the tube into the city, or – whisper it – the bus?  Or would that mean mixing with the hoi polloi, and possibly catching/smelling something nasty?  Best to keep yourself cut off in your hermetically sealed (and oh-so-fashionable) bubble”.

Wendy Stayte at Transition Culture shows us the softer side of the environmental movement, providing An Update on Totnes Nut Tree Plantings.

In the dim and distant days before he metamorphosed into a clean-shaven Paw Broon, when he was a mere Chancellor of the Exchequer, our Beloved Prime Minister publicly pondered what it means to be British (British Council annual lecture, 7th July 2004): “What are the core values of Britishness?  Of course, a strong sense of national identity derives from the particular, the special things we cherish.  But it is my belief that out of tidal flows of British history - 2,000 years of successive waves of invasion, immigration, assimilation and trading partnerships that have created a uniquely rich and diverse culture - certain forces emerge again and again that make up a characteristically British set of values and qualities that, taken together, mean that there is indeed a strong and vibrant Britishness that underpins Britain”.

How might the essence of Britishness be put into words? According to Brown as follows: “(…) a passion for liberty anchored in a sense of duty and an intrinsic commitment to tolerance and fair play”.

He elaborates further: “And at every point this British belief in liberty has been matched by a British idea of duty as the virtue that reinforces neighbourliness and enshrines the idea of a public realm and public service.  A belief in the duty of one to another is an essential element of nationhood in every country.  But whether it arose from religious belief, from a noblesse oblige or from a sense of solidarity, duty in Britain has been, to most people, the foundation of rights rather than their consequence”.

And: “Britishness has also meant a tradition of fair play.  We may think today of British fair play as something applied on the sports field, but in fact most of the time it has been a very widely accepted foundation of social order: treating people fairly, rewarding hard work, encouraging self-improvement through education and being inclusive”.

Five years on his pronouncements hold a certain irony: “The two ideologies that have characterised the histories of other countries have never taken root here.  On the one hand an ideology of state power, which choked individual freedom and made the individual a slave to some arbitrarily defined collective interest, has found little or no favour in Britain.  On the other hand, an ideology of crude individualism, which leaves the individual isolated, stranded, on his own, detached from society around him, has no resonance for a Britain that has a strong sense of fair play and an even stronger sense of duty and a rich tradition of voluntary organisations, local democracy and civic life”.

In asking What binds Brits together? former Islamist Ed Husain voices unease about the ability of the concept of Britishness to promote cohesion between diverse ethnic groups:  “Let’s cut to the chase: we have a problem with connected identity here in Britain.  It’s not just Muslims such as [Muhammad Siddique] Khan who feel disconnected from Britain - the problems of atomised, self-centred existence are widespread.  The ‘nothing-to-do-with-me-guv’ mindset has caused us damage.  It has made us unwilling to find common ground with our fellow citizens.

British bashfulness also prevents us from talking about ourselves.  ‘Mustn’t grumble’ stops us from complaining about our identity malaise.  An aversion to ideas and anything remotely intellectual - unlike the eager French - blocks any discussion of shared values, or common ideas that glue us together.  But for how much longer?  I believe that this lack of a vigorous debate is damaging Britain”.

What it boils down to is whether integration and assimilation are desirable goals for minority communities subsumed within wider society: “But can a secular, liberal democracy in 2009 sustain values-based challenges from faith communities?  Time will tell, but a national conversation is overdue.  Without fear of racism or Islamophobia, it is time to ask the difficult questions.  Can religiously observant Muslims really integrate into Britain?  And should they?  How can a nation that has pubs as its shared space, ever truly welcome non-drinkers?  How do ordinary Brits really feel about those who prefer orange juice to beer?  And how can religious, marital monogamists raise children in a sexually liberal society that values individual choice over collective obligations?

And what about the loud minority within the Muslim community who oppose a secular state, and want to rule ‘for God’ and who wish to impose their reading of sharia law?  Is democracy a compromise with hakimiyyah, their version of ‘God’s rule’?

We need to move beyond simplistic debates about identity and engage with the deeper issues that are at stake.  Too often, commentators have suggested that a united society can be built on shared tastes in sport, food, and clothing.  This is not enough: such arguments overlook that the 7/7 bombers played cricket, ate fish and chips and dressed in jeans.  We need a deeper debate about the core values that can bind us together as a nation”.

His Quilliam Foundation is organising a seminar, What do Britons have in common?  Its publicity blurb is telling: “Why does Britain face a difficult challenge around integration today?  Is it because, as some claim, we have too many immigrants?  Or because of Britain’s liberal sexual mores that seemingly contradict religious teachings?  Or is it because our shared national space - pubs - appear inaccessible to some?  Or are democracy and the secular state unacceptable to some?  Or do Asian forced and arranged marriages abroad create generational tensions here in Britain?”.

The ascendancy of secularism and the concomitant loosening of the baleful grip of religion to my mind constitute the greatest achievements of Western civilisation, bringing many other benefits in their wake, including the unfinished project of full equality for women.  As such, they are non-negotiable.  Instead, I would re-frame the debate to focus on the limits of tolerance.

As a fully recovered ex-fundamentalist myself, I am more than aware of the blend of condescension and pity verging on outright contempt (although as Christians we never admitted the latter to ourselves, too piously concerned about the welfare of the eternal souls of the unconverted).  It is when the segregation of the mind is accompanied by social segregation (not by definition unilaterally imposed from the outside) that fanaticism enjoys free rein.  Religious conviction should not be allowed to take precedence over law within a parallel society.  This is where multicultural “tolerance” degenerates into a form of racism (”their” own laws are good enough for “them”, a charter for exclusion, oppression and the perpetrating of abuses, such as honour killings and female genital mutilation, outlawed practices that would never gain acceptance in the community at large).

In spite of being a happily married monogamist, I would never - “live and let live” neatly and succinctly captures the British outlook - seek to force my choice on anyone else much less look down on them for rejecting it.  Sexual permissiveness is always the first evil denounced by the religiously inclined, but I have no desire to see the clock turned back to the manifold miseries of the 19th century where the obstacles to divorce left women trapped in tyrannical relationships with no hope of escape.  The comments about teetotallers are arrant nonsense.  I have never frequented pubs and only drink a glass of wine with a meal in a restaurant in the company of friends yet this does not undermine my sense of belonging.  Mr Husain is oblivious to the history of the Temperance Movement.  The moral panic about women drinking to excess is very recent.  When I was growing up, pubs were completely male-dominated, women only allowed to venture into the Lounge Bars (and even then they were suspected of “loose” morals), but nobody ever doubted that women were part of the nation.

The unfailingly perspicacious Heresiarch of Heresy Corner detects similarities between the two interpretations, which he cogently sets out in His master’s voice: “The concept of Britishness, currently much in vogue, would seem to have two principal aims.  Firstly, to do something about the Muslim ‘problem’; secondly, to give Gordon Brown a point of contact with people in England”.

Khan and his disaffected spiritual brethren surely cannot be portrayed as typical young British Muslims: “It strikes me as ridiculous to frame citizenship programmes around the needs of such an unrepresentative group of disturbed individuals.  All that the state should require of its citizens is that they pay their taxes and obey the law.  beyond that we are in the realms of propaganda and indoctrination, neither of which strikes me as being particularly ‘British’ - any more than Brown’s recently-announced plans to inculcate a sense of national identity by using British teenagers as a source of unpaid labour.  Britishness as something defined by and imposed by the state is - apart from anything else - profoundly un-British, an irony the prime minister seems incapable of understanding.

Nations are brought together by shared stories, by a national spirit, by indefinable eccentricities.  With a government unable, or unwilling, to celebrate our shared national story - which used to concentrate on such things as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Henry VIII’s wives and the Victorians’ conquest of much of the known world - what is left is nothing but a series of empty platitudes, a statement of ‘values’ that say nothing whatever about being ‘British’ as opposed to being French or Taiwanese.  Or there is an appeal to such things as freedom of speech, the British constitution, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and other parts of our national inheritance that have been systematically undermined and betrayed by new Labour”.

The Heresiarch lists a few of the cultural archetypes that inform our sense of self: “It is not ‘values’ that define Britishness but particular things - fish and chips, thatched cottages, red postboxes, roads that become impassable every time it snows, the Grand National.  And these things change over time.  Curry houses are now as ‘British’ as old-fashioned pub signs, not because of officially sponsored programmes of multiculturalism, but because they have been naturally absorbed into the landscape and into the national psyche.  And it wasn’t some national characteristic of tolerance and cultural pluralism that made for the spread of Indian restaurants; it was because people wanted to eat the food they provided.

A national culture is organic and unpredictable.  Attempts to impose it from the centre usually fail, or produce ugly results”.

Solidarity and belonging cannot be conjured up to order (or upon orders): “The current Brown-directed garbage about citizenship elides two very different things: an individual’s relationship towards other people, whether in their local neighbourhood or at national (and indeed international) level, and the individual’s relationship with the state.  ‘Citizenship’ is both a legal concept, based on entitlement to a passport and the vote, and a moral concept, based on living in a society.  The same word may be used for both; but that does not mean that they must be or even ought to be confused.  To combine them, as the present British government is trying to do, in an artificial ‘Britishness’, is to assert the state’s sovereignty over both individuals and social groups, even to nationalise personal identity.  I suppose that’s the idea.  hence the paraphernalia of ID cards, lessons in ‘values’, ‘citizenship ceremonies’ (at the moment just for immigrants), repeated consultation exercises, a putative ‘national day’ and the new proposal for ‘compulsory volunteering’”.

The Heresiarch wonders what precisely Husain is driving at: “If all Ed Husain is saying is that all children, including those from Muslim backgrounds, should be taught that they live in a secular state and that they have a duty to obey the law, then I agree with him.  He appears to be saying something far more ambitious, however.  He claims (absurdly) that we are currently facing ‘the strongest challenge to Britain’s value system since the civil war’; his solution, it seems, is that a new notion of national identity ought to be constructed, which everyone of whatever background should have a duty to adopt.  Such ideas are illiberal and, coming from someone who write a bestselling book describing his longtime association with Islamic radicals, presumptuous in the extreme.  He appears not to understand British culture or national character at all.  But then again, I suspect he’s really just doing his paymaster’s bidding”.

With details of the postmortem result emerging (abdominal haemorrhage as the likely cause of death as opposed to a heart attack), The British Citizen protests that the press has its priorities all wrong in Police violence and Tomlinson death more important than silly emails.

However, in what mainstream media-employed journalists would no doubt gloat over as proof of the self-obsessed nature of blogging (thereby conveniently glossing over the sheer quantity of column inches they themselves have devoted to the issue), the ongoing saga linked to the leak of the electronic missives dubbed “Smeargate” has attracted greater attention amongst nominators this week.

Blogging

In a speech on Public Life delivered in Canary Wharf in June 2007, Tony Blair (not a politician from whom I can be accused of quoting very often) presented his thoughts on the implications of technological developments on the media (which opened up an ever-expanding niche for bloggers) and the latter’s relationship with politics: “The media world - like everything else - is becoming more fragmented, more diverse and transformed by technology.  The main BBC and ITN bulletins used to have audiences of 8, even 10 million.  Today the average is half that.  At the same time, there are rolling 24 hour news programmes that cover events as they unfold.  In 1982, there were 3 TV stations broadcasting in the UK.  Today there are hundreds.  In 1995 225 TV shows had audiences of over 15 million.  Today it is almost none.

Newspapers fight for a share of a shrinking market.  Many are now read on-line, not the next day.  Internet advertising has overtaken newspaper ads.  There are roughly 70 million blogs in existence, with around 120,000 being created every day.  In particular, young people will, less and less, get their news from traditional outlets.

But, in addition, the forms of communication are merging and interchanging.  The BBC website is crucial to the modern BBC.  papers have Podcasts and written material on the web.  News is becoming increasingly a free good, provided online without charge.  Realistically, these trends won’t do anything other than intensify.

These changes are obvious.  But less obvious is their effect.  The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  It moves in real time.  Papers don’t give you up to date news.  That’s already out there.  They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules.  Or they give a commentary.  And it all happens with outstanding speed”.

In the wake of Smeargate some of these contentions seem to have been borne out: “The reality is that as a result of the changing context in which 21st Century communications operates, the media are facing a hugely more intense form of competition than anything they have ever experienced before.  They are not the masters of this change but its victims.

The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by ‘impact’.  Impact is what matters.  It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed.  Impact gives competitive edge.  Of course the accuracy of a story counts.  But it is secondary to impact.

It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.

Broadsheets today face the same pressures as tabloids; broadcasters increasingly the same pressures as broadsheets.  The audience needs to be arrested, held and their emotions engaged.  Something that is interesting is less powerful than something that makes you angry or shocked.

The consequences of this are acute.

First, scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down.  news is rarely news unless it generates heat as much or more than light.

Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement.  It is not enough for someone to make an error.  It has to be venal.  Conspiratorial (…)

What creates cynicism is not mistakes; it is allegations of misconduct.  But misconduct is what has impact.

Third, the fear of missing out means today’s media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack.  In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.  But no-one dares miss out.

Fourth, rather than just report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary on the news being as, if not more important than the news itself.  So - for example - there will be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it.  In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean.  This leads to the incredibly frustrating pastime of expending a large amount of energy rebutting claims about the significance of things said, that bears little or no relation to what was intended.

In turn, this leads to a fifth point: the confusion of news and commentary.  Comment is a perfectly respectable part of journalism.  But it is supposed to be separate.  Opinion and fact should be clearly divisible.  The truth is a large part of the media today not merely elides the two but does so now as a matter of course.  In other words, this is not exceptional.  It is routine”.

Even in a relatively measures speech such as this, Mr Blair could not resist the inevitable swipe: “New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media.  In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five”.

Blogging has not rendered the printed press entirely obsolete, however: “It is sometimes said that the media is accountable daily through the choice of readers and viewers.  That is true up to a point.  But the reality is that the viewers or readers have no objective yardstick to measure what they are being told.  In every other walk of life in our society that exercises power, there are external forms of accountability, not least through the media itself.  So it is true politicians are accountable through the ballot box every few years.  But they are also profoundly accountable, daily, through the media, which is why a free press is so important”.

Not long ago journalist Nick Cohen waded into the debate with the question Who would you rather trust - the BBC or a blogger? (slightly lopsidedly pitting the true Goliath of news coverage against the rather puny David of the one-person blogging operation characteristic of most output): “[Clay Shirky] quotes the example of Alisara Chirapongse, a marvellous Thai student who blogged mainly about fashion.  Her readership was tiny, until the 2006 Thai military coup.  Chirapongse ignored a news blackout and described life in Bangkok.  She posted photos of mutinous troops on her website and organised a campaign against the army’s attempts at censorship.  When the crisis was over, international admirers left and she went back to sharing thoughts with her friends.

Newspaper correspondents in Thailand may have been censored by the military.  If their editors had sent them from London, they may not have known the language or understood Thai politics.  It is possible that Alisara’s writing was not only equal to the work of her professional rivals but superior and more widely read.

Why, then, mourn the passing of the hack?  The best reason for wanting my colleagues to survive is that serious reporters and broadcasters offer a guarantee that what they say is true.  If they stray, their editors impose journalistic standards and insist on objectivity.  They may not have the best or fullest story or the most vivid account, but readers should be able to assume their work is reliable, while a blogger’s commitment to objectivity can never be assumed”.

All too often, such a lofty depiction of your average journalist’s work is inaccurate to the point of travesty, as we shall explore later.

Gaby Hinsliffe in Guido Fawkes: Fast, furious,buccaneering…and now claiming their first major scalp bemoans the sheer nastiness of “the bitterly personal and vindictive world of the blogosphere”, adding: “Political blogs are a mix of the courtly (they acknowledge a story taken from another blogger by crediting the source with a ‘hat tip’, for example) and the toxic, with bitter feuds regularly erupting between players.  Both tactics actually help boost readership, by encouraging casual surfers to hop between sites or raising the profile of both sites in a spat”.

Briefings, lunches, consorting with the powerful and the implicit flattery of being invited have been the preserve of the fortunate and favoured few, who could congratulate themselves on having made it.  At some stage the unwavering pursuit of the truth no doubt slipped down the list of priorities compared to wining and dining, or mixing in the right circles for the elite.  Bloggers by contrast are not pampered and privileged in this way and our dedication to the truth (at least as we perceive it) has never faltered.  By trespassing on the territory of the “professional” journalist, Guido’s scoop represents a milestone.

Nick Anstead, occasional contributor to Slugger O’Toole and lecturer in politics, sets out his assessment of the significance of the episode in Media in the digital era: “While not structurally revolutionary in itself, I would however contest this kind of event is more and more likely to happen.  the mass media elite was defined by narrow inputs (produced by a small number among an information elite - journalists and publishers, for example).  It was because there were few of them that the role of the modern spin doctor developed in the first place.  A dialogue could occur among a narrow group of people and information could be managed.

Now though, we live in the digital era and have moved to a time of broad (and growing) inputs - in short, information cannot be managed in the same way by spin doctors when publishing is so easy.  Secrets are far harder to keep.  Look at wikileaks for just one example.  This means a fundamental readjustment in the way parties and governments handle information, and the ending of the nineties consensus on how politics is done”.

In Drapergate: Labour falls into a banal pit of despond…, Mick Fealty of the excellent Slugger O’Toole furnishes us with a very useful (though not exhaustive) review of articles and opinions, setting out what he regards as one of the important messages to be distilled from the furore: “One is that if you are going to get into the business of smearing your opponents (and I would strongly advise against it), make them plausibly deniable.  Guido has traded in smears of his political opponents from the start, some of it very personal and involving family members of the intended Labour party victim.  But, so far as we know, he is not on the Conservative party payroll!

But, as I argued on Brassneck in February, Draper was wrong headed in his handling of his blog Labour List…He and his party have paid a high price for the banal nihilism card of getting your opponents, no matter what…”

Indeed.

Not that the blogosphere and mainstream media are locked into mortal combat by some ineluctable law of nature.  As Slugger O’Toole demonstrates, when freedom of speech is under threat, they can fruitfully come to one another’s assistance.  Slugger landed an exclusive (as finally acknowledged in The Irish Times) when a rather nasty letter was passed on, prompting the question A legitimate complaint, or case of bullying from the top?

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) also analyses the deeper significance of Smeargate in There are lessons for every party in the McBride scandal, more particularly the tendency to stifle any manifestation of criticism or dissent (which even the most cursory glance at the history of Central Europe will reveal is a Socialist speciality): “It amounts to an unaccountable clique at the heart of the party, and in this case the government.  Any criticism of Draper’s extremely problematic LabourList, for example, was seen as disloyalty to the party.  Even senior cabinet members were unable to curb these rogue elements because they had backing at the highest level.  This isn’t just a problem that the Labour Party faces, it is a potential problem for every political organisation (and non-political ones too probably).

Party members who have criticisms to make of party initiatives, departments or members are not just inconveniences but an important corrective that can help improve party performance.  Without the ability of members to at least have a say over the direction of the party they are a member of, and that includes publicly voicing concerns, that party cannot make any claim to democracy – and certainly will be sabotaging its own ability to retain experienced members.

That does not mean that all criticism is appropriate or, heaven forbid, correct but its existence is not an affront to anyone but control freaks and psychopaths.  But alas there are plenty of those in every party.  Those people wrongly see every suggestion that things could be done differently as evidence of an enemy within who want to tear down everything their party has achieved”.

In passing, Rachel Sylvester in Brown’s loyal attack dogs always bite to order elaborates on the nature of the Prime Minister’s inner circle: “There is a laddish and bullying atmosphere to the cabal of advisers and MPs surrounding Mr Brown.  Small talk revolves around football.  Briefings take place in pubs and karaoke bars.  The alleged coup against Tony Blair was planned over balti and beers.  It is not surprising that Mr McBride begins his e-mail with the word ‘Gents’ – the underlying misogyny of the rumours he was trying to spread is one of the most shocking aspects of the whole thing.  ‘Gordon is from Mars and more than half the voters are from Venus,’ one female minister says”.

Charles Crawford in Blogging Remora Fish: A Lack of Semiotic Subtlety? quotes from Wrinkled Weasel on the issue of blogging as a propaganda tool: “The real life parallel of blogging is a bar room rant, not an exchange of letters on Basildon Bond notepaper…

…If there is anything that could be described as ‘discourse’ in the blog world, it moves very quickly and is non-linear, which is why a lot of it becomes reduced to swear bloggery and ranting, since you do not have the time and reflection to agree on the meanings of terms, and ‘arsehole’ or ‘jerk’ tends to sum things up nicely”.

Blogging involves the gradual building of a constituency.  Summoning up an instant audience flash mob-style according to the Draper/McBride recipe was doomed to failure.

Charles ends his piece with a wonderfully witty comparison: “Finally, bloggers love to bang on about the iniquities and incompetence of the mainstream media, whose journalists in turn uneasily bang on about the soaring irresponsibility and trivialisation brought about by blogging.

To use another biological metaphor, are the MSM a group of elderly and lazy sharks, while bloggers are the Remora fish who swim around their jaws and backends picking up decaying morsels for the benefit of both species?”

In a comment on Janet Daley’s rather sour A star blogger admits that the blogosphere has not yet come of age, Oldrightie forcefully conveys why bloggers have a reputation for trustworthiness surpassing that of their highly remunerated counterparts: “The blogosphere, Madame, is a place to vent one’s spleen whilst the MSM chase advertising and power.  The self-interest and financial ambition of career journalism rarely taps the psyche of a public now very disillusioned by the media.  In particular the shameful BBC bias and the power crazed manipulation of people such as by Rupert Murdoch.  To gain way in journalism often requires the kind of subjugation as demanded by brown of his cohorts.  Honesty is never an issue, just egotism and hubris.  I’m afraid few journalists achieve accuracy or honesty in their commentaries and remain successful”.

Trixy, of Is there more to life than shoes? reminds us of the positive aspects of enhanced ease of access to information in Things to be thankful for: “The not-so-whispered concerns among hacks is that how did Guido get the mails before they did?  Why was he the first port of call?  Sunday papers in particular need those big scoops brought about when someone calls them with a scandal, or a video or some e-mails.  They pay thousands of pounds for them knowing that it will draw in the punters to buy their weekly rag.  It’s their life blood.

And now some upstart blogger who hasn’t done a graduate trainee scheme or worked on a regional paper has been running rings around not only the seemingly terminally foolish Dolly Draper and the political editors of the nationals but magnificently called the bluff of these spin doctors.

I can see why they’re concerned, but the running of this country and the actions of the people who do it is too important for the information not to be published.  How dare people being paid from the public purse spend their time thinking up such deceptions?  How low must one sink to try to divert democracy in such a way by seeking to alter the view voters have of an opposition party with such lies?

The internet has many pitfalls, but the quick, cheap dissemination of important information is one of the reasons we should revel in our new found power over people who seek to control the information we have access to.

If economics flourishes with information, then politics - an industry where the abuse of power can dominate opinions, actions and pay cheques, will surely benefit as people realise that they aren’t safe from the voter finding out.

And with the internet and blogs in particular, those who stand to lose the most can’t lunch or bully everyone”.

Bloggers do not pose a real threat to the livelihood of journalists attached to the major papers (even with their diminishing circulations we still cannot really compete with their entrenched position in the national psyche as authoritative and reliable sources of information, nor can we remotely command anything like the resources at their disposal).  A few, such as Guido, might make inroads into their celebrity, the rest of us diligently plugging away in obscurity (I am not complaining, I prefer not to have every minute detail of my life held up for inspection).  What irks me about the attitude of many journalists is that, instead of welcoming the broadening of opinion, and taking it as inspiration to improve their own writing to stay ahead, they fear it as a challenge to their authority.  Like mice at a banquet, all we can do is gnaw at the hem of the tablecloth yet even this appears to be more than many can stomach.  Yes, we bloggers are so bold as to deconstruct slovenly writing and to dish out criticism where it is deserved.  “Keep Out” signs will not deter us.  Journalists have to wake up to the fact that deference is not automatic, and respect has to be earned.

Returning to the lofty pronouncements of moral superiority and professional integrity on the part of our haughty detractors, I submit for your consideration two case studies.  First up is Bill Carmichael in the Yorkshire Post on Brutal truths about protest: “The female protester allegedly assaulted by a police officer during the G20 protests is said to be ‘traumatised’ by the incident.

Poor love!  She sounds like a delicate flower, doesn’t she?  Strolling alone minding her own business in the City of London when suddenly she was struck down by the jackboot of the fascist police state.

Er…well, perhaps not.  The marvellous thing about all this video footage that is swilling about on the internet is that truth cuts both ways – and often it dispels the myths on both sides.

Take a few moments to look at the video and a strikingly different picture emerges from the propaganda being put out by the protestors and their friends at the BBC and left-wing newspapers.

Instead of the sanitised version of injured innocence, what you’ll see is an aggressive-looking young woman – as yet unidentified –hat pulled down over her eyes, mouthing obscenities into the face of a police officer, who is trying to ignore her.

After several minutes of this he snaps and slaps her with the back of his hand with the words :’Go away’.

She doesn’t and she continues to hurl abuse.  At which point he draws his baton and belts her on the legs.

If anyone ever deserved a good slap, this woman certainly did.

Instead of being suspended and investigated, I believe the officer involved should be commended for his forbearance”.

It is entirely inappropriate and completely reprehensible for a supposedly reputable publication to condone the physical chastisement of women for defying male authority.  Perhaps the activist transgressed Mr Carmichael’s notions of demure, simpering femininity by spouting foul language, who knows, no doubt his remedy would be to resuscitate the laws against the pestilential scourge of uppity women, of communis rixatrix, bring back the scold’s bridle!

Harpymarx shares my disgust at his views, which she summarises thus: “(…) state thuggery and violence against women is totally acceptable as this woman got what she deserved.  Is his next column going to argue for the return of the ‘rule of thumb’ against lippy women who step out of line?”

She pours justified scorn on Carmichael: “Let’s not contend ourselves with the boring details about this TSG cop not wearing his number let’s distract ourselves with the details of the woman who had her hat pulled down over her eyes.  Shocking!  And could she have done that because…it was a sunny day…(Oh, hiow prosaic!).

She remonstrated with the cop, if you look at the video on youtube, the cops decided a couple of mins. previously to grab a man for no reason that is what she and others were responding to.  I witnessed them grab this man for no reason and that caused people to remonstrate…I saw the TSG cop grab another woman seconds before, he was intent on punching her as well!  Carmichael would undoubtedly believe she deserved a beating too!!!”

Secondly, Uponnothing of Angry Mob picks apart the reporting of a tragic accident in Newspapers lie about the death of Georgina Williams, showing how biases lead to the wilful distortion of facts: “The Daily Mail reveals once again its obsession with class, it feels necessary to say she attended a ‘top grammar school’ which is then clearly juxtaposed with the ‘nearby comprehensive’ – so the Daily Mail clearly picks a side in the opening paragraph as well as the headline.  Further unnecessary details include the value of the home in which she was found dead, again cementing the idea that a respectable upper-middle-class girl has been hounded to death by feral comprehensive children.

However, the interesting details are that there are ‘fears she was bullied’ by comprehensive students, the inquest and father of Georgina Williams had concluded that any fears were not founded, and in fact that no ‘row’ had actually taken place.  So where is the Mail getting its evidence from?  Their source is the reliable and neutral news source: Bebo” (going back to Nick Cohen’s piece, not only are the dailies failing to dispatch correspondents to Thailand, but even the wild, conflict-riven wastelands of Kent would seem to be too remote and expensive!).

As Uponnothing concludes: “The Daily Mail is therefore able to trump fact with unsubstantiated rumours posted by children in the period of time following the death of a fellow student.  The Daily Mail are not reporting news, they are indulging in scaremongering gossip dressed up as investigative journalism – as if digging around  Bebo page could provide answers that the inquest could not”.

The credibility that blogs possess by virtue of articulating the authentic opinions of the author has been recognised by those who would dearly love to hawk their wares and have no scruples about how they go about it, as discovered by Gordon McLean of One Man Blogs in Evil Pharma: “After some investigation it turns out the entire blog is fake, in fact it isn’t a blog at all, it’s a single page with faked comments, which inserts a ‘recent’ date at the top of the page and uses a script to match the IP of the visitor (you) to make it look like it’s being written by someone in the same local area”.

Thankfully, we bloggers are not as under-endowed with intelligence as the advertisers would like to think, as Gordon makes clear: “(…) you cannot simply con your way to having a good ‘online presence’, that blogs take work and effort, care and attention, and that,ultimately if you cock something up or try to con us we WILL find out”.

To close on all matters Internet, Letters from a Tory mulls over whether Twitter and Facebook may damage our sense of morality: “The speed at which we now receive a breathtaking volume of information every hour of every day is something that should be both praised and damned in some respects.  As an adult who was brought up on the crest of the digital wave, I don’t think Facebook or Twitter or anything of the same ilk represents a threat to my morality or ethics.  However, the prospect of someone developing and maturing in a world where instant reactions are the rule rather than the exception raises some interesting questions, particularly for parenting.  No doubt some idiots along the way will call for digital media outlets to be banned or curbed but it is impossible to fight the tide”.

Feminism

Laurie Penny of Penny Red argues that feminism’s emancipatory agenda is not confined to the liberation of the female sex in Men, feminism and the patriarchal con: “There are many urgent reasons why socialist feminists of all genders need to concern themselves with popular misandry and the subjugation of men, especially when we’re facing down the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.  A recession is never a good time for women’s rights:economic crisis moves economic equality from the agenda, and a great deal of women’s struggle in and out of the workplace revolves around the battle for equal economic status.  Cuts to welfare benefits and part-time employment hit women with children hardest.  But most importantly of all, recession creates a large body of justly angry, disenfranchised working men, men who are encouraged implicitly and sometimes explicitly to take that anger out where it will do least damage to capitalist hegemony: to wit, on women.  It is a well-known and oft-repeated fact that domestic violence against women increases in times of economic crisis, usually, as is the case now, contiguously with a cut in state spending on women’s refuges.  But another backlash against feminism itself is also to be expected – and as feminists, the fallacy that the problems that men face in a recession are the fault of feminism is something that we need to turn and face”.

As if to substantiate her argument, Lynne Miles at The F-Word informs us Council strikes blow for gender equality, cuts women’s pay by 25%: “Sheffield City Council has announced a salary restructuring as a result of the onerous duty of gender equality legislation.  Apparently the unreasonable burden of having to pay the workers equally for doing similar jobs has caused them a great deal of trouble.  When they looked into it they found – as so many do – that they weren’t.  Solution?  Cut the pay of your lowest worker, blame the lefties who made you do it”.

Culture

Natalie Bennett of Philobiblon reviews Melissa Franklin Harkrider’s Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519-1580 in How to really annoy David Starkey, a tongue-in-cheek title, which she explains for the benefit of those not familiar with the historian’s prejudices: “Women, in Starkey’s world, had no significance in the 16th century, and writing a biography of a woman, even one who was high ranking, with access to royalty, would be a pointless exercise. Read this slim monograph, however, and you’ll realise just how silly this stance is”.

Whilst Susanne Lamido of Suz Blog samples some slightly less rarefied pleasures in Britain’s Got Talent Susan Boyle Sings Les Misérables.

If there was ever a feature of Englishness remarked upon by outsiders, then surely it is the proliferation of eccentric customs, such as gurning, Cheese-Rolling or the Hallaton Bottle-Kicking faithfully catalogued by Peter Ashton at Unmitigated England.  No quaint, sedate rituals these.  Their boisterousness and risk to life and limb in sharp contrast to the cotton-wool cosseted, drab government-approved entertainments of more recent vintage.  Long may they flourish!

Miscellaneous

The Heresiarch contemplates the divine on the basis of research carried out by Professor Uffe Schøjdt into how believers apprehend God by scanning their brains during prayer in What a friend they have in Jesus: “What Schøjdt’s brain imaging reveals, then, is something that we really know all along: that when it comes to worshipping, or praying to, or putting trust in, ‘God’ most people (even, I suspect, some of the sophisticated theologians) are not relating to the Supreme Being, or to the Ground of Universal Transcendence, or some such abstraction or spiritual essence, but to something much closer to the human scale.  Perhaps language, with its talk of heavenly fathers and ‘the word of God’, pushes them in this direction.  But I suspect that religion, as a way of making sense of the world, had its origins in anthropomorphic ways of thought that seem to come quite naturally to human beings.  Evolved to relate to other individuals with minds, people tend to relate to inanimate objects and even the universe itself as beings possessed of intelligence.  In the days before science, people conceptualised forces at work in the natural world as reflecting the activities of beings with intentions, or as beings themselves.  Even today we tend to (half-jokingly, perhaps, and in full knowledge of its futility) feel anger towards a car that won’t start.  And we are constantly exhorted to feel a sense of responsibility towards ‘Gaia’”.

Cabalamat of Amused Cynicism expounds why Blair’s Faith Foundation is full of shit: “So Blair wants us all to respect other religions, or ‘faiths’ to use the namby-pamby ecumenical mot du jour.  But hang on, isn’t Tony Blair a Roman Catholic?  And don’t Catholics believe that if you’re not a Catholic (or at any rate not a Christian) you’ll be tortured in Hell after you die?  That being the case, surely Catholics shouldn’t ‘respect’ other religions at all, but should regard them as deadly serious errors?

For example, if Blair saw a friend about to drink weedkiller, mistakenly believing it was blackcurrant juice, he would say ‘No!  Stop!  Don’t do that!’  And so it should be with religion, if Blair is truly a believer in the Catholic faith: if he notices that one of his friends is a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu, and he really cares about his friend, he should say ‘Stop, friend!  Don’t do that!  You’re risking being tortured for eternity!’”

In a thoughtful piece, which perfectly encapsulates the virtues of the blog as a mature medium for informed comment, Margin at Pseuds’ Corner and Home of the Frustrated Hack recalls An earlier Hillsborough disaster, the Spurs versus Wolves match at the grounds in 1981, which has not left a scar on the collective consciousness: “And the reason for that is simple.

Unlike their counterparts in 1989, the police commanders in charge in 1981 were not in charge of their first match, were not ignorant and incompetent, and were seemingly not predisposed to assume all problems were the result of violent scum on the terraces who deserved everything they got.

Instead, those in charge acted sensibly on the feedback of officers on the frontline.  As a result they ordered the closure of the gates leading to the most crowded pens, and then directed incoming fans to safer areas.  They acted somewhat late, but they did act.  And many fans were helped out of the crowded spaces by fellow fans and police alike.  They then sat along the edge of the pitch to watch the game unfold”.

Craig Murray pays tribute to the late Clement Freud, one of his predecessors as Rector of the University of Dundee: “For the student charities’ campaign he produced The Rector’s Cookbook, a collection of recipes that could be cooked in one pan on a single gas ring – in those days a not unusual sole cooking facility for a Dundee student.

He did a promotional piece for STV in a student flat in Springfield, equipped with a fold-away gas ring that swung out from the wall.  Halfway through his cooking demonstration the cooking ring collapsed, the pan clashed to the floor, spraying everyone with chilli, and a jet of yellow flame shot across the room, setting fire to the bedclothes. Freud turned to the camera and said, in the slowest and most deadpan voice imaginable as the room blazed around him: ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the perfect demonstration of the conditions which students have been reduced to under the Labour government’”.

Nest week’s Roundup will be hosted by Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire.  For a full statement of editorial policy, the hosting rota and the complete archives of the Roundup, consult the Britblog Central website.

As ever, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

[Background: on 20th November 2008, I received an unsolicited mail from Blogged.com generously awarding me a score of 7.4 out of 10 whilst informing me with all the gushing, upbeat insincerity of contemporary corporate rhetoric: "This is quite an achievement!"  The sender encouraged me to festoon my site with a promotional link proudly displaying my rating for the vast legions of bored males who according to Google Analytics spend less than one second on my site, just long enough to be disabused of the notion that my category XXL might have anything to do with simulations of writhing ecstasy, perhaps pausing for a Homer Simpson-like, forehead-slapping epiphany that the abbreviation quite innocently refers to clothing sizes.  No doubt expecting me to roll over like a poodle, tongue-lolling excitedly in transports of self-abasing gratitude that a little affection had been directed towards me.  How sadly mistaken.  A more appropriate canine comparison would involve that house at the end of the road in the sink estate, the one that even the local thugs give a wide berth, with the rickety wooden fence complete with scratch marks from vicious claws and an abandoned supermarket trolley lying helpless on its side on the lawn where the spike-collared Rottweiler roams.  One whiff of an impetuous intruder foolhardily approaching the beast's domain and it launches itself, teeth bared, battering its muscular bulk against the flimsy wood, salivating to part flesh and sinew from bone in its frenzied fury.  What follows is my reply.  Needless to say, I did not receive a response]

Dear Amy,

Thank you for taking the time and trouble to send me a standard format mail with a corresponding one-size-fits-all text.  No doubt the implied flattery of the phrase “This is quite an achievement!” is intended to elicit a Pavlovian response from the recipient to increase your site’s prestige (and position in search engine rankings) by pasting the link onto the sidebar as a badge of honour.

I, however, do not have the remotest intention of so doing and would like to explain why.

Firstly, I harbour serious suspicions that no human editor has so much as given the most cursory glance at my blog.  In part because I do not believe that you possess the financial and staffing resources necessary to substantiate your claim (albeit not expressly stated, but inherent in the nature of a site assigning scores to blogs) to function as some kind of arbiter of good writing.  In view of the sheer number of blogs (many of which are strewn over the pages of Blogger like so many archaeological remains, having been abandoned shortly after coming into being in the first instance either because the author’s attention span compares unfavourably with that of a thereby much-maligned amphibian or because they quickly succumb to the disillusionment that sets in when they are not instantly catapulted into the limelight or inundated with offers of book deals and the only attention bestowed upon them manifests itself in the inane and malevolent scribblings of trolls) it would require hordes of full-time employees to sift through and provide a genuine, considered assessment of each and every one of them.

Secondly, because of the score awarded to my blog.  All evaluation criteria are open to contestation, but some are more nebulous or likely to attract objections than others.  Let us examine each of the rating-determining criteria in turn.  The first is listed as “Frequency of Updates”.  This is founded on the assumption that a good blog is updated every day or perhaps more than once a day.  However, as the most superficial perusal of any teenager’s blog will suffice to demonstrate,  frequency of posting is usually in inverse proportion to quality.  Had an actual human judge proceeded to investigate my Profile Page, the logical place to begin when attempting to glean relevant information about the author or to acquaint oneself, however fleetingly, with the persona they wish to adopt, he or she would immediately have been appraised of my “mission statement”, or my stated purpose in writing: “Redemption Blues was conceived as an autobiography in fragments, but equally as a work in progress not easily reducible to any single (or simple) category.  My hope is that Redemption Blues will eventually attain the status of a ‘blog’ as opposed to a ‘good blog of the hour’ to adopt and adapt John Ruskin’s classification in Sesame and Lilies”.   The quotation from Ruskin which follows would have alerted them to the fact that the blog is not intended as some temporary or ephemeral venting exercise or disjointed series of huffings and puffings about the relentless flow of events, but as a literary/academic work including serious commentary and in-depth analysis.  True, the author’s initial perception of her output was as a “Personal Blog”, but the undertaking grew over time, expanding like a tree trunk, the rings invisible until exposed in cross-section.  This is where I part company with many, if not most, in my appreciation of the potential of the genre as a vehicle of thought and expression.  Its boundaries are not fixed, but fluid, it ought to be able to encompass “art” or at least aspire to, and it should not be regarded as inferior to what actually makes it into print in the bleak, commercially-driven imperative of the contemporary publishing industry.  Why should our views of what a blog should be like be conditioned by the lowest common denominator?  I am quite reconciled to the minute readership my blog commands as I quite deliberately refuse to pander to the tastes of the majority.  Given therefore that Redemption Blues strives for depth, the likelihood of the kind of feverish updating typical of blogs aimed at an average audience is not great to say the least.  Judging it according to criteria that quite self-evidently do not apply is an exercise in futility, if not downright dishonesty.

Then comes the enigmatic “Relevance of Content”, a classification, which begs more questions than it could ever hope to answer.  From whose standpoint?  Is a blog written from a staunchly British point of view to be deemed less relevant than a comparable American one simply because of US dominance of the Internet or because US politics and culture are considered more important by dint of the country’s economic clout and sheer weight of population numbers?  Surely this constitutes a parochial view, further sullied by a myopic and ugly nationalism.  Moreover, what meaning does the concept of “relevance” possess in relation to a “Personal Blog”?  By definition, the content posted on any blog is relevant to the author, otherwise they would not have bothered to write anything at all on the subject.  No external observer is entitled to adjudicate on the question of relevance.  Even if I were to attract a high volume of traffic because of an opinion voiced what is being measured is the interest others show in a topic (influenced by an entire array of factors).  Perhaps a blog that explicitly stakes a claim to being political might at a pinch be graded according to relevance of content in the sense that if the author strays from the narrow parameters defining what constitutes the properly political (a contested category in itself) to talk about the weather (unless the latter is related to anthropogenic climate change) it would not be beyond the bounds of imagination for an excessive and recurrent focus on the natural spectacle beyond the window pane to detract from the supposed “relevance” of the articles under scrutiny, but again exclusively in terms of the individual author’s own stated objectives.  It is, quite simply, nonsensical to try to impose a universally valid relevance criterion to any blog, which fatally discredits the rating system itself.

Next up is “Site Design”.  Blogging has been lauded as a more democratic and widely accessible form of articulating opinion.  Since the vast majority of bloggers are not computer experts/programmers/web designers it strikes me as highly questionable to include site design as a gauge of relative merit.  You really ought to be giving the points to Blogger or WordPress, but not using them as a means of distinguishing between individual bloggers, some of whom might be advanced enough to customise the standard template to add a personal touch.  In so doing, you end up penalising bloggers who might be extremely talented writers, but whose computer skills are more limited, privileging style over substance, slightly odd for a site that purports to direct readers towards quality content.  Then there is the matter of gender bias.  Supposing a female blogger wishes (and I am quite deliberately trading in crass stereotypes here for illustration purposes) to “prettify” her blog with cascades of flowers or a retina-scorching pink background, whereas a male blogger wishes to cultivate an air of “seriousness” and prefers a crisp, austere backdrop to his collected ruminations.  Which of these would yield a higher rating?  Increasing a score on the basis of “superior” site design not only depressingly replicates the kind of snap judgements ascribed to employers when ascertaining the suitability of job applicants (i.e. success or failure hinges almost entirely on superficialities, again surely not the kind of activity any organisation that craves to be taken seriously as a reliable guide to quality ought to be indulging in), but also  rewards those who can afford to pay small fortunes for web designers (in which case it would of course be the latter’s efforts which were being assessed) to impart a polished professional “look” - bringing us straight back to substance versus surface.  How amazingly progressive and enlightened of you.  How profoundly in touch with the spirit of blogging.

Finally, “Writing Style”.  In this context, I decided to check the rating your organisation considered appropriate for another personal blog with which I am familiar, Petite Anglaise.  It trounces Redemption Blues with 7.8 (as opposed to my 7.4).  In many respects, this is analogous to comparing an academic publication with a bodice-ripping bestseller, although both blogs are, it is true, subsumed beneath the same broad category.  You don’t have to take my word for it, simply type the respective URLs into the Blog Readability Test (a blunt instrument, yet instructive here) and you will discover that whilst Redemption Blues targets readers of a certain sophistication, as encapsulated in the “Genius Level” grading (itself an exaggeration betraying a sad decline in literacy levels), Petite Anglaise can be savoured by anyone of “High School” educational attainment.  I am at least somewhat relieved to note that pure readership figures (albeit blogs of stellar renown, such as Dooce.com have obtained remarkably high scores, suggesting that Technorati Authority might be an unacknowledged component of your evaluations after all) do not appear, at least not blatantly, to influence the results, otherwise Petite Anglaise would eclipse Redemption Blues entirely.  Taking raw popularity as an index of quality is extremely problematic.  Although inaccessibility/impenetrability do not betoken academic prowess (particularly to those acculturated into the theory-adverse, pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mindset), widespread appeal does not represent an incontestable guarantee of distinction.  Petite Anglaise does not pretend to be anything other than lightweight (except in the book version, where portentous mentions of posterity recur), profundity is entirely alien to it.  The judiciously edited account of the trials and tribulations of a secretary living in a location steeped in romantic associations in the minds of many of its readers was never going to aim higher than vacuous chick-lit, fit for consumption over a morning coffee, a throwaway piece of entertainment.  Redemption Blues, by contrast, is not hallmarked by either shallowness or pathological self-obsession.  In a nutshell, endorsing Petite Anglaise over Redemption Blues is equivalent to rejecting the Booker Prize shortlister in favour of the sun cream-spattered Mills and Boon beachside distraction.  Therefore it would be extremely difficult to persuade me that your entire rating system is anything other than a hollow, intellectually and morally bankrupt endeavour.

Returning to my initial protest about the total absence of human involvement in the rating process despite avowals to the contrary, the “Related topics” are simply strip-mined from my introductory paragraph and bear no relationship to the actual contents of my blog.  A more refined method of hoodwinking the hapless browser into deluding themselves that an actual person had so much as clicked once on the blog would have been to reproduce the author-devised categories.  This would have included Culture, Sociology and Women and Multiculturalism to name but three.  At least then any reader who might have strayed onto the relevant listing in the Directory might have been given a tantalising flavour of what my blog is about.  As things stand, potential visitors are comprehensively (and reprehensibly) misinformed (I cannot be blamed for this, as by compiling a Profile Page as well as a list of categories, I self-evidently expect curious passers-by to explore further).

I hope that these objections will serve as an inducement not to underestimate the intelligence of blog authors in future and to reflect on the wisdom of remorselessly promoting a hopelessly defective rating tool.  Perhaps they might even prompt you to ponder how best to salvage a semblance of the authority you clearly hanker after by improving it.

Yours faithfully,

The Chameleon

[Footnote for the hard of thinking, orchestrators of two-minute hate sessions, sundry members of Petite's army of (p)sychophants and wilful distorters.  Before hastening to conclude that my aversion to the prose of the Parisian stems from snobbery, spite, sour grapes, bruised vanity or whatever other motive you would seek to impute to me, please recall the vast power imbalance between us, which overshadows all else.  Remember before gallantly rushing to her defence by taking a swipe at me that she is the one who has been able to escape the drudgery of office dronedom with the half a million pound book deal whilst I continue to toil away in obscurity.  There is a certain subtle, self-deprecating (if not masochistic) irony contained in my words.  Like the high-pitched whine of the mosquito inaudible to the elephant it is about to divebomb in spite of the latter's magnificent ears.  The insect's doomed attempt to penetrate the hide so utterly ridiculous as to enter the realm of the farcical.  The mere fact of the inclusion of this piece under Chameleon Lite signals that it belongs to the more trivial postings with a tinge of humour.  Of course, it is quite dismal for me to feel obliged to point out what to a regular reader is insultingly obvious.  Detractors seldom bother with context before launching into invective however and I have already been shunned by the self-proclaimed "cream" of British blogging for the sin of blaspheming against Her Sublime Untouchableness.  I steadfastly refuse to back down from my assertion that marketability does not coincide with merit, a proposition Ms S very vividly illustrates]

Leaning on the draining board, tea towel for padding, yet your elbows still bruised, the newspaper strategically folded to reveal the crossword as the starlings perched along the empty washing line.  The drowsy hum of the bees at the Tummel mint, in the shade of the parasol planted in the border you watched his infant’s hand reach towards the drooping purple heads to withdraw at your warning.  A patchwork of tiny gestures, the wooden tongs transferring sodden cloth from one tub to another, Scottish breakfast every Sunday, trowel digging the weeds up by the roots and discarding them on the midden with the grass clippings.  The peal of the Academy bell through the open kitchen window, afternoon tea on your best china, sandwich slivers with cucumber for two giggling girls, dissecting the working day, patrolling the corridors, the trips to the library on board the double-decker, smokers upstairs, the shopping lists unworthy of such careful script, the smell of polish.

Yours was the gift of true humility, holding us together with the warmth of your smile, the Mars bar in the packed lunch box, watering the tomatoes in the greenhouse, Mr Blobby biscuits fresh from the bakery, gentle, embracing, welcomed without question, we could always return to you, no matter how bitter the disappointment, you accepted us without judgement, putting the kettle on, and when you could not follow us down the path, your hand waving in front of the lace curtain.

Welcome to the sustainable society edition of the Britblog Roundup brought to you from beneath the the permadrizzle shroud of the city of regulators and lobbyists.  Contributors have been in philosophical mode this week, pondering how best to preserve social cohesion and support a lifestyle that will not deprive future generations of a decent future, covering a wide variety of topics ranging from the devastating impact of chronic job insecurity, through the possible benefits of eugenics to putting on your wellies to emulate the admirable self-sufficiency of Tom and Barbara.

Politics

Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium, in Dr Butler on the rot that is Britain today… rightly laments the bias shown by Auntie Beeb in choosing not to peer through her bifocals at a volume published by a think-tank that she disapproves of.  In his review of The Rotten State of Britain at Blogger News Network, he suggests why her bloomers might be in a twist: "The book sets out to detail all the various aspects of life that have worsened under Labour ranging from personal freedom through taxation to the most basic provisions of health in the NHS.  Dr Butler effectively prepares anyone who wishes to perforate the continued assertion that Britain is in its current state because of Conservative administration that ended over a decade ago".

TV and computers are always first in the firing line when it comes to hand-wringing about how we increasingly live in juxtaposition to each other rather than mingling in the outdoors.  However, the doom and gloom mongers of the media are keen to portray public space, where social interaction occurs, as dangerous.  This in turn fuels a pervasive paranoia manifested in the unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras and letting our children out of our sight for a fraction of a second, let alone permitting them to wander off to the playground unsupervised is regarded as the height of folly, an act of culpable neglect.

We retreat into the safety of our properties with a pang of sadness and loss. mourning the demise of the carefree days when we inhabited the outdoors free from a protective adult presence, roaming through the streets until hunger chivvied us homeward.  In our more nostalgic moments, we yearn for the warmth and closeness that appears to have evaporated when we are not cursing our litigious neighbours for suing us over the branches of the lilac brazenly trespassing over their fence.  Is community the product of boredom or deprivation?  As an ex-pat in self-imposed and relatively contented exile, I appreciate the irony of contemplating the issue.  My uprootedness, my existence outside the context of my birth and upbringing are precisely what I cherish, rendering me impossible to "read" (and be instantly appraised, beyond the status of "foreigner" that is).  The precondition of community must surely be the wish to belong, some bond of affection, some feeling of investment in and attachment to a place, all of which are absent for myself and many of my fellow inhabitants of the Eurobubble, surrounded by reluctant and resentful hosts.  Like many immigrants who cannot bear to admit to themselves that they are here to stay, wherever "here" may be, no matter how many years go by, I still think of my residence as transient.

Riversider at Broadgate is Great, drawing on Professor Robert Putnam’s initiative across the Pond, lists, in a creditable effort at transplanting it to British soil, 85 Ways to Build Community.  Predictably (though not without justification), "Turn off your TV or PC" features as admonition number one (on the original American list, top spot goes to "Organise a social gathering to welcome a new neighbour".  Switching off the goggle box is to converse with friends or family occupies 71st position only).  "Go outside" comes in at number two.  Interestingly, "Say hello to strangers" is number 51 (85 in the US version).  People still where I come from and it is part of the charm of the place, but nowadays chiefly the preserve of the older generation.  "Join in to help carry something heavy" would be a non-starter in Waffleland, where nobody would dream of giving up their seat for a white-haired matron on a bus, never mind a pregnant woman.

Continuing on the theme of community, David Cameron recently unveiled the Conservatives’ plans for devolution writ small in the party’s Green Paper on local government, setting out the logic behind the proposals: “Right now most people feel totally insignificant in the political process.  Frankly, that’s because – in the current over-centralised system – they are insignificant.  If you’re unhappy about decisions made by your local council there’s very little you can do about it outside election day.

We’re going to change that by giving people the power to instigate referendums on local issues – including council tax rises.  If there’s a local consensus that a tax increase is unnecessary, people will be able to club together and vote it down.  This isn’t the sham ‘power to the people’ of a one-day consultation or a citizens’ jury; it’s real power in the hands of local people”.

And: “Many worry that decentralisation is a step backwards.  But localism isn’t some romantic attachment to the past.  It is absolutely essential to our economic, social and political future.  If our local economies are vibrant and strong we are far less vulnerable to global shocks or the failures of a few dominant industries.  If people know that their actions can make a real difference to their local communities, they’re far more motivated to get involved – and civic pride is revived.  If local government is both more powerful and more accountable, we can start to restore the trust that’s been lost in our political system.  It’s for these reasons that I am a conformed localist, committed to turning Britain’s pyramid of power on its head”.

In Central truth of Tory localism, Jeremy Beecham endeavours to expose what lurks beneath the rhetoric: “The truth is that the effect of these proposals would be to undercut representative local democracy and diminish the appeal of service as a local councillor.  On the other hand they might, as Nick Boles candidly admitted a year or two ago, be the only way the Tories might exercise influence in much of urban Britain, which has long turned its back on them”.

For Beecham, the cloven hoof positively protrudes from beneath the hem of the gown: “And over local government finance a more than discreet veil is drawn.  No mention of the planned 1% cut in grant, nothing about making council tax fairer or revaluation 20 years after its introduction, nothing about reforming council tax benefit and nothing about relocalising business rates, beyond a modest revision of the government’s scheme for a business supplementary rate.

But then this is not too surprising, for behind Cameron’s warm words lies the reality of the Tory approach to local government, from Eric Pickles’ blustering instructions to Tory councils to the 100 ways to cut council tax promulgated by their flagship (or should that be destroyer?) council, Hammersmith and Fulham, including cutting the youth service, slashing support for the arts, sending children to boarding schools and emasculating scrutiny.  And isn’t it significant that when it comes to referendums on council tax there’s no option to increase it?  The only direction is down”.

Matt Sellwood of Anglo-Buddhist Combine devotes a post to responding to a comment by Paul Kingsnorth to the effect that "The population of the UK is currently 60 million.  At current rates of change it will be over 70 million within a couple of decades.  That’s largely an issue of immigration.  Something can be done about that.  If it isn’t done - because we don’t want to talk about immigration in case we are called racist, etc. etc. - then we are faced with having to provide power for an extra 10 million people.  Any plans for how to make that work in a ‘green’ way?"

In a thoughtful and more detailed earlier post on his own blog, Immigration: truisms vs. clichés, Kingsnorth highlights the perniciousness of stifling debate: "On immigration itself, whatever your view on the matter it is hard to deny that the way it has been handled over the last decade has been deeply undemocratic.  The number of people expressing concern about immigration has shot up in the last decade; coinciding with the largest rise in immigration in British history.  Call them racists if you like (though it would be lazy, and wrong), but if you call yourself a democrat you have to question the right of any government to carry out, over such a long period, a policy which results in such significant social change, against the wishes of its people.  Still, that’s British ‘democracy’ for you".

He describes his forebodings of doom: "Population growth is a disaster for Britain.  We are already, in my view, overcrowded and overdeveloped - especially in southeast England.  The idea of allowing, or encouraging, the population to grow by almost a million a year in the name of propping up global capitalism is a joke.  If you are in favour of unlimited immigration you need to be able to explain where all the new houses and roads will go.  And the new schools, hospitals, power plants, superstores and call centres.  You need to be able to explain the impact on our climate change targets.  And what the country will look like at 77 million and rising.  Environmental arguments are always predicated on the existence of limits.  What is the limit here?  When should population growth - and thus immigration - stop?  If you can’t answer that, you are wasting my time".

Sellwood in Greens and Immigration offers his vision of a remedy: "As Paul rightly points out (…), immigration is not caused because people love Britain’s weather or think our party scene can’t be beat.  It’s caused by economic, environmental and social ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, which force people to leave their homes in order to support themselves or better their lives.  The root of this, quite clearly, is the extraordinarily unequal and unjust world we live in, caused by a particular economic system.  The solution to environmental problems is not to create a kind of fortress Britain, where we keep out all others because of our high-energy lifestyles and the impact that has on the environment.  The solution is to change that economic system" (emphasis in original).

Mr Kingsnorth was nominated in his own right for the strikingly titled Why I am a planet-raping fascist, which reiterated his stance in defence of the spiritual dimension of landscapes unravaged by human hands following heated reactions to a contribution in The Guardian condemning the Severn barrage: "1. Renewable energy technologies are not, despite some green claims to the contrary, always harmless.  Some - those which are carried out on a massive scale - can actually be harmful.  The harm is of a different measure to that caused by fossil-fuel burning; it’s harm to the wild landscape.  But it’s harm nonetheless, and we should acknowledge that.

2. Wild places and the non-human world are important both for the biosphere as a whole and for human well being.  They should not be ravaged by human industrial intrusion.  This goes both for motorways and inappropriately-sited windfarms.

3. Environmentalists should be able to talk about crucial but intangible things - like beauty, wildness, stillness, the soul-lifting power of mountains and forests - without feeling ashamed.  They should talk less like economists and more like poets, because if they don’t, the economists have won.  And then we’re really in trouble".

Councillor with a conscience Antonia Bance of Antonia’s Blog reports that 850 jobs go at BMW in Oxford, expressing her sympathy with these casualties of the credit crunch: "How do you go from £250 per week steady, to £60 per week jobseekers’ allowance, with no redundancy pay?  I don’t know, and I’m incredibly sorry for all those workers who don’t know what the future holds for them and their families".

She criticises the Government for having allowed EU legislation, which would have extended protection to such workers, to gather dust on a departmental shelf.  Their “temporary” status belies the fact that they have been employed at the company for anything between two an