Welcome to the 272nd Forrest Gump chocolate box edition of the Britblog Roundup, the weekly compilation of delights where you are never quite sure what you will find until you have removed the cellophane.

At examiner.com, Andrew Ian Dodge brings us up to date with the latest developments within the Direct Democracy project in US exports tea party movement to UK and elsewhere.

As an ex-pat I am torn between homesickness, yearning for mountains amidst the unrelieved flat monotony of Waffleland, and despair at the relentless tide of encroachments upon freedoms and wholesale abandonment of that once staple British virtue of common sense.  From the safe distance I inhabit, my abiding impression is that Britain ever more closely resembles Airstrip One, a surveillance society complete with Thought Police where the prevailing orthodoxy is rigorously enforced with the connivance of technologies the Stasi could not have imagined in their wildest fantasies (for example the state of the art CCTV cameras which allow operators to listen into casual conversations as well).  Where curtain-twitching and snitching are in the process of being elevated to civic duties thereby severing the few remaining threads of community and solidarity.  Trawling through the columns of even the broadsheets leads me to the uncomfortable conclusion that Britain is sliding down the proverbial slippery slope towards the kind of oppressive, interfering state that it took Central Europe over 40 years and countless personal tragedies (both in terms of wasted potential and as the price of resistance) to rid themselves of.  More worryingly, that the kind of inbuilt safeguards you might expect to accrue from acculturation in a democracy possess all the resilience and durability of the morning dew in the face of the opportunity to combine the pleasures of a new toy with those of meddling in the business of others.

Contemplating the rot that has set in, I was reminded of Piotr Sztompka’s brilliant essay Civilisational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies (Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Volume 22, Number 2, April 1993, pp85-95).  The incompetence referred to in the title is defined as “a complex set of rules, norms and values, habits and reflexes, codes and matrixes, blueprints and formats – the skillful and semi-automatic mastery of which is a prerequisite for participation in modern civilisation” (p88).  He identifies three causal mechanisms to blame for the pernicious state of affairs: “The first was direct indoctrination through socialist propaganda, as well as habituation in the ways typical for socialist economic and political practice (this is responsible e.g. for primary egalitarianism, demands of welfare and social security from the state, claims to ‘leading political role’ by the working class etc.).  The second involved successful attempts at totalitarian control, by means of coercive state apparatus (resulting e.g. in opportunism, blind compliance, reluctance to take decisions, avoidance of personal responsibility etc., which together make up the syndrome of ‘prolonged infantilism’ matching the ‘paternalism’ of the state).  The third, and perhaps most crucial, were adaptive, defensive patterns developing spontaneously against indoctrination and totalitarian control.  They took the form of unintended consequences, or ‘boomerang effects’ (e.g. lack of respect for law, institutionalized evasion of rules, double standards of talk and conduct, glorification of tradition, idealization of the West)” (p89).

Loathe to say it though I do, his description of the paralysing impact of decades of authoritarian rule on individual minds contains elements, which ring disconcertingly true when viewing contemporary Britain from the outside.  I admit, polemicising aside, that there are limits to the comparison, but since nominations have been thin on the ground, indulge me a little longer with one further quotation from Professor Sztompka, this time cataloguing the factors inhibiting the acquisition of civilisational competence once the Communist regime has finally been overthrown, the anxieties of transition: “First is the widespread anomie or axiological chaos, common disorientation as to the binding norms and values, valid rules, right ways of life.  Old patterns have fallen down, new ones have not yet been legitimised.  thrown into uncertainty and devoid of moral guidance, people feel isolated, lonely, and turn their resentments against others.  Interpersonal suspicion, hostility, hatred – destroy whatever social bonds have been left intact by totalitarian rule (…) Second, the emergence of new life-chances, opportunities to raise social status, by freshly opened access to wealth, power, prestige – generates brutal competition, in which stakes are high but rules of the game – undeveloped.  Civility, fair play, cooperative attitudes – do not find conducive ground to put roots (…) Third, the rigid social controls, both external and internal are suddenly released.  Police force and the judiciary get disorganised and lose any legitimacy they might still possess.  The law is undermined by the claims that its totalitarian origins make it illegitimate and not binding.  If law is considered unjust or anachronic – why should one comply?  This is not the helpful condition for establishing the rule of law, as the fundamental principle of democracy.  And fourth, there are unintended costs of opening toward the Western world.  The flow of consumer mass culture of lowest quality arrives first, before any truly valuable products, and brings pornography and drugs, brutality and mysticism, organised crime and deviant ways of life.  The enthusiastic adoption of most superficial symbols of capitalist affluence reminds one of ‘conspicuous consumption’, ‘nouveau riche’, and ‘Great Gatsby syndrome’” (pp89-90).

There are certain familiarities with the litany of discontents related to how unpleasant a place Britain has become to live in, how courtesy and service have vanished from everyday interactions, even the pretence of politeness ousted by grasping commercialism and cynicism, the vacuous cult of celebrity and route to short-term fame (notoriety) via the likes of (now thankfully defunct) Big Brother where contestants parade and perform themselves in all their glorious banality, the eschewal of effort and quietly plugging away as the pathway to the rewards of peer recognition and achievement.

All of these thoughts were inspired by Charles Crawford’s piece addressing the limits of the redistribution of wealth within our societies in Being, Not Producing.  Particularly the (to me at least) revelation that amongst the array of punitive instruments and penalties that has been put in place to compensate for the erosion of meaningful social networks (in this particular instance a supportive family or set of responsible friends actually worth the designation who might be willing to show some tough love and help keep the recipient’s self-destructive tendencies in check) police may issue a Drinking Banning Order covering the entire country.

Before returning definitively from Central Europe, Island1 of Polandian shows us an intrepid Polish TV reporter showing off his waders at a variety of waterlogged locations in Floods in the news.

Although children playing conkers in school playgrounds have allegedly been forced into wearing protective goggles, I am heartened to hear via Wartime Housewife in Beano! that killjoy regulators have not yet succeeded in eliminating the catapult as part of standard issue mischief-making equipment.

Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire highlights a possible large-scale miscarriage of justice in relation to child pornography charges in Operation Ore: Profound Consequences if it Collapses: “If this appeal is successful, the ultimate consequences will be profound, because Operation Ore was the first large-scale British ‘paedo’ case.  The alleged success of Operation Ore, and the public fear of paedophiles created and fed in its wake, is the foundation upon which law enforcement around paedophile offences and a related public culture dominated by fear of child abuse has been built”.

This is not the only instance where the questionable decisions have been taken to prosecute without robust evidence.  In When it comes to sexualising children, the CPS is far worse than Primark The Heresiarch of Heresy Corner deplores the conviction of two boys of primary school age for rape: “Until relatively recently, a boy under the age of 14 was deemed incapable – that is, physically incapable – of committing the crime of rape.  That was in a sense ridiculous, but it may validly be asked if a boy as young as ten is mentally capable of rape, even if he does have the hydraulic capacity.  It is the most adult of crimes – more adult than murder, for while children have a fairly clear concept of death, sex is something of which they have little comprehension.  Even if they do know where babies come from.  And however much porn they’ve seen on the Internet.

At most, these boys were acting out things that they had heard discussed – possibly watched online – and wondered about, for there is nothing more natural for children than curiosity about their bodies.  Though the boys in this case were the youngest children ever to accused of rape in England, childhood ‘sexual’ play is far from uncommon – as indeed it always has been, even in the days before children were bombarded daily with sexual imagery and talk.  There has, however, been an increasing (and frankly bizarre) tendency in recent years to view such activities through the prism of adult concerns about paedophilia and abuse, and to impose adult understandings of sex on children who are pre-sexual.  When the law steps in, with its adult-oriented definition of what is and is not a sex crime, the stage may be set for a tragedy of inappropriate labelling – the results of which will live with the children involved long after their childish misdemeanours should have been forgotten”.

He concludes: “When it comes to sexualising children, it turns out, the CPS is far worse than Primark.  It is strange for child welfare campaigners to trouble themselves over padded bras when the full majesty of the state is putting small boys on trial for the adult crime of rape.  It’s almost as though these children are being persecuted for the wider sexualisation of society and of childhood, which may have contributed to their behaviour, but which is in no sense their fault”.

Next Left blog covers the latest expenses furore in David Laws’ dilemma and the transition to gay equality, broadening the focus to encompass the wider issues at stake: “Some have expressed disappointment that, in the Britain of 2010, the most powerful gay man in the Cabinet did not feel he could be open about his sexuality.  That is an understandable instinct, but it is surely legitimate to think that these are highly personal decisions.  Most of us would be reluctant to think we could pronounce, without having lived in their shoes, on somebody else’s choices about their own life”.

Matt Wardman approaches the same subject from the angle of the coalition’s anxiety to distance themselves from the grubby and grasping exploitation of the system in the past in David Laws: His position is probably untenable.

In a highly productive week, Matt has also reproduced the full compendium of the Top 100 UK Political Blogs for May – by Wikio as well as launching The Orange Digital Campaign Awards (NOT): a gentle protest meme, further consolidating his site as one of the indispensable (not to mention authoritative) stopping off points for anyone interested in politics and the Internet regardless of party affiliation.

Subrosa asks the pertinent question Has the BBC’s Question Time Had Its Day?

In a highly entertaining blend of autobiographical anecdote and analysis, Ian Yorston of The Unreasonable Man highlights a tendency towards irrationality in political decisions (such as the closure of European air space) in Ashclouds, Airplanes, Engines and Risk.  One of the many pertinent questions he asks in relation to the hypothetical scenario in which an aircraft on a scheduled flight between England and the Continent were to encounter some particles spewed out from Eyjafjallajökull is as follows: “if the worst did come to the worst, and all the engines stopped working, then how difficult is it to land a modern commercial aircraft – deadstick – no thrust – given that the starting point is 20,000 feet above mainland Europe? – bear in mind that every Shuttle landing is a deadstick landing – and the Shuttle flies like a brick.  Bear in mind that we can land aircraft in the Hudson River.  Bear in mind that technology is getting better.  Bear in mind that there are airfields all over the place”.

Whereas any decision-maker will pay lengthy lip service to safety, I suspect that the real underlying concern is with litigation and avoiding compensation claims rather than any genuine human empathy.

Tim Newman’s White Sun of the Desert offers a fascinating insider’s view of the oil industry, embodying all the qualities that ensure the best of blogging beats journalism hands down (a distillation of specialist knowledge presented in accessible form, accuracy, passionate interest in the subject, the space to develop an argument as much as it requires without an editor breathing down your neck, freedom from the tyranny of writing for the sake of filling in column inches rather than when you genuinely have something to say and so on).  Let’s face it, the microcosm that is the high-pressure corporate world is about as alien and far removed from my daily reality as I can possibly imagine, in the popular imagination at least is awash with cigar-chomping, ruthless men in Stetsons, too macho even for the likes of Rosie the Riveter.  In Fateful Decisions on the Deepwater Horizon, he discusses possible contributory factors to the disaster not immediately apparent to the layperson: “The problem is, I think, a matter of egos.  Like I said, some oil companies deliberately recruit little Napoleons with egos bigger than your average offshore platform.  The interviews and selection process favour the born leaders and weed out the compliant team players, with the result that you have a generation of natural leaders – who have been told since joining that they are the very best, the cream of the crop – and nobody who just wants to settle down to the drudgery of getting the job done.  Which is why half the damned industry is made up of contractors, nobody else wants to do any actual work.  I exaggerate, but not a lot.  Anyway, if you have a bright, young, energetic high-flyer who you want to develop and gain experience in another area, then you put him in charge but you assign him a lieutenant.  And that lieutenant should be a grizzled old dog who has been round the block a dozen times and then some, knows everything and everybody, is as cynical as hell, but just doesn’t have the drive or energy or career desires to lead any more.  The old dog would ensure the young pup stays on the straight and narrow and doesn’t do anything stupid and remains on call should he need to offer advice drawn from his considerable experience.  The oil industry is chock-full of these blokes, and they’re being laid off by the thousand when they should be doing everything they can to keep them.  Instead, the egos of the high-flyers and the management, who are effectively promoting somebody just like themselves, won’t allow him to be told he’s wrong, about to make a stupid mistake, knows sod all, and really needs to start listening and wise up a bit.  All young engineers, myself included (on more than one occasion), have had a slap down like this from some old hand when we’ve stuck our neck out and thought we knew it all.  You feel pretty hurt afterwards, but it’s a vital process in learning what your limitations are and how to respect and listen to those around you.  When it happens, boy do you learn.  Sadly, I sometimes get the impression that some oil company staff are taught by default they know more than the contractors and everybody else and they should not be cowed into listening to them, hence you find experienced hands being second-guessed and shouted down by some arrogant git who has no idea what he’s talking about, and you find it far more often than is healthy for the industry”.

Another author with a privileged insight into a profession that comes under intense public scrutiny, Inspector Gadget of Police Inspector Blog, draws our attention to certain inconsistencies in expressing national pride in Through the Looking Glass.  In my days as a postgraduate student, I spent the best part of three years in Denmark, carrying out research into a subject, referred to rather dismissively by Lord Palmerston thus: “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it.  One was Prince Albert, who is dead.  The second was a German professor who became mad.  I am the third and I have forgotten all about it”.  One of the things that struck me during my time in Copenhagen was how the flag, Dannebrog (which according to the myth of its origin was a gift from heaven that turned the tide of battle in 1219, a peerless pedigree if ever there was one) was seamlessly woven into the fabric of everyday life, unashamedly on display everywhere, fluttering in the sea breeze on flagpoles in allotment gardens, waved to welcome family members being greeted at the airport.  It is not banned by over-zealous officials petrified of giving offence, folded away in a drawer to be consumed by moths, an object irredeemably tainted by unsavoury associations.

Yesterday, Viktor Orbán in his speech prior to being sworn in as Prime Minister of Hungary deployed a striking phrase when characterising the defeatist attitude propagated by the Socialist governments over the last eight years.  He talked about how Hungarians have been wandering around, heads bowed and that their horizons have never extended beyond their shoelaces.  In the UK, patriotic sentiment has been thoroughly pathologised by the Left, conflated with racism and intolerance.  However, the reason why one local council has banned flag flying whereas another has encouraged it is intimately linked with the specific context.  In the former, the flag is being linked to the World Cup, football, a sport much loved by the working class and carries connotations of hooliganism, brawling and mindless, drunken violence on the part of supporters.  Presumably, local worthies are terrified that the mere glimpse of an England flag on a passing vehicle might be enough to incite passers-by to engage in loutish behaviour, according to the red rag principle, triggering barely suppressed tendencies to lash out at the nearest target amongst the lower orders.  By contrast, sailing is a genteel, middle-class pursuit.  In addition, the Dunkirk evacuation (in which my grandfather took part) is a revered and iconic episode in our history, incorporated into our national identity along with the Battle of Britain and the White Cliffs of Dover.  The emphasis in the re-enactment was presumably on sacrifice the British genius of muddling through and coming up with pragmatic solutions when confronted with the most dire of circumstances, not letting our boys down in their hour of need.  In short, what separates the two is not only distance in time (past and all too threatening present), but respectability.

Sticking to the theme of the irritations of modern existence, Wrinkled Weasel of the eponymous blog loses patience with an ailing institution in Paper Free but not junk free: “Since when was the Post Office letters division a Public Service?  When was the last time anybody received a meaningful communication via the Royal Mail, that could have been done electronically?  The last important document to arrive at Weasel Hall was a Passport.  And that was by Private Courier.  The only thing we get from the postman these days is junk.  Day after day after day.  These days, posties are in reality, highly paid leaflet distributors, and, forgive me if I am mistaken here, but this aspect of the Post Office is done entirely for commercial reasons and is highly profitable.  It benefits nobody but the Post Office and perhaps also the companies who use this method of marketing, which apparently raises £67 billion in sales.  hardly what you could call a ‘public service’, though, is it?  Getting details of Twofers at Somerfield?  Do me a favour”.

Quite.  I completely agree with the Wrinkled Weasel’s point that the advent of e-mail has been the death knell for traditional postal services.  Over here, on the other side of the Channel, “pas de publicité” stickers were distributed for mailboxes (with the typical Waffelian twist that you can refine these instructions somewhat by demanding that unsolicited advertisements only be delivered in Flemish and not French).  Whenever the red van pulls up in front of the house, I can be fairly sure it is either for a bill or the tax declaration form, nothing to look forward to in other words.  More recently, De Post conducted a sneakier campaign to prise information out of residents as a means of getting round our grass roots resistance to any extraneous printed matter.  Feigning concern for the environment (the waste of thousands of tonnes of paper consigned to the recycling bins without having been so much as glanced at never having caused them sleepless nights), De Post sent a questionnaire form to every household in the region unapologetically poking its nose into every conceivable aspect of existence from income to hygiene product preferences, “All the better to target you with, my dear”.  Having taken the trouble to ascertain that amongst the hundreds of boxes to tick, there was no option for “I do not wish to receive any advertising” (although, to be honest, by the time I reached the end, I would seriously have welcomed the option of “Fuck off”).  Something about their assurances that the data was anonymous did not quite ring true (maybe it was the fact that my name and address was printed brazenly at the top).  Let’s face it, how could they tailor the advertising to suit your personal preferences if they did not store the information?  Seriously, who in their right mind would voluntarily surrender that amount of intimate detail about themselves just to eliminate a minor inconvenience?  I don’t care about data protection disclaimers, I bet that the sole purpose of the exercise was to gather saleable intelligence from the widest possible sample (apart from central government only De Post keep records of every single householder in the country).  End result: apart from the local double glazing and garage door specialists, the only rubbish I am pestered with comes from the eternally optimistic Aldi, God bless them.

Not that all is hunky-dory in the virtual world, as Mark Pack demonstrates in Dear Facebook, I don’t like you this morning.

Jess McCabe of The F-Word announces a Summer school for feminist activists to be held in London between 31st July and 1st August.

To conclude, I warmly commend three posts by way of a balm for the soul, two revealing hidden gems of the countryside and one in a more urban setting.  Firstly, a very warm welcome back to Jonathan Calder of Liberal England with a delightful introduction to The old church at Tur Langton.  Followed by Philip Wilkinson of English Buildings on Horningsham, Wiltshire, which surely comes close to the English pastoral ideal, though its thatched Congregational Chapel was built for Scottish workers.  Last, but by no means least, Diamond Geezer gives us the benefit of his unparalleled local knowledge the latest instalment of his guide to the Lost rivers of London in Hackney Brook.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Jackart at A Very British Dude.

As always, nominations should be sent to the mailbox at britblog [at] gmail [dot] com  For a full statement of editorial policy, hosting rota and a complete archive of the Roundup since its inception, consult the Britblog Roundup Central website.

Welcome to the 263rd short but sweet edition of the Britblog Roundup, which presents a varied assortment of submissions for your delectation in an exercise comparable to tipping the envelopes (whether brightly coloured or just plain brown) and packages from a postbag onto the table without their having passed through the sorting office first.  The weekly host’s task being that of organising the material into a few loose categories rather than censoring (or censuring) the contents.

Politics

Andrew Ian Dodge writing at Pajamas Media gives us his Reaction to the Inaugural British Tea Party Event in Brighton on 28th February.

Andrew Cooper of Greening Kirklees extols the virtues of installing solar panels in I join the ‘Energy generating Democracy’!: “It is quite a liberating feeling.  I know one of my potential energy suppliers is 93 million miles away but I feel a much greater affinity with it than the earthbound energy companies.  I guess it is because the sun never sends me any bills and 0p/kWh is by far my favourite tariff!”

Not that there are enough tranquil leafy suburbs to go round…Sarah Cope of the eponymous blog ponders how best to coerce private landlords into cleaning up their act and stop scrimping on repairs and basic maintenance in Private Sector Housing – time to get tough: “Sewage splattered across the path to the front door due to a broken pipe.  Houses split into 10 to 12 rooms, looking decidedly dilapidated.  Huge bundles of wires strung along outside walls, clearly a health and safety nightmare.

These are just some of the badly managed properties that I have come across in the private sector whilst door-knocking in Stroud Green.  One resident told me it was ‘like living in a slum’ and that it had been that way for years”.

Retreating for a moment from the sleeves-rolled-up more practical side of righting wrongs to a more theoretical level, David Morgan of Washminster summarises Lord Chancellor Jack Straw’s lecture on Parliamentary Reform, whilst Riversider of River’s Edge contemplates A hung parliament – Implications for the Left: “A hung parliament, or a government with a weak majority would reflect the weakness and indecision of the ruling class and their political representatives in the 3 main parties.  They have been badly shaken and disorientated by the disastrous credit crunch, which burst their bubble of ebullient confidence.  Now they foresee a much more complex, difficult and dark future for their system”.

At the RMT London Calling blog, Janine is not quite so optimistic about the prospect of future improvements and is prompted to pose the question Does the Economic crisis Mean that Employers ‘Have To’ Cut Jobs? contrasting responses to recession by London Transport in more confident times with those of the present day.

Slightly further afield, Fraught Mummy of the Brits in Bosnia Blog deplores the recent arrest of Ejup Ganic in British politics, a dirty, dirty game, arriving at a damning verdict: “The British Government has said that it was ‘just a case of the judicial authorities following their legal obligations’ and they were not making a political statement at all.  Try telling that to the thousands of protestors outside of the British Embassy in Sarajevo on Friday.  They, like pretty much everyone else, see it as a way of appeasing Serbia for the trial of Karadzic”.

Neil Craig of A Place to Stand provides an alternative analysis in two pieces devoted to the subject, Ejup Ganic – War Crimes Extradition and Ejup Ganic – ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall’.

Ben Challis, part of the team of At last…the 1709 Copyright Blog draws our attention to some suspiciously fortuitous timing in relation to the publication of certain research results and the sublimely catty reaction to it by one ISP in OOOO errrr missus, the claws are out in DEB debate.

Dwelling for a moment on the theme of Internet freedom and intellectual property rights, Andrew Robinson of Pirate Party Blog publicises the outcome of a vote in the European Parliament in ACTA Supporters – UKIP named and shamed.

Inspired by news of a controversy over the underlying message conveyed by differential pricing of Ballerina Barbie and Theresa dolls as examined by Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy, Charles Crawford addresses some of the wider dilemmas in Racism In The Toyshop Sale: “is there any sensible way other than the price mechanism to measure the weight of rival views’ view on the subject?  If ten people complain but 900 do not, is there any issue?  Is a good enough answer to those offended along the lines of ’shop somewhere else’?”

Guy News covers the release of pub landlord Nick Hogan, the smoking ban martyr.

Feminism

Gavin Robinson of Investigations of a Dog reminds us that Women Really Do Exist, a statement not as straightforwardly obvious as you might be tempted to think given the marginalisation (to the point of almost complete invisibility) of women in traditional historiography.  As part of a contribution to Women’s History Month, he links to They Really Do Exist, an initiative of Liberal Democrat blogger Jennie Rigg aimed at disproving sweeping assertions that downplay the role played by women in any given area of cultural endeavour.  Gavin states: “What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics.  In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality.  This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists”.

In a thoughtful essay that combines practical valuable tips on publishing on demand with a keen sense of how such forms of expression perpetuate the venerable tradition of the women’s movement and political activism within it, Adventures in self-publishing, Deborah Withers encourages the pooling of skills and resources in order to articulate viewpoints that would otherwise be ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream media.

Culture

Philip Booth of Ruscombe Green assesses a recent performance of The Amazing and Preposterous Constance Smedley at Everyman Theatre (with a couple of other recommendations thrown in for good measure).

In a review of Robert Harris’s Lustrum, Natalie Bennett of Philobiblon considers the similarities and differences between modern British politics and those of a turbulent antiquity in The pains of politics, Roman-style.

Miscellaneous

In 40,000 new sex workers for the South Africa world cup?  Really?  Anatomy of a number, mngreenall issues a salutary reminder of why we should never relax our vigilance whilst perusing newspaper reports.  Search engines are a treasure trove when it comes to fact checking and tracing the origins of unsubstantiated rumours.  Indeed, when journalists wax snooty about the alleged unreliability and sloppiness of bloggers it is good to have a few ripostes in one’s repertoire…

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) vents his spleen about one of his less conventional pet hates in Disorganised Rage!  And, yes, I most definitely feel his pain.

Tom Reynolds of Random Acts of Reality recounts why he has decided to banish Unwarranted Uncharitable Thoughts when called out early in the morning.

With customary charm, the ever-entertaining Diamond Geezer invites us to hop on board the Number 45 to accompany him on an exotic journey: “There are many glamorous destinations to which a man can travel from St Pancras International.  Paris, Brussels, even Margate, to name but a few.  But instead I took the bus to Elephant & castle, Camberwell, Brixton and beyond.  Given that I was staying on board until the very last stop, it was the ‘and beyond’ bit which unnerved me”.

To close in humorous vein, Ross of Unenlightened Commentary is captivated by a tale of Teenage Lesbians Stripped…, all strictly in the pursuit of research into outrageous manifestations of blatant discrimination, you understand.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by cabalamat at Amused Cynicism.  As ever, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com  For a full statement of editorial policy, hosting rota and a complete archive of the Roundup since its inception, consult the Britblog Roundup Central website.

Welcome to the pre-hibernation edition of the Britblog Roundup where blogging activity appears to have succumbed to seasonal sluggishness in the absence of major scandals.

 Politics

Writing at Pajamas Media, Andrew Ian Dodge weighs up the Tory leader’s prospects of success at next year’s election in David Cameron Likely Britain’s Next PM, But He May Yet Blow the Chance: “Labour might change leaders between now and the election.  They know that Gordon brown, barring a miracle, would go down to a crushing defeat and cost many a Labour MP his seat.  Their clamouring for change was mostly pacified at their party conference, but as their doom looms larger and larger, it seems hard to believe they will not attempt to rid themselves of the loathed Brown.

There is no guarantee that any other leader would win the general election and keep Labour in power – in fact, it is almost certain that they would not.  however, a new leader might be able to significantly reduce the majority held by David Cameron.  It is even possible that there might be a ‘hung’ parliament, where no party has overall control.  This would bring up the possibility of a ‘minority’ government, which are notoriously weak.  Worse, it could lead to a ‘coalition’ government made up of everyone who wants to keep the Conservatives out of government”.

Meanwhile, James Higham of Nourishing Obscurity has high hopes of a radically different coalition: Brit politics suddenly interesting – time for a coalition to win in 2010, an idea on which he elaborates further in Steps to getting this coalition afloat.

In a slightly late entry (given the date of publication, it would have been more appropriate for last week’s edition, but I am in an indulgent mood and it is a first-time nomination, after all), Joanna Cake of Having My Cake and Eating It Too assesses Nick Griffin’s performance in Question Time: the BNP on Homosexuality and Immigration: “What the BNP is doing is their own form of exploitation.  Appearing to stand up for the common man whilst, all the time, merely adopting a stance that will win them enough popularity to start feathering their own nest.

Our only consolation is that watching Mr Griffin weaseling and smiling as he spouted statements and denials that made so many people just stare open-mouthed with disbelief, his transparency became obvious to all”.

Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole encourages us to listen to Clive James on the subject of the postal strike in An ‘old-style left’ view on the dignity of labour…

I agree with him that it is well worth the effort, especially when you are treated to soundbites such as this: “Where there is dignity in labour, workers usually want to work, even if the task is a drudge.  They should beware of any outrage on their behalf by false friends on the playtime left who have never done a hand’s turn.  While it is a fine thing to be an artist, it is an even finer thing to be a doctor or a nurse.  And it can be just as fine a thing to stack shelves or clean lavatories”.

Having dealt with a client convinced that electrical appliances are insidiously whispering at him to commit murder, Clairwil ponders the corrosive and compassion-dulling impact of constant exposure to benefit scroungers rhetoric in The Value of Nothing!

“I do realise that whilst this chap is out of work he’s costing us all money, but I personally find the idea of a seriously ill person being harassed into employment for the sake of saving a few bob morally repugnant.  Money is important and it’s very useful at the shops, but a person’s worth cannot be  determined solely by their economic worth.  Good Heavens if people believed that they’d cheer when they hear about the deaths of those deemed economically worthless and no one has been that evil since we saw off Hitler”.

Except for the Daily Mail readers who left – moderated – comments of approval on a piece reporting that an illegal immigrant had suffocated whilst hiding on board a lorry that is…

In Secret ACTA treaty would impose 3-strikes, cabalamat of Amused Cynicism highlights the latest moves to clamp down on Internet freedom.

In a customarily incisive piece at Liberal Conspiracy, Unity examines the issue of Offensive Language?

On the subject of banning the use of “retard” as a term of abuse, Unity remarks: “You can’t make words disappear, but you can educate people to use words in their proper context and to understand why context matters.  That’s how you change attitudes and it’s attitudes that matter, not words.

That’s where the dogma of ‘political correctness’ too often gets it completely wrong.  It tries to change attitudes by making rules, giving people banal lists of words that they supposedly can’t use in any circumstances because the words themselves are ‘offensive’”.

And: “Making simplistic rules about what can and can’t be said doesn’t change attitudes.

frequently, all it does is provide cover for people whose attitudes aren’t going to change no matter how much you try to educate them.  Sure, you can use these rules to force Nick Griffin into saying ‘Muslim’ rather than ‘Paki’, but you know damn well that ‘Paki’ is what he’s actually thinking when he starts railing inanely against ‘Muslims’ for the umpteenth time.  It just doesn’t change attitudes at all, but it does explain why people are so vocal in their complaints about political correctness – because sticking to those ‘rules’ doesn’t always work as well as the unreconstructed bigot might hope.  No matter how careful they are in sticking to the rules, the vast majority of bigots are still easily identifiable because they still get the context of their comments hopelessly wrong”.

Feminism

Penelope Trunk recently updated her Twitter feed with a short message: “I’m in a board meeting.  Having a miscarriage.  Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin”.

Cue outcry on the appropriateness of her admission of relief.  Far from being a callous self-promotionalist, Ms Trunk has personal experience of the distress a miscarriage can bring in its wake:

“I also understand the pain a miscarriage can cause.  I had one in between having my two kids, and I thought I was never going to recover.  I remember the ultrasound technician’s face when she saw the baby was dead.  I knew before she told me: I screamed and had to be put in a separate room at the doctor’s office because I had a panic attack and nearly fainted.  I was inconsolable for days.  I was scared I’d never have another child.  I hated myself for not trying to have children sooner.

But this time was different.  I knew I did not want the baby.  Is that so bad?  I had taken a pregnancy test when I couldn’t do my normal run or stay awake at work.  When it came back positive, I felt old, scared and angry.  When I called my boyfriend to tell him, he cried.  He doesn’t believe in abortion.  But I have a child with autism and the odds that the next child will have autism is almost 90%.  The odds of a mother over 40 having a child with Down’s syndrome is one in 100.  The risk that a woman who is 42 will miscarry at some point in the pregnancy is higher than 50%.  These are not good odds.  And I’m the sole breadwinner.  I already knew that the risks of this pregnancy were huge.  And if I had a baby with compromised medical health, it would jeopardise my ability to care for my two kids in the way I want to”.

She opposes the suppression of women’s voices through the weight of collective disapproval, as this merely serves to perpetuate isolation and suffering:

“I believe that the history of women can be seen, in some ways, as a history of language.  The more women talk about their experiences, the more power they have to shape those experiences.  Words such as date rape and antenatal depression are empowering because they give us ways to talk about issues that were hidden when we did not have the language to express them.  We have a word for miscarriage.  We should use it to explore the complicated issues around it.

If you insist on keeping the word private, you force the experience of women back into darkness.  If you start telling women which media is appropriate for which emotion, you undermine the progress we make”.

Laurie Penny of Penny Red reacts in Have you no shame? (her title echoing the question asked by the CNN news presenter):

“Personal, factual, shoving the meaty details of women’s everyday life up in your face.  Plus, it quite delightfully manages to combine in 32 words most of the big taboos of modern misogynist thought: women bleeding in the boardroom.  Women being candid about parts of our physical lives which aren’t to do with fucking but also matter to us.  Women’s bodies being, in fact, more than just tools for baby-making and delivering sexual pleasure to men”.

I am delighted to announce that next week’s Roundup will return to the more than capable hands of Clairwil, former member of the regular hosting team.  As always, nominations should be submitted to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com  For a full statement of editorial policy, a list of the upcoming hosts and a complete archive of the Roundup since its inception, consult the Britblog Roundup Central website.

Welcome to the 231st edition of the Britblog Roundup.  Forgive the uncharacteristic terseness of my introduction, but I have reached an advanced stage of sleep deprivation induced by the relentless onslaught of dust particles on my lungs and the consequent impossibility of drawing breath with ease whilst reclining.

Blogging

It is quite gratifying that for once this section does not begin with outrage at the latest encroachment on our freedom of expression.  Those particular storm clouds have receded, beaten back by the summer sunshine.  For the moment, at least.

Judging by the number of vote-soliciting exercises involving cutting and pasting the rules accompanied by a bit of gentle wheedling or less subtle instructions, the story of the week that in the minds of many of the regular contributors to the Roundup eclipses all else is Iain Dale’s annual call for nominations for inclusion in his Total Politics Guide to Blogging 2009-10.  A bit of recognition can never do any harm, especially in the blogosphere where rewards for effort tend to be restricted to a badge of honour in the sidebar and, given the congregation of hosts and readers of this Roundup it does seem appropriate to publicise the ritual in spite of its limitations.  In Mr Dale’s own words: “There are many ways of measuring a blog’s popularity.  Wikio and Technorati have complicated logarithms which measure the importance of incoming links and traffic.  Google Analytics does it by measuring how many people visit.  But the TP poll gives blog readers the opportunity to vote for the ones they like and visit most often.  It’s not scientific.  It’s impossible to achieve 100% balance and no one pretends it’s perfect”.

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) interviews Councillor Sue Luxton (of the Green Ladywell blog) about the blogging experience with some interesting insights into how her role as a public figure influences what subject matter she feels she can and cannot include.  However, there is plenty to empathise with when she sets out the low points: “trolls – I’ve had petrol heads making quite personal remarks because I had the audacity to support 20mph speed limits, someone accusing me of supporting the Tamil Tigers and others who try to turn any topic into a discussion on their pet issue.  Also writing post after post, not getting any comments, and wondering if anyone is reading it (happens less often now).  Occasionally feeling a slave to the blog or guilty when I haven’t posted after a busy week”.

Politics

In Democracy Diner, Mark Thompson of Mark Reckons serves up a splendid satire of democracy’s blemishes and discontents, continued with aplomb in the comments section.

On the issue of party funding, Stephen Tall of Liberal Democrat Voice asks the pertinent question To tithe or not to tithe?

Jennie Rigg of the eponymous blog is seduced by a meme, cataloguing her political achievements by the tender age of 17 in Monday, bloody Monday and what I was doing at 17.  With admirable humility, Jennie acknowledges the shortcomings of this particular piece of copycat light-heartedness: “At 17 I was elected chair of the debating society on the back of beating the Labour Party into fourth place representing the Monster Raving Loonies in the 1992 mock general election.  My reasons for choosing the party were simple: I was, at that stage, an adherent to [sic] the misguided and childish notion that all politicians were as bad as each other, and the best thing one could do was take the piss.

And this is the key, really.  At 17 I was full of misguided and childish notions.  I had yet to go to University and have On Liberty as a set text by the wonderful Stuart Toddington.  I had yet to be introduced to media spin, and the workings of local government by Dr Mike Feintuck.  And I had yet to develop the research methods which doing a law degree instilled in me.  My ideas were all secondhand.

[...]

I was immature, and so were my political ideas.  I was horribly wrong on many things, and woefully idealistic on others.  And yet I was convinced that I knew The Truth, and that when I was old enough I would Show Them, and that I was going to Change the World.  I was 17″.

How refreshingly realistic an appraisal.  The only person amongst my cohorts at school who was remotely politically aware let alone active at that age was my friend Maggie who supplemented her uniform with a PLO scarf (until barked at to remove it on a monotonously regular basis) and whose casual wear of choice comprised an army surplus stores combat jacket.  Rebelling against her middle-class privilege, she espoused Communism with a fervour only matched by my religious zeal as a fundamentalist born-again Christian.  Whilst she memorised Russian irregular verbs, I prayed for the salvation of her soul and we devoted fruitless hours to the attempt to convert each other over Viennese coffee at an establishment so snotty prams were not permitted to cross its threshold.  She left to study medicine at 17 whilst I stayed on and that was the last I heard of her until very recently when she traced me via my parents’ address and she told me she had become a Buddhist – how typical, a religion without a God!

Responding to a report by the Canadian Privacy Commission, Letters from a Tory explains why Facebook should be illegal: “I think most people have realised that you need to activate some privacy settings on Facebook to prevent your profile being accessed by people who are not your ‘friends’ but, unknown to many, Facebook is still allowed to throw your personal information to developers.  Facebook’s own privacy settings page says: ‘When a friend of yours allows an application to access their information, that application may also access any information about you that your friend can already see’.  So, according to Facebook, if your friend signs up to an extra little programme on Facebook, it is perfectly acceptable to hand over all of YOUR personal information including your picture, date of birth, address, work history, relationship status, all your photos and a whole lot more.  How can this be legal in the UK?  How can we have such little respect for people’s privacy that we allow a company to just hand over extremely personal information?  Now, you could argue that no-one is forced to use Facebook and you don’t have to put too much personal information on there, but the way Facebook is set up deliberately sets the default options to allow sharing of your personal details.  This is totally unacceptable.  Every website and company operating online should work on a simple premise: you can’t give out my personal information unless I actively allow you to.  Preying on people’s ignorance or lack of IT skills in order to harvest personal information is wrong and Facebook is clearly not the only offender in this respect.  However, unless we put in place some privacy laws that not only stop the paparazzi snooping on people’s private lives but also stops companies stealing personal information without permission, this situation will only get worse”.

I unreservedly share the author’s qualms, which is precisely why I have avoided setting up an account, adopting instead a variety of Internet aliases for each of my online activities (blogging, publishing academic articles, gaming and so on).  Perhaps there is a generational factor at play, as my teenage son carelessly strews details of his identity all over cyberspace without batting an eyelid, much less losing sleep over it.  However, I have serious objections to the de facto uneraseability of a profile and the commercial exploitation of my every whim (true, I am not always consistent in that I do own a supermarket loyalty card, though I try not to think too hard about the implications, whereas a survey that the local postman popped through my letterbox on the pretext of cutting waste by eliminating non-targeted advertising was treated with derision, promptly consigned to the paper recycling pile, as it was breathtakingly shameless in prying into the minutiae of my existence, seeking to siphon information on everything from my income level, the extent to which I spoil my Guinea pigs, holiday plans and the like).

Facebook has come under fire for perceived moral muddle-headedness, as illustrated by Andre Oboler’s piece in The Guardian, Facebook gives hatred a hand: “Facebook has decided not to remove groups that deny the Holocaust.  This policy contradicts its own ’statement of rights and responsibilities’, which clearly states ‘you will not post content which is hateful’.  Facebook seems to be ignorant of the inherent danger of Holocaust denial, the deeply hateful nature of it, and international efforts against racism.  It either fails to understand the responsibility it has to society, or it has placed profit far above morality”.

His conclusion: “The internet requires regulation, just as film, television and computer games do.  If companies such as Facebook abdicate that responsibility, it suggests government intervention is needed to prevent an internet-powered surge in racial hatred.  The spread of racism and hate is not something that can be left to chance or the whims of the private sector.  Working against hate, bullying and racism must be part of the price companies pay when they offer an online social environment as their product.  In the meantime, more than 68,000 people have joined the Facebook group ‘United Against Holocaust Denial On Facebook’.  Facebook, get the message and remove the hate!”

In Ban the Internet!!! Charlotte Gore takes issue with Mr O in no uncertain terms: “Requires?  Surely it is not the internet that requires the regulation.  It is politicians and idiots like Andre Oboler, the article’s author, that demand and ‘require’ these things to be regulated.  It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s always worth remembering who benefits?

It’s not even worth debating this moron’s specific argument.  The point is he wants to use fascist tools against fascists he doesn’t like, as a way of trying to stem the tide of fascism on the internet.  Anti-Fascism FAIL.

Free Speech is a wonderful, wonderful thing Andre.  You brush it aside too easily”.

Personally, I agree that Mr Oboler’s approach is too heavy-handed.  Surely the odious Holocaust deniers and their ilk are already contained behind the cordon sanitaire of mainstream opinion.  Let them slaver in their delusional little circle of the woefully ignorant.  Their own words ought to be enough to condemn them in the eyes of any sane individual.  Let those so inclined mark their disapproval by joining the group Mr Oboler mentions if they are afraid that their silence might be misinterpreted as agreement (I find the increasing pressure to take a public stand by participating in various “Not in my name” actions slightly worrying, as it parallels the “guilty until proven innocent” attitude currently functioning as our Government’s operating assumption.  Even the overwhelming need I feel to distance myself from the unsavoury villains by including this crystal-clear disclaimer in itself constitutes proof of the existence of the imperative to avoid being tainted by – erroneous – association.  The fact that the sensible majority would never vote for the slobbering throwbacks of the extreme right is more than amply reflected in the tiny number of seats that they obtain.  Let me reiterate: tacit approval is not the correct conclusion to arrive at if I do not take to the streets in protest that they won any seats at all).

Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire paints a chilling picture of how miscarriages of justice and socially corrosive hysteria can result from well-intentioned efforts to clean up the Internet in Is Operation Ore on the Skids at Last?  Can we now roll back paedomania?

In days of yore, criminals were put in the stocks and pelted with rotten cabbage leaves and overripe tomatoes transmuting community anger at their misdeeds into highly tangible form.  These days, as the Bring Back Birching Brigade would no doubt lament, the tearaways of today get off lightly by comparison.  In Community Payback: Modern Branding, Harpymarx castigates Jack Straw’s plans for inflicting humiliation upon juvenile miscreants between the ages of 10 and 17 by forcing them to carry out their community service sentences in attire that quite unambiguously advertises their penance, namely, high-visibility jackets with the slogan “Community Payback”.

One of the dilemmas facing contemporary society is how to reconcile respect for human dignity and humaneness (minimising distress) with traditional morality, in short, how to confront those who have crossed the line of acceptable behaviour with their transgression and mete out a fitting punishment.  Some contend that we inhabit a “victim culture” where self-proclaimed experts are soft on deviancy and devote their energies to absolving the perpetrators of responsibility whilst failing to give adequate redress to those left damaged.  Against this backdrop, plans to attach electrodes to the brains of hoodies to gauge their emotional responses to images of angry faces and to attribute gang membership to defective genes fit in with the overall logic.  Harpymarx does not approve: “I am highly cynical and sceptical about these studies as they smack of biological reductionism and determinism.  Human behaviour is viewed through a biological vacuum.  There is more to us than DNA and biology, humans are far more complex.

Actually, on the subject of scanning brains, here’s a thought.  Instead of scanning the brains of NL clones (I wonder if there’s a ‘NL gene’?) how about checking whether they have a backbone…?”

Dame Suzi Leather of the Charity Commission, has been causing ructions by threatening to withdraw the charitable status of two private schools if they do not overhaul their bursaries schemes to make more places available to children from less wealthy backgrounds.  Cue righteous indignation from Simon Heffer in The Telegraph: “Last week I visited a superb public school, which had done me the honour of asking me to present the prizes on speech day.  It, like many private schools I have seen, was no nursery of privilege or affluence.  It is a place that allows parents on modest incomes to buy for their children the sort of education the state sector largely fails to provide: and fails to provide after 12 years of a sectarian government that said its first three priorities were ‘education, education, education’.  Such parents make enormous sacrifices to send their children to these schools.  These are all clichés, I know, but let me repeat them: they drive battered cars, they have frugal holidays or no holidays at all, they re-mortgage their houses.  They expect no sympathy: it is their choice.  But it is a choice the utter failure of the Government forces upon them”.

Juliette of the new adventures of juliette walks off victorious with the pun of the week award in her bittersweetly humorous take on the subject, Opportunity Mocks: “Without readily available bursaries on tap, you’re going to get these bright kids going to the local comprehensive with their friends from primary school.  Part of a dull, undistinguished, lumpen mass of anonymous humanity.  In this environment, they’ll quickly get absorbed into the ebb and flow of comprehensive life – and learn to be exactly the same as everyone else.

When, with the help of a bursary, they could be standing out, unique and special, making the most of their individual potential and abilities.  Like their unique ability not to be able to afford the school trip to Verbier.  And their unique ability to be the only kid in the class without their own tennis racket.  And their unique ability to have their life made a misery 24/7 from the moment they rock up in a ten-year-old Nissan with the cheapest trunk known to humankind.

Given a bursary, these children will be in a position to discover sports and activities they’ve never even dreamed of before – and at which they may quickly come to excel.  The 100 Metres Running Away.  The inscrutable Oriental art of Bushido, which involves hiding behind a bush when you see the rich cool kids coming.  They’ll even have the opportunity to develop their potential in the dramatic arts, as they try to convince the matron they have a temperature so they won’t have to face the others in the changing rooms for games.  And all of this will take place in the glorious no-expense-spared settings that you’d normally expect to pay a hell of a lot of money for”.

One of Juliette’s replies to a comment brought memories flooding back: “Being a nerd at the local comp is also better, because – no matter how bad things get – you can console yourself with a small crumb of knowledge.

Barring an unforeseen meeting with Steven Gerrard or a big break in Nuts magazine, the local Kewl Chix are going to end their lives weighing twenty stone and sitting behind a Tesco checkout.

Tragically, this is a consolation you don’t get in a posh school – where even this small and fragile future hope can be filed straight under NGFH (Not Gonna Fucking Happen)…”

Although I won various bursaries (beating the crap out of private school pupils in the process), being labelled the “swot” consigned me to outcast status.  Two particularly unpleasant incidents haunt me even from the safe distance of over two decades: having bricks lobbed at me, which thankfully missed, as I was determined not to give my tormentors the satisfaction of breaking into a run to escape their ire and being abducted at knife point by a fellow pupil who forced me into a classroom full of my detractors for interrogation.  I dulled the pain of isolation through study and the church, driven by the desire not to suffer the kind of fate Juliette so eloquently sketches out (in which undertaking I succeeded, apart from the 20-stone bit!).  Indeed, I did not mingle with the products of a fee-paying education until university, where they oozed a confidence and sense of entitlement that left me tongue-tied and intimidated in their wake.  We dubbed them the “OK Yahs” because of their plummy accents and took pleasure in outperforming them.  Social mobility through education will always be dear to my heart, as it permitted me to escape the dreary confines of my housing estate and home country.  Having been on the receiving end of class hatred, with zero expectations as its most muted and least virulent form, I believe it is vital that the means be provided for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to unfold their potential.  I achieved my aims through a combination of natural ability, hard graft and refusing to listen to those who were hell bent on keeping me down and I do not have a recipe for an ideal policy.

Molly of Gaian Economics outlines Ten Ways to Challenge Capitalism That Wouldn’t Frighten Your Grandmother, whilst Natalie of Philobiblon cites A small example of how our economy went terribly wrong.  The latter takes Harry Whewell’s The seeds of an idea from 1980 as its starting point, in which the journalist ponders the devastating impact of something as seemingly trivial as buying bird seed instead of scattering yesterday’s crusts over the lawn: “He [the owner of the local garden and pet food store] had no idea why people were no longer content to feed the birds in their garden on scraps, as had been done from time immemorial, and he didn’t seem very interested in the question either, but it niggled away at me.  Old ladies and lonely flat dwellers had to buy tinned meat for their cats because the meat they bought for themselves had little or no waste, but was there anybody who could not find crumbs in their cake tin, stale slices in their bread bin, and bits of bacon rind in the sink tidy, enough to keep half a dozen sparrows, two blackbirds, and a robin happy?

Taking an early morning walk on Wednesday another thought struck me.  Where did the packers get their supplies?  Were the wild grasses harvested from woods, lanes, and fields, perhaps by country children who made pocket money thereby?  If so – and it seemed more likely than that they were grown as crops on specialised holdings – then might not this be a rather bizarre way of interfering with nature?  A charm of Cheshire goldfinches might find one autumn that its normal supplies of thistle seeds had totally disappeared, the plants having been stripped by foraging schoolboys and the seeds sold to pet shops in Manchester”.

Natalie counts the environmental cost: “And when you think about it, he’s absolutely right.  (And to add in today’s concerns: all of that seed was shipped, using fossil fuel, to the mixing plant, packaged in plastic bags made from petroleum products, shipped likewise to a superlarket, and very likely carried home in a private car).

Meanwhile, the same people who are carefully pouring this into the bird feeder, are most likely throwing large quantities of perfectly good food – certainly good for the birds – into the waste bin, from where it is carried in lorries to a landfill site, where it will eventually produce globally warming methane”.

Looking up from the keyboard, I can see the greenish ball of fat and seeds dangling from the veranda in plastic netting for the consumption of the pair of blue tits that nest in the brick by the guest bedroom’s window year after year.  Their broods have been nurtured on the stuff and we never cease to take pleasure in the sight of them abseiling down the lace, an acrobatic feat that their rivals, the sparrows, cannot match.  There is no excuse for us not to deposit the uneaten rolls on the sill, although larger birds, such as the wood pigeons that currently forage for the fallen leftovers from the blue tits’ frenetic excavations, might be attracted in greater numbers.

In Mainstream media’s responsibility? Vicky of Green Girls Global expresses her dismay at GMTV presenters for extolling the virtues of cheap labels, glossing over their production in sweatshops in developing countries: “How opportunistic and irresponsible, in a time of economic instability and money worries, to tell a mass audience that this is the way to enjoy fashion cheaply; not to mention patronising coming from a group of women who earn salaries most of us could only dream of.  If they wanted to promote fashion that doesn’t cost a lot of money why not talk about charity shops, vintage shops, customising clothes and even the high street shops with more positive ethical credentials?  Traditional values of designer fashion were to create beautiful, well made and stylish garments that would last for years, not some throw-away item to be bought for one night out”.

Feminism

Penny Red fulminates against Conservative Party social engineering policies, demonstrating why for her the term “Compassionate Conservative” is and remains an oxymoron, in Torygeddon 1: Every Family Matters?: “The Family – what does it mean, this ephemeral concept that makes Tory policymakers so very moist and excited?  It doesn’t mean any old bunch of people bound together by blood and love.  Ian Duncan Smith’s vision of The Family as propounded in his new policy paper, Every Family Matters, is the relatively recent kitsched-out 1950s incarnation of the nuclear heterosexual brood: you know, one man and one woman bound in holy wedlock, living together with their genetic offspring, him in the office, her in the kitchen.  Well, that rules out my family for a start, and probably yours too.  And yet Tory wallahs – not even in power yet but already slavering to sink their teeth into Labour’s social reforms – get all gooey over The Family.  All you need do is have a shyster mention ‘ordinary families’ as distinguished from the rest of us scum, and Tory spinsters start wetting their little knickers.  Every Family Matters wants to actively force men and women, who have been drifting gratefully away from the ball-and-chain-live-with-it moral mentality for generations, back into the heteronormative marriage model.  If Tory plans are initiated, they will institute a compulsory ‘cooling off’ period of three months before divorce proceedings, offer tax breaks and benefits bribes for married couples, and demolish Labour plans to offer the same recognition to unmarried couples and civil partners, as well as boring us all with a whole pile of ‘Pro-Family’ rhetoric”.

She quotes Johann Hari’s reaction to the document, which strikes a blow against Tory orthodoxy, When divorce is the right choice: “At first glance, the sociological evidence shows that the kids of broken homes or single parents are more likely to drop out of school, slip into crime, and become drug addicts than children whose parents stay together.  So the solution is, to Cameron, obvious: keep parents together using the tax code and thse problems will slowly be reduced.  Stop Jimmy’s mum and dad splitting, and Jimmy will be more likely to stay in school, on the right side of the law, and off drugs.  Isn’t that what the stats show?

A major study has just shown that this is based on a simple misunderstanding of the evidence.  Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University have carried out a study of children whose parents stay together for the sake of kids.  We all know some: parents who can’t stand each other, but have made a hard-headed decision to stay together nonetheless.  They are exactly the kind of people who would be glued back together by Cameron’s policies if they succeeded in their goal.

It turns out their children do worse than any other group – including those of divorcees or single mums.  If you are raised by arguing parents who stayed together only for you, then you are 33 percent more likely to become a binge-drinking teen than if you have a single parent, for example.

Having parents locked in live-in combat damages children more than having separated parents, or just one single parent – and the damage lasts well into adulthood.  The offspring are more likely to have bad marriages themselves, and more likely to have children at a very young age.

It makes sense.  Would Jimmy rather have a happy mum and dad who live apart, or depressed, stressed, angry parents sharing a bed?

So Cameron’s first glance at the figures turns out to be wrong.  He was comparing divorcees and single parents to happy two-parent families who want to stick together.  But happy two parent families who want to stick together are not what his policy would create.  If he had an effect at all, he would be tying together miserable couples who would otherwise have split.  To assume you would get the same sociological outcomes from them is an Enron-style accounting error”.

He rejects the hankering after a more innocent world viewed through the distorting rose-tinted lenses of nostalgia: “In the real past – as opposed to the phantasm of Tory creation – divorce was low not because every couple was living in a happy wholesome hearth, but because the door of divorce was barred shut.  You don’t have to read much Victorian fiction to see that no matter how much a couple detested each other, they were trapped behind binding vows.  Women, of course, suffered worst, since they were largely trapped in the home, and if in desperation they tried to flee, they lost their children, their homes and their reputations.

Far from being a time we should pine for and try inexpertly to rebuild, we should be proud we have left this behind for a more civilised and compassionate world.  Isn’t it a strength that we accept that marriages fail, not because of wickedness or moral laxity, but because of ordinary human incompatibility?  Yes, it brings some problems – but this study underlines that they are far less than the problems of imprisoning people in dead marriages, and lecturing them it’s for their own moral health”.

Clare Laxton holds one of the almost completely overlooked aspects of the Coroners and Justice Bill up to scrutiny, its implications for women who kill their partners after years of abuse in Real Justice?: “Clause 44 looks at loss of control as a partial defence to murder.  The important part of this clause for me, is the fact that a person cannot be convicted of murder if their loss of self control has a qualifying trigger.

Clause 45 deals with that ‘qualifying trigger’, stipulating that fear of serious violence from the victim is a qualifying trigger for loss of self control and subsequent murder/assault.  This means that women who kill their partners after prolonged abuse and violence [or] fear of violence from their partner will have this counted as reason for their actions.

Clause 46 abolishes the defence of ‘provocation’ that is often used by men in cases when the prolonged abuse and violence that they have brought on their partner has finally ended in their death.  This defence often means that while women serve life sentences for the murder of their violent partners, men often get away with suspended sentences or short sentences because they claim they were ‘provoked’ by their partner”.

Julie Bindel comments on this discrepancy in Driven to kill: “Men commit almost 90% of domestic homicides, and the victims are their female partners – who have often been previously battered by their killers.  On average, two women die every week as a result of domestic violence.  For men who kill their partners, the defence of provocation is tailor-made.  Provocation will reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter if the defendant can show that things were said or done to provoke them, causing them to experience a sudden loss of control.  In such cases they will often justify their actions by claiming that they ‘just snapped’ or ’saw red’.  Judges have been known to express their sympathy for men who claim they were nagged or cheated on by their partners, but often appear to have little for women who kill after being raped by their partners or experiencing domestic violence.  This tends to be because when women who are being regularly beaten by their partners kill, their dominant emotions are usually fear or despair – not exactly a sudden, explosive ‘loss of self-control’”.

In Eve Was Framed (Chatto and Windus, London, 1992), Helena Kennedy explores the concept of provocation in law in greater depth: “Provocation is a defence to murder and only to murder.  In any other case, such as assault, it can only provide mitigation.  If a defence of provocation is successful and reduces the charge to one of manslaughter, the court still has to pass an appropriate sentence.  Women invoke self-defence or provocation defences infrequently, and the reason is that the legal standards were constructed from a male perspective and with men in mind, and women have a problem fulfilling the criteria.  the question for the jury in a case where provocation is raised is whether a reasonable man might have suffered temporary and sudden loss of self-control so that he was no longer ‘master of his own mind’ in circumstances similar to those described in the evidence.  The issue is one of opinion, not law, but the judge has considerable power in the way in which he presents provocation to the jury.

Little account is taken of the cultural differences between men and women and the way that our socialisation affects our responses.  Women are much less likely to respond to provocation immediately, for obvious physical and psychological reasons, and therefore self-defence and provocation are less available to them.  But the legal standards are built upon ideas of instant ignition and a hotheaded rush to action.  The spark has to be immediate, an assault which requires self-protection or a blow, a curse, an insult that goes to the core of a man’s being.  judges try to create a parallel analogy, the trigger to violent reaction being terrible insults against a woman’s chastity or her way of life, both of which are male ideas of what might make a woman run amok.

the majority of women convicted of homicide kill a member of their own family or someone with whom they are intimate or whom they look after.  It is rare for a woman to kill a stranger.  In 1987, 36 per cent of those convicted of murder had killed their husbands (a crime which in former times was indicted as treason).  In the majority of those killings there was a history of cumulative violence towards the woman, yet a significant number would fail the test for provocation.  Fortunately for most of the women – or unfortunately from another perspective – the toll of violence usually means they are able to invoke a defence of diminished responsibility, suffering as they almost invariably are from depressive illness or post traumatic stress disorder as a result of the abuse.  By and large this reliance on their psychiatric state takes the sting out of the other defences, because the women are then sentenced with appropriate compassion, but there will always be women who slip through the net.  There is also the principled concern that women should not so readily be pushed towards a pathological explanation for their behaviour, an argument which seldom troubles women looking at prison bars, who understandably value their liberty and the companionship of their children above all else.

It is well established that retaliation and revenge have no place in our legal code, and if a woman is seen to bide her time and to strike when her attacker’s defences are low, she is seen as playing dirty and loses the protection of the law, unless she can invoke mental disturbance.  It matters not that she may have been subjected to years of beating and may feel that no other avenue is available to her.  If she makes a deliberate decision to kill she is guilty of murder, even if at the time she is no longer mistress of her own mind.  Temperature seems to be all important.  If the crime is to be reduced to manslaughter the act has to be seen to be in the ‘heat of the moment’ with no time to ‘cool off’.

The immediacy principle makes no sense when the provocation takes the form of long-term abuse.  When a person lives with persistent violence and alcoholism she often becomes overwhelmed.  Her whole life is out of control.  She would not be thinking rationally for some time, and her feelings often would not manifest themselves as ’snapping’, in the form of the crazed outburst, but may seem more controlled: a snapping in slow motion, the final surrender of frayed elastic” (pp199-201).

Once again at The F-Word, Anna Corbett chronicles the epiphany that fundamentally altered her view of the world in Confessions of a brand new feminist: “I was sat in one of the computer rooms of my university trying to find the motivation to start an essay.  next to the computers as usual were leaflets advertising various events, sports clubs and rooms for rent.  Procrastinating, I started to read through them and came across a small slip of paper from the women’s committee.  I wish I’d kept it.  It was only a few short sentences on how careers traditionally considered men’s preserve, such as the police, were better paid than those traditionally followed by women, such as nursing.  This, among numerous other issues, contributed to the pay gap between men and women.  An idea swam through my mind that would characterise my next few months: I’d never thought about it like that before”.

Culture

Carl Gardener at The Wardman Wire reviews Sacha Baron-Cohen’s latest outrageous incarnation, Brüno, discovering serious social critique beneath the brash surface: “Yes, the film gets lots of laughs from gay stereotypes: Brüno loves sex with incredible mechanical contraptions, has to call hotel security to get him and his boyfriend out of chains, and calls his agent while having his anus bleached.  But the real target is the homophobia and bigotry of others.  the climax, at Straight Dave’s TV fight show, is the most hilarious, frightening expose of violent redneck homophobia you could see – Brüno needs a fence to protect him from American men so pumped up with anger at the idea of homosexuality that baron-Cohen really is in danger.  And one of the rednecks is brought to touching, sickening tears at the thought that even this oasis of true butchness could be tainted by the gays”.

Over at Liberal England, Jonathan Calder is offering a chance to Win James Robertson Justice.  Not literally, as in a set of reliquary bones, but a copy of James Hogg’s biography of the great British actor.  All you have to do is answer five questions correctly – hurry on over!

In a beautifully evocative essay showing how celebrity biographies become subtly (and insidiously) interwoven with our own recollections, Martin Newell of The Wild man of Wivenhoe reminisces on the demise of Brian Jones, The Blond Stone: “I couldn’t get the news out of my head.  I think it was then that I realised that The Sixties, if there really were such a thing, was over and by default, so was my late childhood.  I now realise that I had a kind of breakdown at the time.  I didn’t recognise it as such but certain others did and after quitting my job I was dragged to the doctor’s by my mother and medicated with some rather crude drugs.  Poor old Brian.  The establishment and the straight people all around me were actually glad he was dead.  I couldn’t believe the world could be so cruel and nasty.  I pored over every detail of the circus surrounding his funeral.  I had my haircut as closely like his as I could.  I looked at pictures of him.  I wrote poems and songs about him, and as you will imagine, they were the work of a sixteen year old boy of fragile mindset”.

Miscellaneous

Philip Wilkinson of English Buildings draws our attention to a once ubiquitous item of street furniture, as embedded in the British consciousness as the other two icons in the same shade of red, double-decker bus and the postbox, but which with the victory of the mobile is rapidly attaining endangered species status, the old-fashioned phone box.  I echo him in supporting the Adopt a Kiosk initiative launched by BT: “The kiosk, minus its payphone, remains in situ, as a visual amenity, for future generations”.  Settle Town Council has converted one such booth into the Gallery on the Green, whose curators welcome postcard-sized submissions.

The Ill Man similarly encourages us to make a simple contribution towards making our urban surroundings a little less bleak with another idea I wholeheartedly endorse, the Ten Thousand Bulb Appeal: “Just think about that for a minute.  A wave of colour amongst the concrete and tarmac, defying the fag butts and making a rather drab corner of the city look so much better.  This is what we’re trying to achieve at our Townhead garden site currently tended to by [former Britblog Roundup host] Clairwil, Michael and myself”.

When you consider that the city in question is one whose mythology revolves around poverty, children dressed in hand-me-downs lurking in dank tenements never penetrated by a ray of sunlight, but with the warm-hearted generosity and unpretentious welcome of the working class (the difference between the largest agglomeration in Scotland and the country’s snooty capital neatly encapsulated in the witticism that if you arrive in genteel Edinburgh at around five in the evening your host will begrudgingly enquire “You’ll have had your tea?” whereas on the opposite coast, the citizens of Glasgow will phrase the query slightly differently, “You’ll be wanting your tea then?”), all the more reason to donate directly or help out by dropping by the Squidoo site dedicated to the work of the intrepid Guerilla Gardeners.

Tarrying for a moment longer on the floral theme, Ruth of Meanwhile, here in France transports us to the Lavender Harvest.

Cocktails and Records introduces us to a list of The most liveable cities in the world…ever! as compiled by Monocle magazine.  Without giving too much away, only two in the Top Ten are located outside of Europe, none in the USA (sniggers with Schadenfreude).  Having spent three years of my life in one of them, Copenhagen, I was reminded of the culture shock that awaited me as I moved to my present abode of Waffle Central, swapping the bracing sea breeze for the stuffy bourgeois uptightness of the place of my employ.  I was seven months pregnant at the time, the prospect of single parenthood weighing me down as heavily as the two suitcases containing my accumulated worldly goods.  As the escalators were out of order, it took me over two hours to emerge from the station, the commuters disgorged from their trains strategically averting their eyes (this unwillingness to spontaneously help the vulnerable par for the course in a country where teenagers do not give up their seats in buses and trams for the elderly and infirm even as the latter’s arms are nearly ripped out of their sockets when the vehicle lurches at foolhardy speed round a corner).

David Keen at The Wardman Wire gives a blow-by-blow (if not quite wicket by wicket) account of Day 3 of the England versus Australia match in Can you sing ‘Jerusalem’ in Cardiff?

Barrister Simon Myerson of Pupillage and How to Get It, which as its title suggests, dispenses handy tips for those aspiring to an analogous position within the legal profession, sets out the results of a survey rating the courtesy or lack thereof with which job applications were treated by Chambers across England and Wales.

The downside of the media obsession with swine flu is vividly evoked by Suzi Brent of Nee Naw: “I’ve just come back from three weeks’ leave and found the service absolutely inundated with calls from people who think they have swine flu.  No one seems to have taken any notice whatsoever of the NHS’ advice, which is to ring your GP if you are worried that you may have a touch of hamthrax.  (The only expectation is if someone develops life threatening symptoms as a result of the flu, which is extremely rare and usually only seen in people who had poor health to start with).  No, the general public have cleverly decided that they want to take their piggy germs to a hospital where they can spread it to thousands of sick and pregnant people and on their way infect a poor ambulance crew who will then go off sick for a week, leaving our resources even more stretched”.

They ought to take a leaf out of the book of poor Susanne Lamido, Britblog stalwart, who sensibly contacted her doctor to ascertain what was wrong: “Was informed it is so common round here they have stopped testing people – got to take Paracetamol to reduce the fever and to keep the temperature down.  However, if I have real difficulty breathing then and only then it’s time to call an ambulance.  In the meantime somebody healthy has to go to collect a document entitling me to antiviral medication.  Have been advised rest, keep at home as much as possible and avoid close contact with children”.

I am sure that I speak on behalf of all readers and nominators when I wish you a swift recovery and return to blogging, Susanne!

Finally, staying with the medical theme, but on a lighter note, Reynolds of Random Acts of Reality recounts Catching Something Other Than A Cold: “‘I’m going to have to take a look,’ I tell the woman and she lifts up her skirt to show me her genitals.

In training school there were two things that we were told to be wary of causing offence, the first was traipsing around Mosques in our boots.  The second thing was that Muslim women don’t want men who aren’t their husband looking at their bare flesh – strangely enough, when someone is about to deliver a baby they don’t seem to care.  I would guess that common sense tends to trump religion when you (and your husband) are scared and in pain.

I tilt my head to one side, trying to visualise exactly where the baby is.  Then she pushes again and I deftly side-step the gush of amniotic fluid as it shoots past my ear, it’s nice and clear which suggests that the baby hasn’t pooed in it.  The un-professional part of me gives myself a mental high five for not getting caught by the spurting body fluids”.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by cabalamat at Amused Cynicism.  As always, nominations should be submitted to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com  For a full statement of editorial policy, a list of the upcoming hosts and a complete archive of the Roundup since its inception, consult the Britblog Roundup Central website.

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

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 and five years in spite of which they were unceremoniously turfed out onto the street.

Philip Booth of Ruscombe Green encourages us to dig, if not for victory, at least to extricate ourselves from the hole created by the squander-based economy, our addiction to waste, fired up by the findings of a review commissioned by Gordon Brown in More about need for allotments: “The UK’s precarious food supply needs attention – one way is to mobilise the nation’s 11 million gardeners.  They will be able to grow food for their family and for the community and also help spread greater understanding about food, quality and supply”.

According to Philip, a radical change in mindset is a matter of some considerable urgency: “Fewer than 1% of the population now work in agriculture – one of the lowest percentages in the world.  In 1900 this was 40%.  Some 60% of our food is produced domestically, but imports make up a large percentage of food, for example, 90% of fruit is imported, as opposed to 40% in France.  If you look at apples in a supermarket – which used to be Britain’s major fruit – we have hundreds of different domestic varieties which could be cultivated, during the height of the apple season, you will find there are only a few varieties and are mostly imported!  This makes no sense whatsoever (…) It is only possible because cheap fossil fuels allow transportation from far-off countries.  As oil becomes more expensive, this will become uneconomic”.

Vincent Browne’s article in The Irish Times, The crux of our dire problems is political, advocated a not exactly earth-shatteringly new solution to the country’s current economic woes: “The way out of the crisis is blindingly obvious.  Produce a clear plan that requires the rich to bear the burden of the adjustments required and protect the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the vulnerable and children, with the members of the Government leading the way by taking the first and deepest hit.

Instead, no plan.  Just a first hit at public servants – low paid, moderately paid and rich public servants.  And an attack on social welfare payments in the offing.  Isn’t it shameful that we would even contemplate cutting the welfare of people who have lived on annual incomes that would hardly cover the cost of one hour’s flying on the Government jet?”

He went on to voice his dismay at the sluggishness of the Government in postponing any real attempts to tackle the problems until the publication of the report of the Commission on Taxation in September.  He also harbours serious doubts concerning the credibility of the august body as a result of its composition: “This commission has 18 members and is loaded (almost two-thirds) with people who have a vested interest in ensuring that the taxation system does not impinge unduly on the well-heeled.

I don’t mean to impugn the integrity of any of the commission’s members, but merely to draw attention to the reality that they represent and/or come from the wealthier wedge of society; accountants, tax experts, executives from the financial services, a solicitor and the head of the Stock Exchange”.

These complaints inspired Mick Fealty of the redoubtable Slugger O’Toole to ask the pertinent question Can the Irish left get beyond ‘eating the rich’?: “Such leftist populism (or ‘politics of envy’ as others might choose to put it) is one of the reasons the Irish Left has been left in the ha’penny place for so long.  To be successful, the next generation of Irish political leadership will need to be broad enough to tackle the huge range of challenges coming at it”.

Mick then embarks upon a careful examination of an essay in Renewal Magazine by Alex Evans and David Steven entitled Risks and resilience in the new global era, whose authors identify the hamartia of the Left: “Social democrats, finally, understand the importance of public goods and are prepared to act forcefully to protect the vulnerable.  They are also willing to act boldly to manage global instability.  However, they have the weakness of being instinctive meddlers, crowding out the initiative of other actors and risking over-centralisation in the face of distributed risks”.

It is this latter trait that, in Mick’s view, constitutes the most serious obstacle to putting forward a candidate for leading the next government.

Jonathan Calder of Liberal England reminds us that, however rotten things may be in Britain, levels of corruption across the Pond are (for the time being at least) even worse in Those Pennsylvania judges again, alluding to a recent appalling case where two men charged with the task of upholding justice accepted bribes from a private youth detention centre in exchange for guaranteeing a steady supply of inmates.  Jonathan concludes: “(…) their actions have wider importance because they are the logical outcome of allowing the profit motive into the judicial system.

As Rumpole used to remind us, a great many comfortable professional careers are built on the backs of Britain’s criminal classes.  But treating Crime Control as Industry, to quote the title of Nils Christie’s 1993 book, is dangerous”.

Here Mr Calder indeed speaks the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling returns to the theme of Stalinist companies vs. market forces in connection with the spectacular fall from grace of Messrs McKillop and Goodwin (perhaps he might consider changing his name to Badloss).  He recalls a set of objections to his original comparison by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, which evidently stuck in his mind: “Relatedly, unlike with government central planning, the size and scope of each firm on the market is itself constantly tested by competition.  A firm that succeeds today might be bankrupted tomorrow if another firm out-competes it.  That is, the sizes of firms in markets are themselves the result of market experimentation, competition, and discovery – experimentation, competition, and discovery that is never static.

(…) Sure some firms might be too large – but, if so, they’re too large with resources voluntarily contributed.  And in both cases, the forces of competition and entrepreneurial discovery – fuelled in large part by the profit motive and by consumers’ quotidian efforts to get the most value for their money – put constant pressure on big firms to correct their errors.

Managers of even the largest private firms – that are not protected by government from competition or swaddled with state favours – are simply not comparable to central planners in socialist countries”.

Against the backdrop of emerging facts about the authoritarian culture within the bank, Dillow’s analogy has been found to have some merit after all: “Well, it turns out that the RBS was just like a centrally planned economy, complete with the suppression of dissent and cult of personality.  And look what happened.  I’m vindicated.  Or am I?”

I leave it up to you to decide for yourselves.

Arden Forester of A View from Middle England lambastes Labour for its arrogance in taking for granted the unwavering support of the most disadvantaged whilst simultaneously abandoning them to their fate.  Following the party’s defeat in elections to Sevenoaks Council, the BNP might even succeed in gaining a toehold in the European Parliament, Mr Forester speculates.  In Labour flunkies warn Brown over BNP Euro chances, he hazards a guess as to why: “Labour needs to address the core problems affecting people who are attracted to the BNP.  Housing, jobs, schools and hospitals.  These four are the ones that affect these voters most.  These are the issues the BNP are exploiting.  Gordon Brown needs to get his jacket off and get down to the level where the BNP can be taken on.  It’s no use taking a lofty attitude and saying he won’t debate with them.  That over sensitive nonsense should stop right now”.

Cabalamat of Amused Cynicism informs us that the world’s most notorious terrorist has been disowned even by those who could be assumed to be closest to him in Al-Qa’ida’s founder condemns bin Laden, concluding on an optimistic note that: “I think this is a sign that Islamist extremism is on the wane.  It has manifestly failed to deliver the goods, and so is likely to recede from now onwards, and by 2015-2020 it’ll be apparent that it is on the way out”.

I sincerely hope that he is right.

In Single parents, socialist feminism and the right to equal work, Penny Red denounces a fresh assault on benefit payments for the most vulnerable, which would, she tells us, compel lone mothers back into work before their infants are even able to walk and talk.  Apart from the inconsistency of conveniently overlooking that the majority of children living in poverty have at least one parent who works whilst repeating the incantation that the path to redemption for single mothers is through remunerated employment in an environment where the wages earned would be extremely unlikely to stretch to covering the cost of childcare, Penny objects to the more fundamental underlying assumption that bringing up offspring somehow fails to qualify as worthwhile toil: “Let’s make one thing spectacularly, sparklingly clear: being the primary carer of a small child is work – hard work, unending work, work that can last an entire lifetime, work that defines the term ‘labour of love’.  It’s work whether a man or woman does it, although it continues to fall into the historic category of work that women contribute to the economy for free, ‘women’s work’, work undeserving of pay or professional respect.  But, not content with giving single parents with no other means of support a minimum of basic care rather than a liveable salary, the Welfare Reform Bill seeks to force single parents into extra, unpaid work, work that will not even raise their standard of living above the poverty threshold.  That’s extra, paid work that isn’t actually available at the moment, in case you’d forgotten”.

Then there is the element of class stigmatisation: “Women who do not work outside the home, but who do not need government support because they are independently rich or because they have a partner who works, are not considered to be ‘playing the system’, not by the D[epartment for] W[ork and] P[ensions] and certainly not by the Evening Standard group – even though the only difference between these women and single mothers on benefits is the good fortune to be born with money or marry it.  If the world were a late-night tube carriage, the social hypocrisy of the British state would be fumblingly revealing itself in the corner.

In this hyper-capitalist world, power and respect are afforded to those who earn wages – are distributed, in fact, in the form of wages.  By paying a decent, liveable salary to those women and men who have primary responsibility for a child – a wage which they can spend on maintaining themselves out of paid work, or on decent childcare whilst they perform alternative work – we might well fix not only the nation’s soaring unemployment crisis, but go some way towards erasing the breathtaking poverty and hypocrisy of our socially bankrupt self-organisation.  Hey, I’m 22, so I’m bloody well allowed to dream about social justice in vivid technicolour”.

Penalising single mothers, those figures of collective loathing pilloried by the press is a cheap way of being seen not to be a soft touch, of being seen to not be Old Labour, kicking the group least likely to retaliate.  The focus is on these women’s fecklessness, their presumed irresponsibility and immorality, flaw after flaw heaped upon them until they suffocate because it is easier to apportion blame than to confront factors such as the chronic lack of provision of affordable child care.  If you aspire to a career, as opposed to some part-time, low status, insecure and meagre source of income with little by way of satisfaction or advancement, you soon realise that access to the upper echelons is predicated on the anachronistic assumption of complete availability, that the default setting continues to be that the worker is unencumbered with external commitments (dependents , in other words) and has a demure helpmeet at home to take care of the practicalities of running a household.  You have to be both willing and able to put in the hours in exchange for progression, the downside of a high salary that of renouncing the right to a personal life.

This brings us to the heart of what is at stake: the extent of compassion and solidarity within society.

The ease with which it is possible to glide from single mothers (the contemporary embodiment of the "undeserving poor") placing an undue strain on social welfare systems to denying social undesirables the right to reproduce is illustrated by Ross of Unenlightened Commentary in Fun With Eugenics, which starts off with a seemingly innocent throwaway observation: “On another blog I got into a discussion about the topic yesterday, after initially making a half joking remark about wanting to stop the likes of Karen Matthews and ‘Alfie’ popping out dozens of kids for the good of society, I could have mentioned the mother of octuplets as well” (the debate in question is on Tim Worstall’s blog, the comments – where they do not degenerate into unedifying name-calling – are interesting and I can recommend their perusal accordingly).

Ross favours a reappraisal of our negative attitudes: “Eugenics is strongly associated with the savagery of the Nazis and is therefore pretty much the ultimate taboo.  Personally I think the ethical problem with 20th century advocates of eugenics is that they had no respect for civil liberties and believed in the right of the state to forcibly restrict people’s right to reproduce.  It doesn’t therefore follow that there is something intrinsically wicked about non-coercive eugenics”.

I do not wish to misrepresent the contents of the piece, but it is one proposition to talk about eliminating debilitating diseases, which detract from the quality of life and and an altogether different one to think in terms of social as opposed to genetic markers, to eliminate the poor through sterilisation (even where discouragement rather than compulsion is viewed as the way forward).  Ross admits: “When it comes to encouraging the well off to reproduce themselves and the less well off to not do so then it really depends to what extent socio-economic status is influenced by genes, which is altogether a murkier question”.

The meaning of “unfit” is variable in accordance with prevalent cultural values and can be extended to any stigmatised group.  Why stop at the propensity to commit crime?  Why not get rid of the fatties, the homosexuals, women (couples who want to select the gender of their babies generally long for boys), the disabled, and whilst we’re at it, I’m sure our most beneficent leaders would be eager to eradicate the obstreperousness gene, leaving a citizenry of placid drones devoid of character or creativity.  Rather than embark upon such insanity, surely it would be preferable to restore greater mobility, giving the maximum number of people the maximum possible opportunities.  If you are not expected to do well because of the humbleness of your origins, you can either rebel (as I did), proving your detractors wrong or you can listen to them and allow yourself to be browbeaten into submission.

Susanne Lamido of Suz Blog alerts us to what might deteriorate into the latest assault on our civil liberties, the likes of which have never been seen outside the confines of public swimming baths (although in the latter, petting was discouraged, a peck on the cheek considered harmless) in Watch out for the kissing police at Warrington Station.  Personally, after every other incremental paring away at our rights, I am not remotely reassured by the claim that the sign is nothing more than a bit of light-hearted fun.  I wouldn’t put it past some joyless warden whose sole pleasure in life is that of wielding the minute bit of power at his disposal to relish the task of enforcing a ban on public displays of affection.  The slippery slope towards breeding restrictions suddenly does not seem so outlandish…

Refreshing proof that online activism is not a mere exercise in futility is to be found in The F-Word credited for major rethink of “Cervix Savvy” advertising campaign.

Finally, from Witterings from Witney, by way of light relief, the unmissably hilarious Darling Brown’s Salvation?

Blogging

In the latest in a series of entries charting the genesis and evolution of Labour List, Matt Wardman helpfully provides us with an Archive of an attempted ‘blog-mugging’, a sordid and ugly tale of a kind with which we have sadly become only too familiar.  Matt’s verdict: “The alleged threats to close down websites, whoever they came from (!), and to undermine the livelihoods of targeted people, were on a par with the dodgiest manoeuvres I have seen in the blogosphere since I started this site – which are a small number of attempts to get people in trouble with their employers; taking political arguments offline to do personal damage is beyond the pale”.

This does nothing to encourage me to overcome my distaste and investigate Labour List in any depth.  Matt’s assessment is good enough for me (it would take something truly extraordinary to convince me that blogs by politicians are anything but parasitical drivel barely worth the pixels they are composed of): “Derek Draper’s past indiscretions aside, my main problem here is that all the top names seem to see it as a medium to publish bland rubbish that sounds similar to a press release.  It’s boring and lame, and will end up like the far more abysmal Tory effort: The Blue Blog.  Hell, that’s so bad even Iain Dale doesn’t plug it anymore.

Draper has given it personality by ringing up people and picking fights with them, but that’s only going to work for so long.  The point is: if your top bloggers (cabinet ministers) are only going to write boring comment pieces without seeing what others are saying of Labour’s policies and responding to them, then it’s a waste of space.  If we wanted press releases we can go to Labour.org.uk”.

Culture

Ever adept at whetting the appetite for travel, Natalie Bennett has branched out geographically, moving beyond London to My Burgundy, Your Burgundy.  In The Museums of Beaune: The Hotel-Dieu and the Wine Museum she gives us a fascinating insight into some of the region’s attractions: "It’s hard to imagine now, that the Chambre des Pauvres (chamber of the poor) of the Hotel-Dieu was the ideal place for a poor person, for much of its history.  No private rooms here: the huge church-shaped chamber, with its high ceilings and stark stone walls, could hardly ever have been quiet or peaceful, not when the ill were lying in head-to-toe rows along its walls, and the religious sisters who tended them were bustling around.  Still, it was undoubtedly a beautiful place to be sick, and one of the few places where you could expect succour and the best medical care that the past five centuries could offer".

Diamond Geezer of the eponymous blog, that ever-reliable guide to the hidden delights of the capital, takes us on a tour of Valentine’s at Valentines, the reference being to the canny publicity ploy on the part of a council to reopen a renovated mansion to the public on the day dedicated to sending tokens of admiration from afar in the form of tacky cards and red roses: “The good people of Redbridge crowded the rooms and passageways, taking a first opportunity to explore every nook and cranny.  They swarmed round the single interactive history terminal so that nobody else could use it.  they crammed into the tiny shop on the first floor, inspecting its stock of plastic rulers, honey and notelets.  They allowed their uncontrollable offspring to bounce on the four-poster in the bedchamber, much to the annoyance of the lady on duty”.

Peter Ashley of that veritable blog of delights Unmitigated England brings to our attention yet another of those unobtrusive decorative features that alleviate the monotony of the daily commute and lift the spirits, this time at Stamford Station in Unexpected Alphabets No8.

Miscellaneous

Carlotta of Dare to Know, condemns the portrayal of home schooling in BBC series Waterloo Road, which has strayed far from Reith’s injunction to the Corporation to educate, inform, entertain, in Prejudice is IGNORANCE: “(…) amongst our home educating bunch here, it is exceedingly rare to find them closeted in oppressed, highly controlled fashion round a computer in a front room.  Yes, sure they use a computer, but most of the time, it is doing what they want to do, and therefore they are enjoying it.  There is usually a considerable spark of energy emanating from rooms with children using PCs as they would like to use them”.

Bystander of The Magistrate’s Blog divulges the secrets of his calling after four years of keeping his readers in suspense in So What Do We Actually Do, Then?: “A court might be city-centre urban with the attendant problems (such as Haringey or Camberwell Green), suburban (such as Sutton), or predominantly rural (e.g. Hereford).  Dover has the port (smuggling and immigration scams), Crawley has Gatwick (ditto).  Courts in Suffolk know all about moving pigs without a licence, and those in Devon and Cornwall are pretty familiar with what tourists can get up to after an all day session on the beer”.

Mark Myers of Nee-Naw rejoices at the prospect of a change in instructions that will usher in a new era, drastically cutting down on the number of call-outs to non-urgent cases (a problem that has never assumed such proportions in Waffleland, largely due, I suspect, to the fact that the patient has to fork out €100 a whack for the privilege of an ambulance), an instance where rationalisation in the NHS ought to provoke delight rather than despondency in Cotton Bud in Ear = Life Threatening Emergency: “The infamous ‘are you breathing normally’ question is completely gone from a lot of protocols, and when it IS there, a ‘yes’ only results in an amber response, not a red.  The rationale, which I totally agree with, is that if the breathing was that much of a problem, they’d have told us at the beginning of the call.

I can’t wait for this new protocol to come in.  It is going to decrease frustration levels in call takers, allocators and ambulance crews no end, and more importantly, we won’t end up having to waste ambulances on rubbish when people who are really sick are still waiting”.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Jackart at A Very British Dude, which is looking impressively snazzy following its makeover!  Rota details and a complete archive may be found at the Britblog Central website.  As ever, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

Welcome to the pre-festive edition of the Britblog Roundup, where the relative dearth of nominations suggests that shopping delirium (jostling for bargains or the must-have toy of the year, unless you prefer the less stressful, sedentary online version, so accurately described by Gordon McLean of Informationally Overloaded in Sneaky) has taken hold.  Not that I am  the annual blues-banishing splurge.   Think of this week’s Roundup as a seasonal tin of Quality Street without the cracknel (I implore you not to clutter the comments box with protestations if the red-wrappered delight was your favourite).

Politics

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe), in The terror of unlicensed paperboys, highlights yet another grossly disproportionate application of anti-terror legislation by a local council to a situation, which does not by any stretch of the imagination warrant such a response.  In essence, a couple of newsagents were hauled before court following a covert surveillance operation because of some minor irregularity with the required paperwork.  The grotesque absurdity of it cannot help but remind me of Terry Gilliam’s only too prophetic masterpiece Brazil…when Sam is visited by rogue heating engineer Harry Tuttle and the authorised Central Services operatives, whom he is able to send packing with a strategic demand for a 27B/6.

Jim rhetorically mulls over which of the possible courses of remedying the hiccup would have been the more sensible:

"Option one: phone them up and ask them to sort out the paperwork.  After all there is no question of fraud being involved or improper behaviour, it’s just some forms that need to be signed.  There’s not even any money owed as far as I can work out.

Option two: let’s get James Bond on their asses!  Yeah, it costs more.  Yeah, it’s heavy handed and unnecessary.  Yeah, it turns the council from the servant of the community into a domineering, out of control watchdog.  But on the plus side you get to play at spies!"

It’s enough to make you positively hanker after the good old days when the power-crazed park wardens stalked the children straying across their territory on the way home from school ready to pounce on the litterbug who had the temerity to drop an empty crisp packet.  Nowadays, such wrongdoers would probably acquire a criminal record and have DNA samples taken to be stored in the national database in perpetuity on the fatuous assumption that trivial breaches betray a propensity towards escalation, today’s miscreant spitting flavour-spent chewing gum onto the pavement mutating into tomorrow’s serial killer.

Diamond Geezer displays a gift for satire with a hilarious parody of The State Opening of Parliament, ably cutting through the mystifications of pomp and circumstance to venture a guess at what might actually have been going through Her Majesty’s mind whilst reading her script.  A tiny excerpt to illustrate:

"My Government will waffle on a lot about fairness.  My Government will ban pubs and bars from running extra specially cheap drinks promotions, although it’ll still be possible to binge drink on value lager from the corner shop.  My Government had better not raise duty on sherry, else that’s one’s Christmas ruined".

Two Doctors examine the practical impact of recent policy to lift us out of the financial doldrums in VAT boost in Parliament canteen.

Philip Booth of Ruscombe Green deplores the Shameful decision to expand Gloucestershire’s Airport.  Campaigners gathered to articulate their views with humour: "(…) there was a peaceful demonstration, by opponents of the plans, on the steps of the Council offices.  featuring a cheque made out to the ‘Gloucestershire Airport White Elephant’ for ‘Many many millions of pounds’ and a banner featuring a flaying white elephant emitting clouds of CO2 from its behind".

Derek Wall, of Another Green World, reviews a British anarchist periodical in Black Flag: pirates with a purpose, a task which he approaches with  scrupulous fairness, declaring his own affiliations before proceeding to his appraisal.

 

Feminism (Motherhood, Murder and Madness)

Motherhood

"The psychoanalysts had constructed the ideal mother to go with the permissively raised child – one who would find passionate fulfillment in the details of child care.  Through her newfound biological instincts, this new ‘libidinal mother’ was an even better match than the ‘household engineer’ for the liberated child of permissive theory.  Not only would she naturally fulfil her child’s needs, but she would find her own fulfillment only in meeting the needs of the child.  The libidinal mother would rejoice in pregnancy and breast-feeding.  She would seek no richer companionship than that of her own child, no more serious concern than the daily details of child care.  She instinctively needed her child as much as her child needed her.  She would avoid outside commitments so as not to ‘miss’ a fascinating stage of development, or ‘deprive’ herself of a rewarding phase of motherhood.  No longer would motherhood be reckoned as a ‘duty’, or child raising as a disciplined profession.  Instead, mother and child could enjoy each other, fulfilling one another’s needs perfectly, instinctively, as if Nature in her infinite wisdom had created them, two happily matched consumers consuming each other"

Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women, New York, Anchor Books, 2005, p243 (emphasis in original)

Far from being static, notions of ideal motherhood expand and contract to fit the exigencies of the moment as snugly as certain nappies claim to envelop an infant’s bottom, as the above example shows.

At The F-Word, Victoria Dutchman-Smith dismisses the lazy supposition that rejecting the dominant cultural construct of motherhood constitutes an attack on motherhood itself in Why feminists shouldn’t have to keep mum:

"While I love being a mother, I resent the current cult of motherhood in our society.  It’s something feminists need to challenge, instead of feeling it’s a thing they need to adapt to and be oh-so-polite about.  When I was on maternity leave following the birth of my son, the loneliness I felt at being out of the workplace and spending all day with someone who couldn’t talk was compounded by the fact that when I did meet with other mothers, the contemporary cult of motherhood required me to hold my tongue.  It’s not that no-one talks about the physical and mental challenges of being a mother.  Women do, all the time (even though the same discussions on cracked nipples and tantrums in Sainsbury’s are treated as ‘taboo breaking’ each time they arise).  The trouble is, while we’re all allowed to say how difficult it is, no-one’s allowed to say that it’s too difficult and needs to change, because that would be seen as undermining the very roles with which we’re struggling.  So we get nowhere or, worse, we learn to seek value in all the things that could be so much better if only we’d try to alter them".

She continues: "Feminism has a long tradition of promoting fairness, equality and choice, things that enable women to be respected as complete human beings worth just as much as men.  If we ask feminists to sympathise with cultural trends that militate against such ideals, we weaken the fight for equality to the extent of it becoming meaningless.  For instance, it is not reasonable to ask feminists to treat essentialist and non-essentialist views on the roles of mothers and fathers as though they are equal, just because not to do so will offend some mothers and fathers.  It doesn’t matter to me how you choose to run your own household.  It does, however, matter that the view that mummy does one thing, daddy does another, currently holds sway over our parental leave laws and limits the freedom of individuals to make their own choices.  It matters that many children are being brought up with restricted views of what women and men do, simply because the essentialist views of their parents are held to be off-limits in feminist debate.  It might upset some mothers to say that their femaleness is not intrinsic to how they act as parents.  But it isn’t, and to claim otherwise isn’t to take a neutral ‘all things are equal’ approach.  It’s to say mixed-gender couples who achieve an equal division of labour and perform similar roles are somehow doing it wrong.  And why should we put up with that, just so that others feel their personal choices, choices we have no interest in challenging, are viewed as superior?  I don’t care if an individual woman chooses to take on all childcare responsibilities, if this is the division of labour that works for her and her partner.  I do, however, care if this particular allocation of roles is claimed to be ‘natural’ and any deviation from this taken as a personal insult.  If we believe in choices, we cannot validate one person’s choice at the expense of everyone else’s.  That leaves us with no choice at all".

Aminatta Forna, in her 1998 book Mother of All Myths (London, Harper Collins): "Nothing exemplifies the paradox of motherhood as a state which is both revered and reviled, natural and yet policed, more clearly than the issue of breastfeeding.  Bottle-feeding is frowned upon and the pressure on mothers to breastfeed is immense, yet there are still very many people in the UK who regard the sight of a breastfeeding woman as obscene.  In August 1997  a woman breastfeeding her child in a courtyard had water thrown over her by a disgusted shopkeeper.  She turned out to be an Express newspaper journalist and the story, which was carried on the front page the next day’s newspaper, prompted a national discussion.  many people, including Anne Winterton MP, supported the shopkeeper’s view that women should breastfeed out of sight, but in Britain there are extremely few public breastfeeding facilities and the combined effect of public disapproval and lack of facilities keeps breastfeeding mothers virtually homebound" (pp7-8).

Since then depressingly little has changed (although, as Britblog’s own cabalamat points out, legislation has been passed in Scotland to prevent the kind of unpleasant incident catalogued below from occurring).

Laurie Penny, at Liberal Conspiracy, wins the Most Excruciating Pun of the Week for the title of her post on the politics of breastfeeding, No thanks for the mammaries (the cross-posting at her own website has a slightly less groanworthy version, Milking it), not that this should deter you from reading an important denunciation of hypocrisy and its pernicious impact on women’s lives, a piece prompted by the expulsion of a nursing mother from a Soho café.  Laurie writes:

"Breasts are the most fetishised part of the human body, bar none.  They have been drawn, painted, photographed, filmed, fantasised, mythologised and obsessed over by the men who are told to desire them and by the women who are taught to ‘make the most’ of them for centuries.  Most girls’ and women’s rooms are stuffed with apparatus to push them out, plump them up, pull them apart, squeeze them together, flatten them down and otherwise force them to resemble the platonic ideal of the fantasy pneumatic breast, currently achievable only by surgery and a certain type of mesomorphic 19-year-old.  Walk down any street, open any newspaper and you’ll be confronted with bosom after computer-enhanced, barely-concealed bosom.  And yet, whenever there’s the slightest risk of boobs being exposed in the course of their most natural function, we whip ourselves up into a moral frenzy.

Many cafés, restaurants and other social spaces, along with a significant part of the population in general, have a problem with breastfeeding in public.  And occasionally, this will enter the public domain, feminists will clamour their protest, a legion of (mostly male) prudes will harp on about hygiene and social decency and the fact that it just isn’t done, and when everyone has calmed down nothing will have changed.  breastfeeding – the biological function of the human mammary gland – has remained socially unacceptable in public, a distasteful function of feminine biology seen as akin to leaving a streaming open wound unbandaged".

Alongside the issues highlighted by Laurie of male "ownership" of and "entitlement" to women’s bodies and breastfeeding as a form of labour, I would add that of women’s freedom of movement and equal occupation of public space.  Nursing mothers should not be relegated to the home, condemned to the isolation and stultification that caring for an infant involves simply because a delicate builder might swoon on the scaffolding at the sight of a suckling babe.

Murder

Why bother with The Daily Mail as a feminist when you know, you just know before you even that it will make your blood boil?  The short answer is that you cannot engage in cultural critique and cannot bring about change if you simply ignore anything you don’t like, that makes you seethe.  That represents the unsavoury antithesis of your most cherished beliefs.  Its circulation figures put the Middle-England Gazette in a different league to, say, Socialist Worker, when it comes to influencing, or perhaps more accurately, cementing attitudes further.  On his mission to discover the essence of the English mind in its contemporary manifestation, Julian Baggini regarded the paper as the Oracle, the Fount of All Popular Wisdom: "But if we are to really understand the English philosophy, we need to know the values that, together with these facts, produce the folk political philosophy.  You can find clues to what these values are by reading the Mail and the Sun.  During my stay in S66 I read only these papers and their Sunday equivalents regularly.  The reason for this was that these are far and away the most popular newspapers in the country, and as such reflect the reality of mainstream English opinion more accurately than others.  The Sun sells over three million copies each day, while the Daily Mail alone sells in excess of two million – more than The Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent combined.  The tabloid press does have the power to shape opinion, but this power is not limitless.  The papers that do best are those which reflect the basic values their readers already have.  If they fail to strike a chord, they just won’t sell.  That’s why, although imperfect, they are more reliable barometers of national opinion than many would like to think" (Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind, London, Granta Books, 2007, p62).

By way of a footnote concerning the paper’s appeal: "Its main purpose seems to be to inspire fear.  The reason for this is that it serves a segment of the population that wants to maintain its middle-class status yet is only one step removed from the traditional working-class.  No one who was truly secure in their middle-class status would be so anxious to proclaim it so loudly and feel it was under such a threat" (Baggini, op. cit., p27).

Kate Smurthwaite of Cruella Blog dissects Jon Ronson’s article claiming to explore the motives behind Chris Foster’s murders in The Daily Male Blame Game.  She fulminates with moral outrage inspired by the sympathy for his actions expressed by his friend:

"Are you hearing what I’m hearing?  That the reason Chris Foster murdered his wife and daughter was because of the difficulties of getting divorced?  The article glosses over things like his being a member of a shooting club where all the members tell obscene jokes and talk about suicide.  The article doesn’t bother to expand on the risks of the fact that he collected guns as a hobby.  And when his career is mentioned it is to suggest that the state has no right to reclaim money owed by Foster".

However, Mrs Foster had not deserted him: "But most incredibly of all after all this: Chris Foster wasn’t getting divorced.  His wife knew he had no less than eight mistresses and yet still ‘played the dutiful wife’.  Clearly she would have been much much MUCH better off if she had gotten divorced a long time ago.  But that’s not what the ‘Femail’ section is there to tell women, is it?  Not when they can have a male journalist tell them it’s their own fault when they’re murdered".

Having ploughed my way through it in the interests of informed comment, might I venture an alternative reading, without wishing to undermine the Kate’s criticisms of the more egregious flaws in Ronson’s effort.  The original piece focuses on trying to figure out what made Foster tick, what could drive a seemingly ordinary and inoffensive man to the brutal and meticulously planned execution of those whom he was supposed to cherish most.  It is concerned with "humanising" him (which some might feel is a reprehensible undertaking in itself, particularly taking into account the type of denigratory vocabulary reserved for young hooligans running riot on council estates) and is pervaded by a prurient fascination about his wealth and lifestyle, which, far from being gratuitous, explains the timing of publication (the murders were committed in August) as well as revealing the author’s actual agenda. 

From the very outset, Ronson concentrates on social class and respectability, Foster and his family living in the midst of an elite of self-made millionaires.  He is more than slightly irked on arrival by the police tailing him, their suspicion aroused because he gives the appearance of being an undesirable intruder, too scruffy to be a journalist, lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, the poshness of which is reiterated again and again. 

We are told the story of how he acquired his wealth: an inspired idea.  Eager to purchase all the trappings of his new-found status (some of which, such as the personalised number plates for his wife’s car, we are encouraged to view as rather vulgar), he moved in with the smart gated community set.  Indeed, he was profligate to the extent that his business was ruined. 

What we are being invited to contemplate is the unfathomability of evil in plush, respectable surroundings.  It contradicts all the cliches about wife-battering and spouse murder being the preserve of the "lower orders", wealth and education miraculously inoculating you against the disease.  Bafflement prevails amongst his acquaintances and neighbours.  The ability of Foster’s close friend to empathise with his crime indeed smacks of an insidious let-off clause.  According to this conventional line of argument, Foster was acting out of character under extreme pressure, the classic "she drove him to it" with incessant nagging, infidelity or whatever other handy excuse presents itself (see Helena Kennedy, Eve was Framed, London, Chatto and Windus, 1992, pp68-9: "Half of all female murder victims are killed by a husband or lover.  In the majority of these cases male defendants mount of defence of provocation: that their wives’ conduct drove them to a sudden loss of control.  Within the male stronghold of the court it is all too easy to create the feeling that the woman had it coming to her.  Pictures of nagging, reproachful, bitter termagants who turn domestic life into a hell on earth are painted before the jury.  Manhaters skilled in the art of cruelty are summoned up to haunt the trials of men pushed to their limits" and, in relation to rape, pp106-199; see also Sue Lees, Naggers, Whores and Libbers: Provoking Men to Kill in Jill Radford and Diana E.H. Russell  (eds.), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1992, pp 267-88).

In reality, Foster was tormented by the knowledge of the impending loss of the accoutrements of his success; he was about to be stripped of his possessions by bailiffs and thereby face public humiliation.   Outward respectability conceals inner turmoil, yet by flashing his cash, Foster had turned his back on the prudence of his origins, the values of caution and "saving for a rainy day".  He was not born into privilege, his upward mobility achieved through intelligence/ingenuity.  The long-term forward planning held dear in his class of origin was jettisoned in favour of reckless spending.  His prodigious infidelity further marked his rejection of sensible, stolid middle-class values, to which his wife tenaciously clung, reverting to the "long-suffering, stand by your man" doormat/default mode required of her (if there had been the slightest hint of her having "deserved" her fate by petulantly threatening to walk out on him, or having sought refuge in the more appreciative arms of a rival these facts would have been endlessly pored over and the moral of the tragic tale would have been a cautionary one to women.  As Kate concludes, there is precious little by way of comfort to salvage for women readers: the conduct of Foster’s wife was irreproachable, she played according to the rules, yet still her life was snuffed out).

What we have then, is a chronicle of inflated pride and greed, an unremarkable rise-and-fall narrative with the twist of the credit crunch (hence the revival of the story now).  True, the financial turmoil was a long way off in the sunny days of summer, but Foster’s circumstances (living beyond one’s means, the spectre of ruin and disgrace, boom and bust on the markets mirrored in the case study of its fatal effects) give rise to the question Ronson implicitly addresses to the men in his audience (in spite of the article being carried in the Femail section): what would you have done in his shoes?  This is the reason why the victims are neglected.  They are irrelevant.  Foster is being portrayed as the real victim, their suffering is incidental, collateral damage, nothing more.

In a misplaced gesture of male solidarity, Ronson too apologises for the murderer: "The truth is, holding a gun does something to you.  It awakens in you some weird, dormant, fetishistic man-gene.  You feel alive and special.  You feel – as Homer Simpson once said – like God would feel if God were holding a gun".

To a greater or lesser extent all the male interviewees identify with Foster’s predicament, even the solution he resorted to.  What I find disturbing is the reaction of the members at the clay pigeon shooting club.  They steadfastly refuse to eject him from their company posthumously; they have refrained from branding him a "monster" or "pure evil". 

Ronson’s article does contain a critique of cultural stereotypes of masculine stoicism, the stiff upper lip of a bygone age.  Foster’s friend complains about the relentless pressures on the hapless males of today: "’We’re supposed to be manly,’ he replies.  ‘We’re not supposed to get upset.  We’re supposed to be the breadwinners and the providers, especially in our children’s eyes.  We’re supposed to do miracles’".  As Kate remarks, this is curiously out of date and certainly bears no relationship to what a feminist would expect.

To conclude, the subject matter of Ronson’s article is not the victims, but the Daily Mail readers themselves.  His mandate is to reassure them that they might not be as successful as the likes of Foster, but their loyalty to staunchly middle-class ideals renders them morally superior.  This virtuousness will enable them to weather the buffetings of the financial storm accordingly.  What we are conffronted with is a true Emperor’s new clothes scenario with more than a dash of Schadenfreude.  We may not be spectacularly wealthy, but contentment is to be found in the lore of our forefathers, bred into our bones.  Thrift, not the in-your-face ostentation of the show-off, is the route to genuine fulfillment.  There is no need to covet Foster’s vast array of material effects, no need to emulate him.  In this regard, Ronson is only too happy to swathe himself in the mantle of the readers’ representative: "I seemed too scruffy for these exclusive, nouveau riche surroundings, but it dawns on me that perhaps – like Letwin – the people of Maesbrook actually have nothing but overdrafts and all these fancy cars and mansions are just an illusion.  maybe, with my meagre savings, I’m the richest man in town".

Madness

By way of a preface to an excellent submission, allow me to cite Jane Ussher: "The concept of madness implicitly locates the problem within the individual who is sick, a contention strongly contested by the critics who would locate the sickness within the system, the society.  The discourse of madness serves to divert attention away from the problems within society, focusing attention on to the individual, who is suffering only as a direct result of societal pressures.  The symptoms labelled as part of the illness called madness are thus seen as a reflection of the inequalities and conflicts within society.  The mental health professionals disguise the reality of the misery experienced by individuals, and add to their oppression by providing individualised technological solutions for social problems" (Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, p148).

What is classified as a pathology may be no more than a sublimated response to an intolerable and (in the mind of the sufferer) inalterable reality: "The socialisation of women can be seen to prepare women for the mask of madness, the ‘desperate communication of the powerless’ [Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady, London, Virago, 1987, p5].  Having no legitimate outlet for feelings of frustration, anger and misery evoked by the reality of living in a patriarchal society, women fall into the psychiatric trap.  Madness in the twentieth century has become institutionalised as a discourse which legitimates the positioning of women as good/bad – attractive and seductive, dangerous and fearful.  The discourse, associated with the fear of women and the confining power of madness in the nineteenth century, has merely taken on a tougher veneer of respectability, as well as extending its authority to greater numbers of women.

Thus the labels applied to women, labels which so cleverly place the problem within her as a person, distracting from the social reality of her life, serve to mystify the reality of her oppression, a process buttressed by the gender bias in psychiatric nosology, the labelling process itself" (Ussher, op. cit., pp167-8).

Failure to conform to prevalent social standards of appropriate behaviour can exact a heavy price: "Although masculinity is associated with more positive mental health, it seems that this is only for men; and women who are adventurous, competitive, sexually active, independent, women who reject the role of wife and mother, to name but a few examples, may be at risk of being designated psychiatrically ill.  In fact, the woman who reports symptoms which are seen as ‘male’, such as alcohol abuse or aggressive antisocial behaviour, will be seen as much more psychologically disturbed than the man who exhibits the same symptoms" (Ussher, op. cit., p168).

Ussher neatly encapsulates my own doubts concerning therapy as a containment exercise, reconciling the patient to docile acceptance rather than looking to tackle the problems of systemic inequality and its invalidation of female protest: "In the feminist view, therapy is not gender-neutral.  It is based on patriarchal principles and supports a patriarchal and misogynistic culture.  The transformation of oppression into illness during the course of therapy is seen as rewriting women’s lives, women’s pain, within a framework which conceals misogynistic control of women, encouraging women to conform and be controlled.  The ‘helping professions’ are seen as agents who coerce women into accepting situations they do not want and that they are unhappy with.  The woman herself is taught to see her misery as illness, and to direct attention and cure at herself.  This means that women fail to look to factors outside themselves, factors outside their own madness, for explanations for unhappiness" (Ussher, op. cit., p176).

In Ussher’s sobering assessment, there is no magic bullet, no easy solution (pp292-3): "Psychiatrists might suggest that dopamine is deficient, that neural pathways are malfunctioning.  Psychologists might argue that women in distress are troubled by negative cognitions, making dysfunctional attributions which result in depression, or exhibiting learned helplessness.  A sociologist (or socially orientated psychologist) might argue that lack of social support and poor living conditions were of aetiological significance, and that the answer lies in social and political change.  The dissenters might argue that women, alongside men, are victims of a stigmatising labelling process, which function as a means of social control, pathologising behaviour which is defined unacceptable; that society is disposing of such people through the label of ‘mental illness’ and incarceration in the metaphorical strait-jacket of psychiatric categorisation or professionally mediated treatment.  A feminist might argue that women are victims of patriarchal oppression, of misogyny, and that madness is an understandable and natural reaction to the demeaning role enforced upon women, the protest of the powerless, or that labels of madness are merely tools of patriarchy and that our position as other within phallocentric discourse, makes us mad" (Ussher, op. cit., pp289-90).

Laurie Penny provides personal testimony of how these are not mere abstract debates, but have a devastating impact on ordinary lives in her moving and courageous Gender fucked: what does ‘healthy womanhood’ look like?

"When I was in a mental institution, a lot of otherwise well-meaning medical professionals conspired to screw up my gender identity pretty much permanently, for the best of reasons (they wanted to help me get better) and the worst (they believed that conforming to received ideas of ‘feminine’ behaviour was the best way for me to demonstrate a new, mentally healthy outlook).  They were wrong.  I am incredibly grateful for the inpatient treatment I received, which probably saved my life, but my political and personal feminism took a massive battering, and that’s less than entirely forgivable".

One woman’s "well-adjusted" is another woman’s "brainwashed": "Instead of analysing why we might be unwilling to go through the process of self-subsumation that represents the western journey into ‘womanhood’, the doctors prescribed a strict programme of feminisation for me.  I was told in no uncertain terms to grow out my hair, throw away my old baggy black clothes, start wearing skirts, pretty shoes and make-up, sit with my knees together and be less ballsy and confrontational.  The other women on my ward, with nothing to do all day, were only too happy to dress me up like a tiny mannequin, teaching me to paint my face and nails and lending me foofy dresses until I was allowed off the ward to buy my own.

Pretty soon, as a day patient, I was getting regular compliments from leery men on the Tube about my nice pink low-cut tops and nice tights and nice impression of absolute submission.  This represented progress, my doctors told me.  Wolf-whistles were something I should be proud of.  I was nearly at my target weight: the attention of men in public places, wanted or unwanted, was proof that I was nearly ready to return to normal society as a ‘proper grown-up lady’".

Culture 

KT Dodge of the eponymous blog informs us that Ratings drop since John Sergeant exit.  Although for me Strictly Come Dancing is the perfect cure for insomnia, even I could not help but notice the controversy concerning his departure and I certainly agree with the author that the panel of judges could benefit from lightening up.

Chris Partridge of the ever-informative and delightful Ornamental Passions enlightens us as to the personages gracing the facades of the College of Preceptors in 2 Bloomsbury Square, WC1.

With his unfailing aptitude for providing us with the solace of nostalgia in an unkind world, Jonathan Calder of Liberal England looks back over the career of one of Britain’s finest broadcasters, In praise of Brian Matthew.

Natalie Bennett of My London, Your London, an indispensable guide to the exhibitions and events which often fills the ex-pat (I know, I have only myself to blame for my self-imposed exile, plus the total absence of well-paid jobs for my particular skills in my native tracts) with homesick melancholy and a more than slight twinge of envy at the sheer abundance of entertainments on offer, reassures me that not every production is equally worth watching in Theatre Review: The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes by the RSC at the Wilton Music Hall: "But there was a wise warning from the Bard that the playwright here, Adriano Shaplin, forgot: ‘the play’s the thing’.  In telling the story of the struggle between the ‘traditional’ philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his rival ‘natural philosophers’ of the Royal Society, particularly of the brilliant but erratic Robert Hooke (and this play might better have been called Hooke’s tragedy), against the detailed background of the political and practical history of the time, Shaplin apparently forgot that this wasn’t a school lesson".

Guest-blogging at Heresy Corner, the magnificently-pseudonymed Valdemar Squelch (I agree that Dave, his real name, doesn’t have quite the same ring to it), provides the uninitiated with an excellent and thoroughly enjoyable introduction to the fiction of Montague Rhodes James in The Hairy Claws of the Vengeful Dead, placing the stories within the wider cultural context: "James could hardly have been unaware of the prolonged intellectual ferment that followed the publication of Darwin’s ideas.  The great debate spanned the early decades of James’ life.  As a Christian by upbringing and inclination, M.R. James believed in the immortal soul.  Yet as a man of his time – and a very intelligent one – he could not have been untouched (untainted?) by the materialistic outlook of the new science of biology.  Disraeli said the question was whether Man was an Ape or an Angel and famously came down ‘on the side of the Angels’.  James does not seem so sure, in his fiction at least.  he offers us spirits that are bestial, yet still in a horrible way human – human enough to be dangerous, with just enough mind to nurse a grievance".

Hopefully, this week’s compendium will have sufficed to silence the detractors of blogging, albeit temporarily, about the merits of our output.

I include one final nomination by way of demonstrating that I take my duty of strict adherence to the principle of inclusiveness as a host seriously.  I am not sure whether this site is touting cycling equipment or dodgy gurus (as an atheist I am not discriminating against cults, rejecting all superstition with equal fervour) and am not remotely convinced that it is a genuine blog, as it has the look of an elaborate marketing ploy, but the Cycling Photos of the Year are innocuous enough in themselves.  I leave it to your discernment, this was just the public health warning.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Mr Eugenides.  As ever, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com.  A full statement of editorial policy and the hosting rota may be found at the Britblog Central website.

Welcome to the unrepentant unbelievers edition of the Britblog Roundup – be warned that for the delicate soul of tender disposition the stench of a whited sepulchre, the whiff of eternal damnation might prove distressing, but it’s a risk I am willing to take…

Religion

Unity of Ministry of Truth in Picking Fleas comprehensively and brilliantly demolishes the essay by Dr Graham Tomlin, Dean of St Mellitus College, London, penned in an effort to refute The God Delusion.  Although Unity systematically works his way through the text, we shall focus on one example, more than adequate to reveal how the Dean is punching above his weight.  Unity clarifies: "Dawkins’ argument vis-a-vis morality is not that Christianity fails to supply a tidy list of do’s and don’ts but that our evolved moral sense is not dependent on Christianity, or any other religion.  The question he addresses is that of whether we can be moral without the need for the belief that a big old sky fairy is looking over our shoulders every waking second of the day – he thinks we can and so have many other eminent philosophers, not least amongst whom were Hume and Kant.

As such, the point about the seeming ubiquity of certain moral principles, particularly the universality of the ‘Golden Rule’, is that this is evidence that the foundations of the ethic of reciprocity are to be found in our evolution as a species and not in the maundering of the priestly caste of any individual religion or even religion, collectively.  Within social animals, of which we are but one of many, reciprocation and reciprocal altruism confers certain survival advantages over and above pure self-interest – natural selection favour those who cooperate – within certain limits – to ensure the survival of their genes to future generations, which makes the Golden Rule no more than an intellectual codification of an evolutionary principle and its ubiquity across human societies nothing more than a function of the fact that we all belong to the same species and, if you go back far enough, share common origins and ancestors".

Unity surmises that the loud bleating amongst the flock of the faithful may have more to it than a simple defence of their good shepherd: "Ultimately, what has got some religionists so rattled about Dawkins and the so-called ‘New Atheists’ is not that they challenge the the existence of god – that is ultimately an intellectual debate – but that he and others are implicitly, and in some cases, explicitly, challenging the privileged position and status of religion as an institution and socio-political entity.

It’s not god, or the belief in god that Tomlin and others are trying to protect when they’re attacking Dawkins, it’s their hallowed place on the secular public teat on which religion has been suckling and has grown fat for centuries.

What Dawkins is threatening here is the automatic seats in the UK’s House of Lords given to the Church of England, the state funding for faith schools and the mandatory requirement placed on all state schools, even secular ones, to provide acts of ‘broadly Christian’ worship and religious education.  It’s the undue and undeserved claim to deference that religion demands under the guide of ‘respect’ and the legislative cop-outs they demand in order to defend their presumed ‘right’ to discriminate and promulgate bigotry and homophobia".

As a former born-again fundamentalist (now fully recovered), the root of my opposition to the monotheistic religions is that they mandate the wholesale subordination and denial of full humanity to women as the "inferior" in the male/female binary.  To me, religion is all about keeping things the way they are and women in their place.  The first step towards emancipation is to debunk the priesthood’s claim to authority and status.  Without the backing of a god they have no foundation for their power, no justification for interfering in people’s lives, prescribing conduct and spreading guilt and misery (not that I have much time for their secular equivalent, psychotherapists, either – the aim of both professions is to help their charges come to terms with the source of their unhappiness rather than changing social attitudes or combating injustice, brainwashing them into reconciling themselves to their lot).

Tomlin’s piece ends with a rhetorical flourish: "God is searching for us and is there to be found but only by those who risk everything to do so.  Those who do find him find love, adventure and satisfaction beyond what they imagined possible".

Nonsense!  For women, submitting to the will of god means servitude without appeal or respite, erosion of confidence, surrender of autonomy and placing oneself completely at the mercy of a man who enjoys the right to unquestioning obedience, a retreat to enforced domesticity.  Baking flapjacks for the prayer group meeting with more than just buns of sugar and dough in the oven (because, after all, it was so ordained that our chief value should be as incubators as opposed to intellects)…always with a cheerful smile for complaint would be sinful, a blasphemous rejection of god’s divine plan and boundless wisdom.

Lest you dismiss my words as an isolated voice crying in the wilderness, I commend A.C. Grayling’s meditation in The Guardian on how Tradition and religion forge shackles of oppression for women: "I leave to you the task of totting up the other ways in which piety makes war on women in different parts and traditions of Islam, and not even very extreme Islam at that, ranging from honour killings to female circumcision and vaginal infibulation.

Indeed I leave to you the not very congenial task of totting up the ways in which more enthusiastic forms of religion in general, not just Islam but Roman Catholicism, puritanical forms of Protestantism, and orthodox Judaism, have treated women: all the way from closeting them, covering them up, and silencing them, to sewing up their vaginas: it is a ghastly litany of oppression, all the less excusable because discrimination against women which began in these ways persists in our society in modified forms: the fact that a woman earns about 70% of what an equally qualified and experienced mad does is a residue in our own society of the attitude which in today’s sharia law states that a woman is worth half a man".

Cath Elliott, likewise in The Guardian, concurs that selling your soul to an allegedly benign deity is a bad deal for women in I’m not praying: (…) the term ‘Christian feminist’ is an oxymoron; it’s a glaring contradiction in terms on a par with ‘compassionate conservative’ and ‘pro-life anti-abortionist’.

Christianity is and always has been antithetical to women’s freedom and equality, but it’s certainly not alone in this.  Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression.  It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.

Since men first conceived of the notion of a single omnipotent creator, that divine being has taken the form of a man: no matter what name he answers to, be it Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, or just plain God, what’s not in doubt is that he’s a he.  His teachings and his various holy books reinforce the message that this life exists for men, while the best women can hope for is some kind of reward in the next one; as long as we do as we’re told of course, without questioning our lords and masters, and as long as we manage to remain pure of heart and mind while we prostrate ourselves at their feet".

This may be slightly inaccurate, in the sense that whereas it rings true for monotheistic religions, there are others, which worship goddesses.  However, even the polytheistic faiths position male gods as supreme, with their consorts and spouses employing their feminine wiles to subvert the authority of their masters.

Elliott continues: "In any society where religion dominates it is women who pay the price: we can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether or not any particular religion sanctions so-called honour crimes for example, but what’s unarguable is that men’s interpretation of religion, and the patriarchal values that religion instils, has led to the murders of countless women.  Similarly, it’s in the name of religion that girls are denied an education; in the name of religion that more than half a million women die every year because they cannot access safe abortions; in the name of religion that Aids continues its unrelenting progress across Africa, and in the name of religion that women throughout the world remain subjugated, impoverished and denied individual agency".

The effects of religion are almost entirely pernicious: it dulls our revolutionary fervour, conning us into putting up with things no matter how intolerable.  One objection might be to recount how religion can have positive social effects by inspiring charity and self-sacrifice: the soup kitchens and other good works.  This compassion is proffered in exchange for spiritual Brownie points to escape being roasted on a spit.  Good deeds put you in God’s good books and keep you out of hell: the motives behind them are purely selfish, in other words.  I grant that this does not detract from the immediately beneficial impact on the needy, but the recipients have to swallow the gospel along with their doorsteps of bread.

Looking back over my own experience to account for the attraction to religion, as a teenage swot, I was a pariah, an outcast, desperate to fit in.  Religion offers a balm to ease the pain of the sheer wretchedness of existence, especially for those near the bottom of the pile.  It can function as a frustration-abatement/containment mechanism.  Often our capacity for self-reflection can torment us, appear as a curse and we seek the temporary numbing relief of alcohol, drugs, or the opiate of the people.  The real miracle is the tenacity of religion, which may be attributed to our inherent futility, the transitoriness of our individual being, which may be too unpalatable, unbearable for us to confront.  Religion is our comfort blanket as we shiver in the coldness of the infinite indifference of the cosmos.  And it offers the ultimate revenge fantasy: those who prosper now will burn in hell.  Similarly, whilst there is no justice in the here and now, there might be in the hereafter.

Religion permeates and simultaneously corrupts perceptions in a subtle cognitive warp as explored and catalogued by Pierre Bourdieu during his fieldwork in Kabylia: "We find in fact in the political sphere the same division of labour which entrusts religion – public, official, solemn, and collective – to the men, and magic – secret, clandestine, and private – to the women.  In this competition the men have the whole official institution on their side, starting with the mythico-ritual representations and representations of kinship which, by reducing the opposition between the official and the private to the opposition between the outside and the inside, hence the male and the female, establish a systematic hierarchisation, condemning women’s interventions to a shameful, secret, or, at best, unofficial existence.  Even when women do wield the real power, as is often the case in matrimonial matters, they can exercise it fully only on condition that they leave the appearance of power, that is, its official manifestation, to the men; to have any power at all, women must make do with the unofficial power of the eminence grise, a dominated power which is opposed to official power in that it can operate only by proxy, under the cover of an official authority, as well as to the subversive refusal of the rule-breaker, in that it still serves the authority it uses" (Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p41).

Returning to Unity by way of conclusion: "That’s what atheism is – growing up and becoming a fully autonomous, independent human being capable of making their own moral choices and their own decisions about what is right and what is wrong without recourse to fairy tales, bogeymen or sky fairies".

The Heresiarch of Heresy Corner in Not-so-sparkling Jewel surveys the response to Sherry Jones’ bodice-ripper sanitised of vivid descriptions of sexual encounters (paradoxical though that may sound upon first hearing) effort based on the life of Aisha, The Jewel of Medina: "Having read the opening chapter when it appeared online in August I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece: simultaneously turgid and flowery, it suggested that Jones’ ambition greatly exceeded her ability as a writer.  It was her intention, she told Asra Nomani of the Wall Street Journal, ‘to honour Aisha and all the wives of Mohammed by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored – silenced – by historians’.  An aim either worth or cringe-makingly ingratiating, according to taste, but one that ought to have rung alarm bells for anyone who cares about fiction.  Novels written with a purely didactic intent are rarely very good".

An excerpt courtesy of The Times should suffice to illustrate its literary merits or lack thereof: "The author avoids graphic sex scenes between the two.  But A’isha says: ‘This was the beginning of something new, something terrible.  Soon I would by lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me.  he would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it?  It’s always painful the first time’.  After consummating her marriage to the Prophet, she says: ‘The pain of consummation soon melted away.  Muhammad was so gentle.  I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting.  To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life’".

These passages prompted Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her review, The Fire-Bombed Book, to write: "Ms Jones does not condemn Mohammed for having sex with Aisha at the age of nine.  The sex scene is not described graphically and its conclusion for Aisha is described by Ms Jones as something Aisha always wanted.  All the behaviour considered immoral and misogynistic in the modern day Western attitudes that offends Muslims are repeated in the novel and affirmed.  Rather than being a challenge to Islam, The Jewel of Medina is a pro-Islamic, pro-Mohammed novel and could easily serve as propaganda material for any Muslim organisation promoting the idea that Muslim women must not only accept the position that Islam ascribes to them but should also view that inferior position as a gift from God.

From my perspective, Ms Jones’ novel does not come close toward helping Muslim women imagine that there is a reality beyond subjugation.  The main lesson for a Muslim woman to take from Aisha the heroine of The Jewel is that it is best to spire to becoming the head of the concubines, or the hatun, and in that dubious position to remind herself that her job is to support Muhammad’s decisions, not to doubt them.  Obedience as a lesson is not something Muslim girls need to read about in novels; it is a concept they have to live with every day.

Where Ms Jones succeeds – and, it seems, unwittingly – is to show the problem Islam perpetually has with fiction.  It is not enough to be positive about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), i.e. to stick to the Islamic account of events surrounding the prophet’s life.  It is not enough to express oneself in the same tone of deference that Muslims do when talking or writing about their religion.

What it confirms is that Muslims believe that Muslims and infidels both must place Islam’s main characters out of bounds for fiction, for literature in general, and for cinema, except as a means of dawa or to spread the faith".

The Heresiarch endorses her criticisms: "A novel about Aisha need not be inflammatory; but a novel about Aisha that was any good would almost by definition be highly controversial.  It would have to tackle the question head-on: not because Aisha’s extreme youth is definitively established (though it is likely) but because it is a matter that continues to have the most serious ramifications for children today.  Across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Morocco, even in Britain, underage and sometimes prepubescent girls are married, usually without their consent (if consent were even possible); and often these marriages are then consummated".

He expresses his regret at a missed opportunity: "Premature marriage takes a heavy toll in terms of female sexual health, psychological damage and limited life-chances.  Yet there’s another story to be told, too: one that takes into account that early marriage was a feature of many societies throughout much of human history, Christian as well as Muslim and neither.  Even in Western Europe, where people have always tended to marry relatively late, aristocratic brides were not uncommonly in their early teens.  These women were not all suffering victims; as widows, still relatively young and vigorous, they might be powerful and rich.  Aisha herself, by all accounts, was such a widow.

The story of Aisha sits at the intersection of two sacred modern taboos: the Western construction of pedophilia as a supercrime, and the almost equally totemic belief in multicultural respect.  A novel that took her life as material for a truly fearless examination of these issues would probably outrage everybody.  It would be dangerous.  It would be great.  But it wouldn’t be anything like The Jewel of Medina". 

Abortion

"There was no one cause, says Aunt Lydia.  She stands at the front of the room, in her khaki dress, a pointer in her hand.  Pulled down in front of the blackboard, where once there would have been a map, is a graph, showing the birth rate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down.

Of course, some women believed there would be no future, they thought the world would explode.  That was the excuse they used, says Aunt Lydia.  They said there was no sense in breeding.  Aunt Lydia’s nostrils narrow: such wickedness.  They were lazy women, she says.  They were sluts"

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London, Vintage, 1996, p123)

We begin with Unity once again, this time at Liberal Conspiracy in Sins of Omission: "The major problem facing the anti-abortion lobby is that, for all their efforts to poison the public debate in support of their prohibitionist agenda, public support for the principle that women have the right to access safe, legal abortions services remains rock solid at around 65-70% in any reputable poll.  If nothing else, the British public understand that the alternative to legal abortion is not no abortions but a return to unsafe backstreet abortions with their attendant horrors.

The ‘moral’ argument for prohibition has been lost and lost decisively and it’s because of that, that anti-abortionists have turned, instead, to a stream of extremely specious and sophistic arguments about the supposed ‘rights’ of the foetus and to the wholesale misrepresentation and bastardisation of medical and scientific knowledge about pregnancy, foetal development and abortion".

Religion steps into the fray to intercede for unborn innocents, conveniently overlooking in their froth of far from righteous indignation the toll that would be extracted from women.  This is religion at its ugliest and most sanctimonious.  In their deluded romanticism about saving "babies", its practitioners would reverse the progress of the last 50 years at a stroke…The latest line of attack on women’s control of their own bodies adopted by Christian Action Research and Education (CARE, an inappropriate acronym if ever there was one), an organisation apparently adept at infiltrating the corridors of power by furnishing MPs with interns, has been to draw a spurious comparison between the campaign of those who oppose abortion with those who fought to emancipate slaves.

Unity lays bare both the historical inaccuracy and brazen dishonesty of such claims: "Drawing spurious parallels to the abolition of slavery is not only a deeply offensive tactic to adopt, but also a desperate attempt by CARE to clothe its position in a false and wholly synthetic brand of moral rectitude in the hope of deflecting attention away from the moral choice that otherwise underpins public support for legal abortion – the clear understanding that the real alternative to legal abortion is not no abortions but a return to unsafe backstreet abortions with all their attendant horrors.

That said, if we are to cast this debate in the language of human and civil rights then, in addition to reflecting on the fact that women were treated in law as something less than fully human for far longer than even those men who were born or taken into slavery prior to successes of the abolitionists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the fundamental question one has to address is whether or not you believe that women are independent, autonomous, sentient human beings who possess the full capacity to make and exercise moral and ethical choices over their own lives".

The 22nd October is the next crucial date in the battle over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

Harpymarx reminds us of what is at stake in Liberalise abortion rights: support a woman’s right to choose: "I ended up chatting to an Irish woman who was a member of Alliance for Choice.

She was over here, as part of a 40-woman team to support the amendment to extend abortion rights to the north of Ireland.  Forty being politically symbolic as 40 women each week leave the north to obtain an abortion elsewhere.

And that costs between £600 to £2,000.  Access to abortion is very much a class issue and if you can’t get the money then a woman is pushed into a desperate situation that includes backstreet abortions.  Women also end up buying RU486 aka the abortion pill over the web, taking pot luck as they don’t know what they are buying.  desperate circumstances bring desperate measures".

Alliance for Choice publish personal testimonies, in which religious scruples feature as a recurrent theme, as Ms. C’s story shows: "When I was aged 25 and my daughter Caroline was almost eight, I went for a pregnancy test at the LIFE offices.  My distress at the positive test was so great, the counsellor took some time to calm me down.  I explained that Caroline has severe autism and challenging behaviour.  Another child would mean that Caroline would end up in care and I wasn’t having that.

The counsellor said that maybe God was sending me this child ‘to make up for Caroline.  This insult to my darling daughter summed up the ‘pro-life’ attitude for me.  getting respite care for a few days to allow me to go to England was very difficult, although all my friends rallied round with money, so that part wasn’t too bad.

Five years on, Caroline is still at home with me and her behaviour is greatly improved.  If I had continued with that pregnancy, I have no doubt that she would be in care and much, much worse in her behaviour and abilities".

Then there is Ms. A: "It was 1993 and my youngest child was 8 years old when I found myself pregnant again.  My marriage had broken up a few years before and my husband had left me to raise our five children alone with no support, financial or emotional.  I had returned to education as a mature student and I was in the final year of my degree.

All the struggling to keep up with home and University was about to pay off.  I was just months away from my final exams.  When I told the man I was seeing that I was pregnant, he just didn’t want to know.  he had children of his own from a previous relationship and wouldn’t be around to help, no matter what I decided to do.

Even though I was raised a Catholic and I didn’t agree with abortion, when I was faced with these circumstances, I felt I had no other choice.  It took five weeks from when I decided to have a termination to raise the money to travel over.  I borrowed some money from friends, lying to some and trusting others with my secret.  I had to use the phone-bill money as well, so we got cut off just before I left for London.  Northern Ireland is part of the UK, so I don’t understand why I couldn’t have the abortion there".

How humiliating for these women to be forced to resort to deceit, to beg for the fare across to England for a procedure, which ought to be self-evident.  It sickens me to the core.  These women are doing their utmost to haul themselves out of welfare dependency, hardly the feckless, fickle little tarts of myth.  If they had succumbed to pressure and carried the foetus to term, they would clearly have been condemning themselves and their offspring to poverty and misery.  Not one of them took the decision lightly.

Penny Red in Stand up for women in Northern Ireland! reports on a Parliament rally convened to support Diane Abbott’s amendment to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland.   She quotes Goretti Horgan, of Alliance for Choice: "’The poverty of some women in NI also impacts on the numbers of late abortions in Britain,’ said Ms Horgan.  ‘The time it takes some women to find enough money to have an abortion means that women from here are three times more likely than British women to have abortions after 20 weeks.  However, thousands of others are forced to continue pregnancies they find intolerable.  This includes women pregnant as a result of rape and sexual abuse,’ says the Alliance for Choice spokesperson.

‘If you’re afraid of falling into some colonialist mindset by overriding Stormont, please, forget it – we need our human rights,’ said Dr Audrey Simpson of the Northern Irish Family Planning Association, reminding those present that when the Bill was last on the table in May, Northern Irish MPs had ‘no qualms’ in voting to cut the time limit from 24 to 12 weeks for English, Welsh and Scottish women".

The campaigners underline the urgency of the issue: "It’s also the last chance Northern Irish women will have to fight for their rights to legal abortion for a very long time: soon, criminal law will be devolved to Stormont, after which ‘we won’t see positive change for generations,’ said Annie Campbell" (also from Alliance for Choice.

Kate Smurthwaite of Cruella Blog in British Women (and Men) – Your Help Needed Now also picks up on the theme of deprivation: "Abortion is illegal in Northern Ireland unless the mother’s life is at risk.  There is no exception made for rape or incest victims.  6217 women who gave addresses in Ireland had an abortion in Britain last year, others travel to Holland or Belgium and some have been known to order abortion-inducing medicines online, which is dangerous both because not all websites selling such things are safe and also because women convicted of causing an abortion in Northern Ireland can face long prison terms.  Since 1967 five women are known to have died as a result of backstreet abortions in Northern Ireland.  This means of course that the system effectively just penalises those women without the financial means to go overseas for their termination".

She then deals with some of the protests against supporting liberalisation, the first of which, unsurprisingly, is religiously induced inhibition: "I can’t support abortion because of my religion.  The nearest the bible comes to mentioning abortion is in Isaiah where it says if two men are fighting and a woman is hit causing her to miscarry the man who hit the woman must pay a fine to the woman’s husband.  I’m not sure that’s the law we need but it would actually be better than the one we’ve got.  Anyway the bible says you shouldn’t blaspheme, eat shellfish or share a bed with your husband during your period.  Should we pass these as laws and enforce them with lengthy prison sentences?  Do we want a country where people of non-Christian faiths and of no religion are forced to practice fundamentalist Christianity by law?  Even when they are pregnant following incestuous rape?  Really?"

She then moves on to another popular cop-out: "The HFE Bill isn’t the right place to amend abortion law.  The 1967 abortion law is significantly out of date.  Not only with the exception made for Northern Ireland but also the requirement in the rest of the UK for two doctors’ signatures (you don’t even need two doctors’ signatures for triple heart bypass surgery), that nurses can’t prescribe abortion pills (though they can prescribe many much more complicated drug treatments and if the law was changed in this area many women would have much less distance to travel to access abortion services) and the law which says that medical abortion cannot be completed at home (women have to take the pills in a clinic and either wait there around four hours until the induced miscarriage starts or risk heading home knowing bleeding could start at any time".

To avoid creating the (mistaken) impression that I am only giving room to commentators from outside Northern Ireland (I would be the last to indulge in such unwarranted discrimination, however, I am almost completely dependent on nominations – what the weekly host is not informed of they are not necessarily aware of), I turn to an update by Brian Walker of Slugger O’Toole, Abortion reform latest, where the comments are enlightening, Goretti Horgan’s in particular: "It’s true that the government do not support extension of the Abortion Act to NI; however, it’s been Labour Party policy going back to the 1980s and in opposition they all voted to extend.  Now there is a large pro-choice majority in the House of Commons and it could pass even with all the Labour frontbenchers voting against (or more likely abstaining).  Anyone who saw Hazel Blears’ discomfiture when asked about her voting intentions on Hearts and Minds can see the problem facing many Labour MPs, especially women like Blears, Harman, Hewitt etc. who made their names as women’s rights activists and are now being asked to say they believe a woman’s right to choose is a fundamental right for women in Scotland, England and Wales but not NI.  Some will abstain and that may lose us the vote, but it is a free vote and many will vote with their consciences despite what Gordon Brown is saying to them. The key will be hearing from women and men here who explain the extent to which the political parties do NOT represent us on this issue.  At least 800,000 women from here have had abortions in Britain.  Surveys suggest that each involves up to 5 other people in making the decision.  Do the maths, that’s a lot of people in a region that has only 1.7 million people".

Politics

Chris Dillow, of Stumbling and Mumbling in Politics for the immature, ponders the implications Ruth Kelly’s decision not to stand at the next elections, what she has in common with Sarah Palin and on how politics is no longer the pinnacle of aspiration, but a mere springboard to an even more lucrative career: "Until around the 1980s-90s, people commonly worked in law, industry or business and only began political life at around the age that Ruth is ending hers.  Whereas politics was once the culmination of one’s career, Ruth’s move suggests it is the start of one.

This reversal betokens a big change in what are regarded as political skills.  There was a time when it was thought that politics required the sort of characteristics that only come to most of us with maturity: judgement and cool-headedness.

Today, though, these skills matter less.  Instead, what matters is simply who one is.  Which is where Sarah Palin comes in.  It’s increasingly obvious that she has no obvious ability.  Instead, she was picked to be vice-presidential candidate simply for who she is (or appears to be) – because it was thought that she would appeal to the right demographic.

Politicians are selected in the same way that manufactured pop bands are – for their media-friendliness, and ability to recite others’ words, more than any great skill they have".

I wonder how Anne Widdecombe fits in here?  As the eccentric and waspish spinster aunt type?

Chris links to an article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Mad Dog Palin, an excerpt of which I cannot resist reproducing here: "’She totally reminds me of my cousin!’ the delegate screeched.  ‘She’s a real woman!  The real thing!’

I stared at her open-mouthed.  In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare.  here’s the thing about Americans.  You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket.  And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin’ Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her.  Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States.  As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove.  But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask in return for the total surrender of our political power.  Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way.  All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation".

Harpymarx of the eponymous blog sounds the alarm over Lone parents: further attacks by new Labour: "More sanctions, more conditionality, more misery and more poverty from NL [New Labour].  And as I wrote before that if NL was at all serious about supporting lone parents then universal free childcare would be at the top of the agenda along with decent jobs and training.  It’s not.  Instead it is about coercion and penalties".

Simon Duncan and Rosalind Edwards in Lone Mothers, Paid Work and Gendered Moral Rationalities (Houndmills, Palgrave-Macmillan, 1999) summarise how the Left and Right have converged on a punitive approach to single mothers in the context of "a British and North American debate that has become polarised between Fabian social policy and conservative new right views of lone motherhood.  Despite their political differences, both tend to see lone mothers as a socially homogenous, categorical group, and both see the national state as the dominant social actor.  Arguably, the current ‘New Deal’ for lone parents in Britain, as proposed by the newly ascendant ‘New Labour’, is using fashionable communitarian ideas as a vehicle to draw on both.  Both sets of views assume a particular notion of personal motivation, based on a neo-classical concept of individual economic rationality.  In turn, this assumption supports a socially simplistic stimulus-response model of the relationship between human behaviour and social policy.  It is assumed that if the national social policy stimulus is changed, lone mothers will respond by changing their behaviour in an appropriate and uniform way.  Thus mainstream social policy analysts propose welfare reform to alleviate the personal constraints on economically rational behaviour.  Changes to the tax and benefits systems should ensure that lone mothers are better off in paid work than they are living on benefits, and publicly funded day care provision should be increased to remove a fundamental block to lone mothers’ uptake of paid work.  The conservative new right also proposes changes in policy, seeking to remove the social threat they see in lone motherhood by removing state support to lone mothers.  A reduction of benefits to lone mothers, for example, will force them into paid work, or dissuade them from divorcing or separating, or even from having children in the first place.  In this way both views lead to a form of social engineering.  Through this debate lone motherhood also has taken a political significance far wider than the policy issues directly raised, particularly in Britain and the USA.  It has become a symbol, and a means of political mobilisation, for rival discourses about the nature of the family and the welfare state.  However, if the underlying assumptions of these views are incorrect – that personal motivation is a matter of economic self-interest and that national states are the only important actor – then these policies are unlikely to have the desired effects.  At best it will be a case of social engineering forcing people, unwillingly and hence inefficiently, into someone else’s categorical box" (pp1-2).

To ascend to and remain in power, New Labour have been forced to perform a balancing act between pleasing their natural constituency and the imperative to woo and appease the middle-classes: "While the New Labour leadership does not demonise lone motherhood, and ‘is not against those who do marry’, it remains convinced that marriage is the ideal state and that living with two biological parents is the best for children.  It is also the best way of dealing with the contradiction between the supposed parenting deficit and the ascribed duty of all adults below pensionable age to take on paid work.  For the two parent family allows specialisation by breadwinning fathers and domestic mothers where the latter, implicitly, are excused from the moral duty to have paid work (…) this policy of neo-classical marriage trading models does little to address gender divisions of labour.  Lone motherhood, in contrast, epitomises the contradiction between paid work and parenting, while the complexities of step-parenting and all the other ‘new family forms’ just complicate matters.  In addition, unemployed lone mothers (like the disabled) continue to eat up a large part of the social security budget as well as reducing potential tax income.  Harriet Harman (1996), at time of writing both Minister for Social Security and, somewhat paradoxically it seems, Minister for Women, has quoted figures of £10,000 per lone mother per annum.  This is a particularly potent threat where New Labour now claims to be the natural, low tax party of ‘middle England’.  Parenting by both biological parents is therefore the best and most efficient family form in linking social morality, social cohesion and economic efficiency" (Duncan and Edwards, pp 285-6).

Whilst on the subject of social meddling, the Heresiarch in Smoking out Smokers explores his ambivalence at new proposals to clamp down on puffing on the evil weed, in connection with a new report Beyond Smoking Kills, more specifically, to quote the press release from Ash aimed at deterring young people from picking up the habit and placing even tighter restrictions on marketing.  For example: "New research from the University of Nottingham, also published in the report, shows that tobacco branding and packaging sends misleading ’smoke signals’ to young people.  Although it has been illegal for manufacturers to use trademarks, text or any sign to suggest that one tobacco product is less harmful than another since 2003, this research shows that products bearing the word ’smooth’ or using lighter coloured branding mislead young people into thinking that these products are less harmful to their health.

The research also reveals that young people are between 3 and 4 times less likely to pick a plain pack as a branded one if they were trying smoking for the first time, supporting calls for plain packaging and countering industry claims that plain packs would be more attractive to young people".

The strategic choice of adjectives with soothing connotations allay fears of the reality of the hacking cough.  Young people are in denial about the dangers of smoking, clutching at straws and the wily manufacturers are all too aware of this propensity.  As for the packs themselves, plain equates with austere, which goes against the grain of the aspiration to exclusivity and luxury.  Teenagers are well-trained fledgling consumers and it is hardly surprising that they might wish to turn their backs on packaging redolent of supermarket brands that "only" the poor buy because they cannot afford to choose any "better".  So far, so innocuous.  I sympathise with the smokers who buy "light" brands, intimately familiar with the psychology of my own particular destructive passion, cakes, chocolate, basically almost any variety of fatty foods.  I don’t want to be constantly chided that they are bad for me.  Besides, until calamity actually strikes, it is not worth worrying about.  The more I am nagged , the more likely I am to comfort myself for all the dire afflictions awaiting me by gobbling a few more squares of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, to hell with the transfats.  The knowledge in itself cannot suffice to dissuade, cannot really compete with the intense physical craving, with the pleasure.  In a poignant and melancholy evocation of enslavement to the habit, Clive James, in Smoking, my lost love, recalls: "I tried nicotine patches and kept sticking them on until they joined up at the edges.  I looked like the flesh-pink version of the jade warrior.  There is a book out now which teaches that every cigarette you have from your second cigarette onwards does nothing for you except raise your nicotine level up to what it was.  Possibly so, but in my case it also satisfied a deep longing, the memory of which lingers like lost love.

Reflect on the frivolity of your desires all you wish, but you will never conquer them unless you first admit their urgency".

In an article in The Guardian, tellingly entitled For once, freedom is not the issue, member of the executive board that drew up the report, Peter Kellner, discusses one of the more radical intrusions put forward: "One of our most striking findings is that as many as 77% of the public would support a ban on smoking in cars carrying children under 18.  Only 11% oppose this.  For the great majority of people, the health of children outweighs the freedom of adults to do what they want in their own private space.  Even among smokers, supporters of a ban outnumber opponents by almost two-to-one (48% support, 27% oppose).

As a young journalist in the 1970s I recall covering the fierce debate over whether the wearing of seatbelts should be compulsory.  The ‘freedom’ lobby lost that battle and, more recently, we have had restrictions on the use of mobile phones by drivers.  Now we find overwhelming support for further curbs on what we can do in our cars – only this time the cause, children’s health, has nothing to do with road safety".

What is a car but a home on wheels, an enclosed private space on public roads?  The boundary between public and private will have been breached if the government is permitted to regulate what we do in our vehicles.

As a result of my Mother’s smoking, I suffered from severe bronchitis as a child, terrified to surrender to sleep as I wheezed, the effort of each breath leaving me completely exhausted, sweating and shivering with cold at same time.  In the end my Mother succumbed to emphysema and heart condition well before her time.  Throughout my childhood, the price of delighting in adult company was to be suffocated in a foul fug.  My brother smokes and I don’t.  I was distancing myself from my Mother, perhaps, instinctively rejecting every aspect of her in order to escape her fate.  My exposure to tobacco smoke, far from enticing me into adopting the smoking habit, disgusted me.   Whereas my brother left school without any qualifications, I have post-doctoral academic research and teaching experience.  My brother belongs to the so-called underclass, whilst I am in a reasonably well-paid job.  We had the same parents and the same upbringing (although, as a boy, he was allowed greater freedoms), but our respective trajectories could hardly be more divergent.  Again, I am fairly certain that gender looms large here: I longed to escape and there was only one route available, namely education.  Gaining financial independence was the key to fulfillment.  I mention all this not to boast, but because our example tends to corroborate research results, as noted by John Henley in The Guardian in All puffed out?: "According to Professor Martin Jarvis, a psychologist at University College London and a leading specialist in the field of smoking and health inequality, this is not a question solely of income: every indicator of a lower socio-economic status is likely, independent of each of the others, to predict a higher rate of smoking.  If your educational level is below the average, you are more likely to smoke.  If you live in rented or overcrowded accommodation, you are more likely to smoke.  Ditto if you do not have access to a car, are unemployed, or on state income benefit".

There can be no doubt that smoking is becoming stigmatised through association with low income groups in a moralising climate where looking after yourself becomes a badge of class status.

Handing over to the Heresiarch: "As the proportion of smokers in the population drops, so the antipathy they arouse in non-smokers rises.  They are becoming an unpopular minority; and while restrictions on smoking have thus far concentrated on removing the intrusive impact of the smoker on the non-smoker, as smoking retreats ever further from the public sphere its remaining practitioners may expect to be the subject of more, not less, disapproval.

Here I should admit to feeling somewhat conflicted when it comes to bans on smoking.  I do not smoke, and I never have, bar the odd after-dinner cigar in my student days (is that still allowed?)  And, from a selfish point of view, I welcome the ban on smoking in public places.  A world without smoking is a far nicer place: it smells nicer, it looks cleaner, and it is undoubtedly healthier.  Smoking is not a ‘pure’ issue of health, because it is demonstrably anti-social.  It is extremely unpleasant (whether or not passive smoking is as dangerous as made out) to be a non-smoker in a smoke-filled environment.  Smoke, as the song says, gets in your eyes.  It also gets in your nostrils, in your hair, in your clothes, on your skin, down your throat.  To be free of it is a blessed relief.

My only personal regret, in fact, is that the ban doesn’t go far enough.  the prohibition of indoor smoking merely shifts the problem out of doors.  On a hot, still summer’s day the stale smell of smoke hangs around in parks and on street corners.  Cigarette ends litter the pavement far more than they ever used to.  True, I miss the colourful and imaginative adverts for tobacco; by and large, however, the total elimination of smoking would make my life even better.

On the other hand everything in me revolts against the self-righteous preachiness of the anti-tobacco lobby, their patronising and totalitarian bossiness, their air of paternalistic concern.  And I want to defend the right of people to kill themselves after their own fashion if that is what they so desire.  Most of all, though, I object to the fetishisation of health, the extent to which personal health is surreptitiously equated to personal morality.  As health becomes a secular religion, with doctors and state nannies its priests, smokers are cast as sinners – who must be reformed, re-educated, taught the error of their ways".

New Labour is convinced that "character, as well as behaviour, can be altered by state intervention from above" (Duncan and Edwards, p286), so the party’s appetite for finger-wagging is insatiable.  What we are witnessing at the moment is the politicisation of health.  What it is really all about is funding the NHS: it is so much easier to badger and bully the public than to risk incurring their wrath at an election by introducing a compulsory health insurance scheme along continental lines.  Thus the government dons a mask of false concern, as prevention is cheaper than cure.  We fatties will be the next in line.  Perhaps we can look forward to being deported to fat camps (as if denial of surgery on the NHS were not penalty enough).  We will be sentenced to a diet of rice crackers or Ryvita until those stubborn and unsightly spare tyres melt away.  The nightmare scenario of nurses with tape measures accosting passers-by has already materialised in Scotland, as if in a culture so obsessed with weight and slenderness anyone with a bit of padding could be unaware of the health risks (ignoring for a moment the pressure brought to bear by the multi-billion dollar diet industry).  It isn’t because we don’t know or are too stupid to know, as argued above.

The founding father of the Roundup Tim Worstall in a Spectator piece, Liberal and Liberals, echoes the slippery slope sentiments: "As to a smoking in a car with children in it?  It is necessary to show that harm is actually done before even an attempt can be made to justify it.  (I can already see where they’ll go next.  If you can’t smoke in your car with the kids then why can you do so in your house?)  That’s actually really something of a problem.  For when the UN did the Mother of All Studies on the effects of passive smoking a decade back they found only one statistically valid finding about child exposure to second hand smoke.  That it protected them in later life from lung cancer".

His fears are justified.  Not so long ago Professor Neil McKeganey, head of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, cheerfully advocated breaching the sanctity of one’s own four walls with the same argument advanced by ASH, urging that CCTV cameras be installed in the homes of drug addicts: "’What price should we put on our privacy?’ said Mr McKeganey.  ‘The question is whether we are prepared to say the principle of the privacy of family life is more important than that of child protection.  If we accept that privacy is the most important principle then there will be many more tragic cases.

‘I am aware that this will be controversial but believe the debate needs to be had.  We have become used to the proliferation of CCTV cameras within public spaces.  We have also become used to the idea that those cameras are an effective tool in crime prevention.  What we have not considered though is their possible use in private spaces’".

ARCH (Action on Rights for Children) blog is rightly up in arms at the latest in a series of Database debacles, this time by the Ministry of Defence’s main IT contractor, entailing the loss of a portable hard drive containing the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of those serving in the army, navy and RAF.  In a nutshell, such bungling beggars belief.  As if this were not bad enough, the authors are incensed about: "(…) the 600,000 potential recruits that particularly worry us.  Presumably a fair number of those are still in their teens and won’t discover for a while yet whether this latest data debacle has made them sitting ducks for identity fraud.

For several years now, the US media has been reporting the increasing use by fraudsters of children’s identities.  The Federal Trade Commission points out that they are ‘perfect targets’ because they have clean credit histories, and are unlikely to know what has happened until they open a bank account or apply for credit".

Inevitably, the storms battering the world economy were bound to blow their way through the Roundup.  Bill Jones of Skipper Blog in a concise and eminently readable Credit-Crunch for Dummies-style Who is to Blame for the Crisis? handily identifies the culprits so that we know who to blindfold and shove in front of the firing squads come the revolution: "(…) bankers became transfixed by the ridiculous sums they could make if they acquired sufficient business for their firms.  Close scrutiny and caution – once the hallmarks of bankers – gave way to a desperate desire to acquire that parking space beneath the skyscraper HQ in Wall St or Canary Wharf, for the new Ferrari.  The super-rich thought nothing about spending £100m on new yachts or even private submarines to swank their way around the world’s pleasure spots during vacations or a hugely early retirement, funded by all those bonuses, companies bought and sold".

Or, ahem, on mature reflection, perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty after all: However, there is a problemette here.  There is another group of people responsible and this is a huge one: all those people who exploited cheap money by loading up with chronic debt, which they now find they cannot sustain by further borrowing.  we are all complicit, to a degree, in what has happened and, I’d guess, will have to return to a much more sobre and cautious way of spending from here on.  If you need a mortgage, you might even have to spend an awkward hour or so in the bank manager’s office, as my generation had to back in the 1960s and 70s".

Lynne Featherstone of Lynne’s Parliament and Haringey Diary (winner of the Best Blog, People’s Choice, accolade at the Gender Balance Blog Awards) laments lack of transparency pertaining to the fate of £37 million in Haringey’s Icelandic Money: "I am concerned that no information as to the details of what is included in the investments is being allowed to me or Robert Gorrie (Liberal Democrat Council Group leader).  All the Chief Exec will say is that the problem is ‘manageable’ and that the Local Government Association is acting for all involved councils".

Adrian McEwen of McFilter wonders whether something he spotted in Liverpool might not just have captured the prevailing mood to perfection in A Sign for the Times?

The perfect antidote to all the doom, gloom and despair surrounding the evil effects of the spectacular economic nosedive, is furnished by Justin McKeating of Chicken Yoghurt in the highly amusing Time for some real intervention in the markets, in which he proposes some truly radical measures to gently encourage the stock markets to rally: "If the FTSE share index is not up by 200 points at 1pm, he [the Prime Minister] will promise, five upmarket cars will be chosen at random from underground car parks in the City and fed into the mobile car crushers.  At the same time, the artillery teams will reduce five randomly chosen houses in the broker belt to rubble".

Blogging

Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire draws attention to a snippet of radio of more than passing interest to bloggers, which might otherwise have been consigned to the archives unnoticed in Tom Harris MP Exit Interview: Spending More Time with his Blog.  In it the former Rail Minister alludes to his most notorious post (which, by one of those odd coincidences that make our lives more intriguing, I dealt with in Britblog Roundup 175) and touches upon the dilemma of the extent of self-censorship (which he euphemistically refers to as "discipline") the ministerial role brings with it, whether departing from the stricture of regurgitating bland pap might earn an MP a reputation as a maverick and jeopardise their subsequent advancement: "Interviewer: But there is a wider point about all this, isn’t there?  How much can a politician say?  Here you are, writing your opinions on every subject under the sun in your blog.  Is that almost a self-destructive act now for a politician?

Harris: It possibly is, and I’ll be disappointed if that turns out to be the case.  I mean, I think we need to look again at the way we communicate with the public.  I don’t think the public are remotely impressed, in fact I would say the opposite is the case, by ministers who sound as if all they are doing is reciting a Labour Party briefing paper,  That has no resonance with anyone at all.  You know people want to be reassured that the politicians are normal people, with normal doubts and normal thought processes.  If by writing about my love of karaoke, or my doubts about whether or not I should buy my teenage son Grand Theft Auto IV, if writing about that sort of thing has somehow blotted my copybook with Number 10 – and I’m not saying that that has actually happened – but if that were to happen now or in the future I think that’s a very, very sad day for politics".

Yes, given the sheer vacuousness and self-serving, semi-articulate nature of most of the bilge churned out by politicians masquerading as bloggers, which in my view is entirely parasitical on the medium, I would be forced to agree with Mr Harris’ conclusion.

By way of an aside, at his blog, transport aficionado Christian Wolmar greets the choice of Harris’ successor with resounding approval in Adonis knows his trains: "His two passions are schools and railways, and this is his dream job (…) it is good news that there is someone in the post with a big brain and an ability to think outside the box".

Indeed, it is reassuring to think that an office holder might actually have a genuine interest in their portfolio, enthusiasm an added bonus, as opposed to grabbing whatever happens to be up for grabs to advance their career.

It is gratifying to have some good news for a change, rather than reciting a dreary litany of bullying and censorship attempts…Slugger O’Toole, whose Mick Fealty is the latest addition to the stable of Britblog Roundup hosts, has made blogging history by organising a ceremony (sponsored amongst others by Channel Four, how heartening to see evidence, beyond BBC Radio Five Live’s excellent Pods and Blogs broadcast, that the relationship between the mainstream media and the blogosphere does not by definition have to be poisonous, antagonistic and characterised exclusively by mutual recriminations and sneering-matches, but that collaboration bringing benefits to both sides is possible with a little goodwill) accompanying the inaugural Slugger Awards (the full list of laureates including links here), Promoting a conversational politics in Northern Ireland.

Another positive aspect of the Awards is that they prove political bloggers are not just snarling Rottweilers ready at a second’s notice to rip the throats out of their targets, but are magnanimous enough to give credit where it is due.  Grannymar, who did a superb job photographing the event, usefully explains the significance of the blog for those readers who might not be familiar with it in I was out last night: "Slugger O’Toole has been following Northern Ireland politics since June 2002.  It is the oldest political blog in and about Northern Ireland and is read by Journalists, Political professionals and bloggers with 23,000 unique visitors every month.  Founded by Mick Fealty, it now has a team of regular bloggers contributing to the site.  Slugger O’Toole is a place where the Blogosphere and the main Stream media merge".

Alan in Belfast of the eponymous blog, in The Slugger Awards – for the wee guy and the big names, likewise puts the awards into their wider context: "Northern Ireland’s been a den of online political conversation, debate and bad-tempered argument for a long time.  It’s out of that foundation of dial-up message boards that Slugger was born all those years ago.  It’s produced a space where people already engaged by political goings-on at a local or national level can voice their opinions against the melee of other informed individuals – including those with vastly different views.

Getting the politically informed to talk to each other is a good first step in Northern Ireland, a land where you’re taught from an early age not to talk to strangers about politics or religion.  Sometimes feels that as a consequence of that human advice, God blesses us with unusually notable weather to give us something to chat about!

But Slugger’s become an online watering hole where the less informed and less engaged can hazard an opinion too.  A place where you’ll not get cut down too quickly, and where it’s possible to have an opinion without having to swear allegiance to a particular party.  With a range of contributors, there’s a spectrum of commentary, and plenty of the post authors pitch in below the line in the stream of consciousness comments too".

For a fuller flavour of the atmosphere, Davy Sims of The Original Sims kindly chips in with a podcast.

Many congratulations to everyone at Slugger O’Toole on the flawless execution of a truly excellent initiative!

Miscellaneous

Gwen of High on Rebellion in If we’re all working class, then really none of us are working class, provides a lucid analysis of an elusive and contentious concept.  For an idea that is so difficult to pin down in a watertight definition, we are all quite content to judge a person’s class instantly, using indicators such as body shape and dress before they even open their mouths.  Class, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  Culture may well be an equally elusive concept, but no definition can lay claim to credibility without it (in Formations of Class and Gender, London, Sage, 1997, for example, Beverley Skeggs concentrates on one particular cultural asset: "Respectability is one of the most ubiquitous signifiers of class.  It informs how we speak, who we speak to, how we classify others, what we study and how we know who we are (or are not).  Respectability is usually the concern of those who are not seen to have it.  Respectability would not be of concern here, if the working classes (Black and White) had not consistently been classified as dangerous, polluting, threatening, revolutionary, pathological and without respect.  It would not be something to desire, to prove and to achieve, if it had not been seen to be a property of ‘others’, those who were valued and legitimated", p1).  Ever more subtle gradations of occupation inform the official system for determining social class for the purposes of the census, but non-academic examinations always include an inventory of outward indicators, which will date with dizzying rapidity (I recommend Jilly Cooper’s hilarious Class, London, Mandarin, 1997, with such one-liners as "The wages of synthetic fibres is social death", p52).  This is quite deliberate, as it prevents those without the time, money or cultural resources from keeping up.  This is not mere whimsy, but the enforcement of distance, the  retrenchment of privilege.

Gwen ventures her own insights: "For me, class is about a combination of things – the amount of money a person earns, the amount of money their parents earn(ed), the amount of options they have at a given time, the choices they are able to make, and envision making and generally the lifestyle they are able to lead.  I know that a lot of this is pretty intangible and nebulous, but so is the concept of class".

She then enumerates glaring defects of the classical Marxist approach to class: "So, by my definition your average university lecturer is at least middle-class.  They earn a higher-than-average wage, they’re very well educated and have options as a result of this, and most of the lecturers I know own their own house and their own car and lead comfortable lives.  They may have debt from acquiring their PhD, but they will be able to pay it off without it seriously infringing on their lifestyle.  This is obviously not universal – a single parent, for example, at a low-paying university may not have a middle-class standard of living.  But on average, a university lecturer is middle-class.

However, the radical left in the UK tends to use the orthodox Marxist definition of class, which measure your class by your relationship to the means of production.  So lecturers are working class because they don’t own/run the university.  When my Dad was working as a salesman he was working-class but when my parents ran their own business, we were petit bourgeoisie, even though we actually had more money and more financial stability when my dad was working for someone else.  The people with whom I was talking tried to explain this as an issue of solidarity – there is no solidarity among the petit bourgeoisie.  But, actually, my parents continued to be decent people who treated their employees well when they ran their own business, whereas some of the other salespeople at the company for which my Dad worked were completely unethical and had no issues with exploiting anyone they could.  And it’s not just my parents – my experience of working for small businesses has been positive, whereas my line managers when I worked for a call centre (theoretically, my fellow workers) were very happy horribly exploiting me.

I don’t think the traditional Marxist definition is very useful today, because it erases the genuine economic privilege held by a lot of people who don’t own the means of production.  There is no comparison between lecturers and call-centre workers.  Solidarity is not going to spontaneously appear between those two groups.  Furthermore, it’s not clear that those two groups HAVE much in common.  Is a middle-class lecturer going to vote to increase her taxes to provide cheap housing for a call-centre worker?  We know for a fact that a lot of them don’t".

Accent and dialect present a particular challenge to even the most highly skilled and highly trained linguists.  In a certain institution, new recruit interpreters who had emerged from their universities a little too cocky and overly eager to show off their technical bravado to their senior colleagues were required to undergo the ordeal of the Wee Hughie M initiation test.  A wonderful character with the rich tones of the damp and fertile soil of his homeland, he would furrow the brows of the neophytes with talk of "Sweet a Donny" (suite á donner), leaving the whippersnappers suitably humbled after their salto mortale left them splattered in the sawdust of the ring (there is no safety net in interpreting). Wee Hughie’s most notorious speech concerned the working conditions of tattie howkers in Plenary.  Cue queues of desperate Greeks and Portuguese outside the English booth.  These reminiscences bring me on to Misssy M of The Misssy M Missives‘ delightful account of a Scottish rite of passage in Out in the Fields: "For those of you not aware of country ways (arrr!) and perhaps from non-potato growing regions of the planet (where do you get your chips?), the idea of a holiday in honour of the potato might seem a little strange.  And if that were the truth, then yes, it would be a little strange.  Kind of like Hawaii having a week off to celebrate the pineapple, or Germany having a local holiday in honour of the cabbage.  But the Tattie Holidays are the opposite of what you might think.  Yes, they are holidays from school, but they are holidays in which the children were traditionally released from the classroom in order to bring in the potato harvest".

Swiss Toni of Swiss Toni’s Place expresses his admiration for members of the teaching profession in could that someone be mack the knife? in which he relates an episode in the local primary school where he assist pupils with their reading once a week: "As you’d expect, the kids were teasing each other when they mis-read or stumbled over a word.  It wasn’t nasty at all and was done in good humour by all of them – it was just gentle ribbing.  I was slightly taken aback, though, when the little boy suddenly blurted out: ‘You’d better watch it.  I’ve got a knife and I’m not afraid to use it’.  he didn’t have a knife, of course.  He was six years old and it was said in exactly the same jokey tone as all of the other mild insults they had been hurling at each other all morning.  I don’t think he even knew what he was saying, and I doubt he knew what it meant.  Even so, the fact that he had clearly picked this phrase up from somewhere suddenly made all that recent press coverage about knife crime in schools feel very real".

In a revealing anecdote about how many of us are so numbed by routine that we cease to interact with our surroundings, Susanne Lamido of Suzblog discusses London’s 24 hour bus strike: "Couldn’t believe my eyes when at the local 390 bus stop people in suits were standing there like lemons waiting for a bus obviously to get them to work".  The cause of her amazement becomes clear when you glance at the accompanying photograph of the poster at the stop, which could only have been more conspicuous if it had been in neon.  In spite of being bombarded constantly with information there would appear to be certain rituals (catching the bus) so taken for granted that they become a reflex.

Philip Wilkinson of the magpie’s shining hoard that is English Buildings mourns for an innocence that has evaporated and a world that has vanished in The Map That Came to Life: "On one of our recent visits to a local secondhand bookshop, my wife came across a copy of The Map That Came to Life, a book she read avidly when she was a child.  Written by H.J. Deverson and illustrated by Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life was first published in 1948, and was much reprinted.  It describes how two children (and a dog) go on a walk across the English countryside with an Ordnance Survey map to guide them.  Much of what they find on the way is marked on the map, whose symbols for roads, railways, telephone boxes, tumuli, and so on and on, turn to reality along the way.  The reader, meanwhile, learns how to read a map, and how maps have much to teach us about the world around us.

In some ways the world of The Map That Came to Life does not exist today.  These two children set off on a walk across unfamiliar country with only their map for guidance.  They talk to strangers – who give them fascinating nuggets of local information rather than luring them into dark corners.  Their dog spends most of its time off its lead, rivers and lakes hold no terrors for them, and, of course, this being 1948, they are not much troubled by traffic".

Jonathan Calder of Liberal England was also inspired by The Map That Came to Life to embark upon a highly enjoyable meandering from the textbook, through the Ladybird series and a contemplation of radical nostalgia to the difference between the conservative temperament and the Conservative Party.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by cabalamat at Amused Cynicism.  For everything you ever wanted to know about the Britblog Roundup, but were too steeped in your reticent acculturation to ask, please consult the Britblog Roundup Central website.

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

Welcome to the calamitous edition of the Britblog Roundup made possible thanks to the caving in of a 280 square metre section of a certain ceiling, which sent eight tonnes of rubble crashing down onto the dissenters’ benches (had the Chamber and galleries been occupied, the estimated death toll would have been thirty-five). Amidst the chaos, disruption and abandonment of comforting routine, I invert the customary running order, commencing with:

Blogging and Censorship

It saddens me that on practically every single occasion when I have acted as host of late I have been compelled to include such a section (indicative of a trend, which we must stand up against). Bloggers do not as a general rule enjoy the protection that being on the payroll of a major publication might entail (opportunities for malicious persecution to be given instant publicity, any legal costs of defending against accusations of libel borne by the paper) and our relative vulnerability might appear to render us a soft target for those who wish to muzzle their critics.

A week is a long time in the blogosphere and, I am relieved to report, in this particular instance, we have a happy ending. Although the threat has been averted, the story possesses more than historic interest, as the principles at stake are too important (democratisation of information inter alia). Hopefully the case study will prove a salutary lesson, which might suffice to deter bullies in future (I am an optimist).

By way of a preface, allow me to echo the sentiments expressed by Phil of A Very Public Sociologist in the comments to his Solidarity with Harry’s Place, where he writes: “(…) what really matters to me is that either Jenna Delich or someone acting on her behalf has threatened legal action, action that could possibly see a popular blog closed. If the action is successful how long will it be before other blogs come under attack?”

Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium sounded the alarm in Harry’s Place taken down by host.

I find it truly dismal that ISPs can be so utterly craven, although I realise that ideals are not an essential when turning a profit, and that the relationship between the owner of the server and the blogger is impersonal, its basis a purely commercial transaction. Nevertheless, instant capitulation to the slightest pressure before verifying the truth of the charges levelled strikes me as pathetic, all the more so when you consider that all a determined blogger needs to do is create a back-up version out of the reach of the long arm of British law that cannot be forcibly shut down (which is precisely what happened when the material re-appeared on Blogger in the form of The Jenna Delich Archives).

Snoopy the Goon of Simply Jews pointed out the hefty dose of irony involved in Jenna Delich took Harry’s Place down or coalition of the muzzled burns their strawman: “Aside of the current UK law on libel being ridiculous, there is a supreme irony in the way the two lowlifes mentioned above behaved. These two belong to a small but vociferous crowd of “anti-Zionists” that chronically complain about being muzzled by everyone – from the Zionist lobby to the British Royal Post. And look what have they perpetrated. It will be quite difficult for them to revive their favourite strawman now, I am afraid”.

Returning to Phil for a moment, no blogger can afford to remain complacent, regardless of their feelings about a given site: “Personally, I have very little time for the politics peddled on HP. Warmed over social democracy plus humanitarian imperialism plus trenchant Zionism do not suit my radical palate. But they have as much right to push their rubbish politics as any other blogger, regardless of how distasteful they can be at times. So down with the complaints, the writs and the threats of court action, and away with those of censorious intent. If you’re stupid enough to make the kind of mistake Jenna Delich did, then you should take the blowback on the chin, not scrabble around for a lawyer’s letter”.

Modernity Blog devoted several postings to the issue, carefully setting out the background in depth in Mr Cushman, Sue Me Too, part 1; part 2; The Implications of Silencing Harry’s Place and culminating in a comprehensive demolition of the flimsy plea of ignorance in For UCU Activists – How To Avoid Re-posting from Neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan or White Power Web Sites.

Unity of Ministry of Truth exposes the farcical nature of the whole sorry episode (I can write that with hindsight in the knowledge that the attempt failed) Harry’s Place sued over typo?: “Absurdly, the bone of contention here appears to be nothing more than an errant hyphen. In the article which revealed Delich’s gaffe, HP published a blurry photograph of Delich which sported the caption, “Sheffield-based academic, Jenna Delich – links to far right websites associated with the Klu Klux Klan”, when it should, of course, have read ‘“Sheffield-based academic, Jenna Delich, links to far right websites associated with the Klu Klux Klan”.

The hyphen could be viewed as introducing a measure of ambiguity as to the precise meaning of the word ‘links’.

If you’re minded to take the photograph, and its caption, entire out of its original context then you could, at a stretch, argue that the word ‘links’ may be being used as a noun in the sense of indicating an association between Delich and David Duke, rather than as a verb indicating that Delich had made a connection to David Duke’s site by sending UCU members a hyperlink, in which case you might also reasonably conclude that its takes no small amount of intellectual dishonesty to try to level a claim of libel on the back of [a] premise that [is] so fucking thin it’s practically mono-molecular. The full article is wholly unambiguous in explaining the nature of Delich’s act of linking to Duke’s website and that’s more than enough to make any suggestion that Delich has been libelled a complete nonsense”.

Finally in this brief sampling of reactions, Britblog’s very own Mr Eugenides added his voice to the outcry in Harry’s Place taken down.

It would seem that humility is in short supply in these days of aggressive posturing, sackcloth and ashes are so last century. If you believe you have been misrepresented, issue a refutation, or, if you come to the admittedly unpleasant realisation that you are in the wrong, be honest, admit it. My tactic has always been to ignore my detractors when their utterances are unsubstantiated, relying on readers’ intelligence and discernment to weigh up the plausibility of the evidence after careful examination. Whilst acknowledging that I am eminently fallible, I have every confidence that anyone who takes the time and trouble to examine my words is capable of distinguishing between manifest idiocy, a blatant misreading/distortion and a valid swipe. If the slanders persist, politely engage with them. Or, I reiterate, face up to the unpalatable fact of having committed a grave error and do not compound it with a further error of judgement.

Bullies consistently underestimate one crucial factor: the solidarity between bloggers, which transcends political divisions. Our sheer numbers are enough to tie you up in the courts for more lifetimes than allegedly the boast of your average moggy and the ripple effect ends up doing infinitely greater damage to your reputation than if you had bothered to demonstrate why our allegations are unfounded (though here such a course of action would have been a lost cause). When will the moment of epiphany finally arrive?

Try as he may, Charles Crawford perceives nothing sinister in FCO rules pertaining to what may or may not be disclosed following retirement in Diplomats Gagged: “The problem at the heart of all this is twofold:

• weak Ministers in a weak government annoyed at some disloyal former civil servants’ memoirs, but themselves pouring fuel on the flames by employing their creepy armies of SpAds who hope to cash in when they leave office by throwing around internal gossip
• a serious incongruity between (a) any norms laying down post-career guidelines for publication, and (b) the fact that huge amounts of stuff can be prised from the system anyway via wily Freedom of Information Act applications.

In short, not a sinister attempt to censor until death. Rather the normal muddle of a democratic society”.

As a footnote to the inexorable creep of censorship, Dummies for Destruction in Pants, discusses an alarming intrusion perpetrated by a (now former) member of staff at a major bank (isn’t it morally uplifting to witness such efforts backfiring?). Worth reading for the deliciously wicked retaliation based on a fictitious great-grandmother’s maiden name…

Politics

Cabalamat of Amused Cynicism in OMG, I must be a terrorist! dismisses a guide to suspicious activities with the withering sarcasm it so richly deserves. Indeed, I would have included this under humour because of its sublime idiocy, only I fear the joke is on all of us: “Do you own a computer? Use a mobile phone (particularly a pay-as-you-go one)? Do you own luggage or travel places? Do you own a vehicle, or hire one? Do you own a camera?

If you answered yes to most or all of these questions, then according to a poster put out by the Metropolitan Police, you’re a terrorist suspect”.

The present Government seems absolutely determined to criminalise the entire population with its endless onslaught on our liberties embodied in the DNA database and its plans for ID cards with fingerprints and retina scans. For a dictatorship to function, its lackeys must cultivate an all-pervasive atmosphere of suspicion, intimidating its subjects so that they never dare to speak their minds and do not feel the slightest twinge of remorse at shopping each other to gain advantage. Admittedly I am exaggerating (one major element that is missing for a genuine dictatorship, of course, is the brute physical coercion to extract compliance), but the incremental erosion of our freedoms (which the Hungarians referred to as “salami tactics”), the most glaring of which has been the sanctioning of lengthy periods of detention without trial ought surely to shake us out of our apathy.

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) hosts the Carnival of Socialism.

Harpymarx in Who cares for the carers…? highlights a report from the Work and Pensions Select Committee putting forward proposals about compensating that neglected group for their efforts, to ensure that they are not penalised financially because of failing to qualify for a full state pension: “The cynical would of course forgive you for saying that there looks to have been a degree of electoral calculation. Imagine a Tory election campaign having to tell a chunk of voters that the tax cuts for the rich are going to be funded by their Carers Allowance being cut back. The charitable might say that NL are finally cottoning on what a social democratic government should be up to”.

It is indeed a scandal that their sacrifices have been so assiduously ignored, perhaps because they are women, whose “natural” propensity for nurturing has not been deemed worthy of reward and whose careers are regarded as dispensable anyway?

In a second contribution, Charles Crawford delivers a justly scathing verdict on the flaws and inconsistencies of British foreign policy in relation to the Balkans in Ralph Waldo Emerson On Kosovo/Georgia: “In short, Washington and London were struck by (and yielded to) the intensity of tiny Albanian nationalism, but underestimated the intensity of far mightier Russian nationalism. I warned London myself about this risk several times as HM Ambassador in Poland. To no avail.

In all the weary meanderings under New Labour about the UK’s foreign policy objectives/targets/priorities and (now) Policy Goals, is not this a comprehensive – and unforgivable – blunder of basic professional technique?

Yes.

How will the mass of states round the world react now?

Most will be privately aghast at Russia’s banal power-play to dismember Georgia.

Some may think that this is a reason to move to recognise Kosovo but not Abkhazia and S Ossetia, as a gesture of protest against crass Russian land-grabbing beyond its borders.

But I suspect that the great majority will keep avert their eyes from this shambles, torn unhappily between deriving private satisfaction from the unedifying disagreements between UNSC members on this core international law issue – and fervently hoping that violent separatist urges in their own respective parts of the world are not given new impulses”.

Chive Turkey of Olly’s Onions salvages humour from the otherwise depressing news that overcrowding in our jails is to be tackled by the construction of sprawling institutions, which has been given a nickname amenable to puns in Prison watchdogs, Tartarus residents object to Titan jails: “‘The plan is to have Tantalus unsuccessfully trying to drink water or eat grapes that are always out of his reach,’ National Council of Independent Monitoring Boards president Peter Selby says. ‘And Sisyphus has to roll a rock up a hill for eternity? Health and Safety won’t be happy. Where are the cost-benefit studies on all this?’”

In Class in Modern Britain (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2001), Ken Roberts addresses the phenomenon of politics as one career option amongst many: “There has been a major shift in the relationship between paid politicians and the people. The political parties used to be composed of active members who were broadly representative, in socio-demographic terms, of the parties’ voters. In this sense, the parties represented broad sections of society. Elected representatives gained their positions on the basis of their skill in saying, and putting into effect, what other members willed. But politics no longer works in this way; nowadays the young adults who remain active in politics for years and years tend at least to envisage paid careers as elected or unelected politicians. There are fewer active stalwarts who do not expect such careers, and the activists who become elected representatives in all the parties tend to be from the same social backgrounds – university educated, with subsequent career experience either confined to politics, or in management or the professions.

Today’s politicians are more of a distinct career group, but, even so, they are probably better informed than ever before about the state of public opinion. All the parties pay for regular opinion surveys and run focus groups to ensure that they remain in touch. The leaders want to know, and they are in fact well-informed about what all classes of people are thinking. None want to ignore any substantial sections of the population (…) Election campaigns are now fought through the media. Active members are not as crucial as they once were. Parties that are represented in parliament are able to draw some funds from taxpayers. They continue to need, and to seek, contributions from individual members and supporters, but in practice they rely heavily on corporate sponsorship – from trade unions and business in the case of Labour, and from business alone in other parties. Needless to say, the manner in which grassroots party members are treated, often bypassed, by their party leaders, can only reduce the rank and file’s incentives to engage in long-term political activity” (pp239-40).

Along similar lines, Jeremy Hargreaves roundly rejects the claim that Politicians today have narrower experience than their predecessors? Rubbish: “(…) compared to the politicians of say a hundred years ago, most politicians today have far far more contact with the whole very wide range of people that they represent. If you had written to, say, Churchill asking for help with, say, a piece of casework about, I don’t know, the immigration status of a member of your family, or asked Stanley Baldwin to help you access more benefits from the Government, I don’t think you would have got much help. Compare that to the huge amount of casework which most MPs do for their constituents today, from the articulate complainers to the most genuinely needy, and it’s clear that politicians today have far far wider experience of the issues and problems in the constituency than their predecessors. Certainly no MP today could conceive of getting away with only visiting their constituency only once every few years as its MP (as Churchill did) – and imagine how a candidate would be crucified by their opponents for standing for election in two constituencies in the same General Election (as Gladstone and many others in his day did). Compared to them, someone today who has come straight out of university to spend say ten years as a leading local councillor, has far wider experience of issues, from helping the poorest to dealing with the business world.

Quite simply, the extension of the franchise, reinforced strongly by the campaigning techniques first introduced by the Liberal Community Politics movement of the 1970s and now predominant in all parties, has transformed the relationship between politicians and their electorate, and vastly broadened the experience and understanding of MPs, leading councillors and other elected figures”.

Behind the hankering after a Golden Age when all politicians were patricians as opposed to grubby careerists trespassing in the hallowed halls of Westminster from the lower orders it is possible to detect disgruntlement at the impudent challenge to ancient and entrenched privilege. However, the constraints of dependence on the patronage and favour of the party elite no doubt encourage rigid conformity to central doctrine, the prospect of demotion or ejection stifling personal conviction and principled disagreement.

Decca Aitkenhead’s interview with Alistair Darling in The Guardian, in which the Chancellor set out his gloomy assessment of the state of the economy and little by way of relief for the future, attracted widespread attention amongst bloggers. As a personality, Mr Darling is not exactly charismatic or inspirational, reminding me of his native environment, the wind-lashed, austere island of Lewis with its muted colours of storm cloud grey, peat brown and heather purple, whose inhabitants are renowned for their eschewal of extraneous verbiage, who cringe at the outward display of emotions, purging it from their speech, and for their dislike of excess and brashness (quite laudable traits in some respects and distinctly rare amongst his caste). He appears to have absorbed the humourless impulse of that last bastion of stern observance of Sabbath piety (the swings and roundabouts in children’s playgrounds are chained up on Sundays as the Lord ’s Day is not to be polluted by frivolous distractions and amusements).

This passage in the interview caught my eye: “His wife has moved down to Downing Street, and when they went for a meal with another couple recently, and tried to order a second bottle of wine, ‘the waiter came over and said ‘too much wine’. In a loud voice. So we stuck to the one bottle for the entire meal’. Another meal out with his press adviser was reported in the News Of The World as a decadent affront to struggling families. ‘It’s just the way things are,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘It’s understandable’.

I wonder what it must be like for someone whose career had been hitherto blameless to find himself publicly upbraided by wine waiters. ‘Well, I think most people understand perfectly well that most of the problems they face are international. However, that doesn’t help sell their house. I was at a filling station recently, and a chap said, ‘I know it’s to do with oil prices – but what are you going to do about it?’ People think, Well, surely you can do something, you are responsible – so of course it reflects on me’”.

Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling with his usual alacrity reveals the deficiencies in the Chancellor’s reasoning in Darling: the worst for 60 years?: “1. GDP. This fell 1.3 per cent in the worst four quarters of the 1991 recession. The Bank of England reckons the chances of a repeat in the next four quarters are a roughly two standard deviation event – less than a one-in-20 chance.

2. Unemployment. The consensus among independent forecasters is that the claimant count will rise by around a quarter million – to 1.1 million – by Q4 2009. In the 1981 and 1991 recessions, it rose three times as fast. It rose twice as fast in 1975.

3. Household incomes. Yes, these have been squeezed recently. But independent forecasters expect the squeeze to abate next year, and for real disposable incomes to rise 1.1%. In the worst point of the 1981 downturn, they fell 2%, and in 1977 – when incomes policy bit – they fell 4%.

4. House prices. OK, so these’ll fall. But this means diddly squat. House prices are not net wealth. Many people gain from falling prices.

5.Financial conditions. The stock market has risen in the last few weeks. The All-share’s dividend yield is 4% – slap in the middle of the range (3-5%) generally considered to be a long-run normal rate. People who are staking money on the UK economy, then, don’t think we face a crisis. Contrast this with 1974, when some people genuinely thought capitalism would collapse”.

John Band of Liberal Conspiracy in Bad Chancellor. Bad Journalists, agrees that Darling’s prognosis is faulty: “This is absolute, shimmering, festering poo on a stick”.

Two Doctors in It’s over, darling likewise contest his take, the reality being more apocalyptic than he makes out, understating the dimensions of the problem: “It’s not primarily about a credit crunch. Like the dot com bust before it, we’re seeing the end of a bubble spun up by market players and governments to try and fend off something worse. Its symptoms are grim, sure, but the underlying problem is that we’re well into the dying days of the cheap oil economy, more commonly known as globalisation”.

Chicken Yoghurt laments the inconsistency of Darling’s contradictory statements on former Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander: Respectfully not likeable. Perhaps the Chancellor is shrewder than we gave him credit for, at least as a judge of character (before the somersaults of denial that is).

As the summer slump draws to a close, deprived of ammunition from closer to home, bloggers have been gazing across the Channel for inspiration. James Grieves of Scribo ergo sum cautiously greets the launch of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in A Short Glance South: “At the moment, in fact, that most objectionable feature I can find in it is the name. ‘Anti-capitalist’ is easy enough to do, its presenting a workable, feasible alternative that always proves the tricky part for socialists (revolutionary or otherwise). Committing yourself to criticising capitalism is a far less interesting goal than stating your conviction to present a supplanter system that you will introduce in its place”.

Indeed, dramatic developments across an even larger body of water certainly call for comment, more specifically the selection of Ms Palin (reputedly not as well-travelled as her comic genius namesake, famed for enduring bone-cracking massages from women with the build of retired Olympic shot-putters in Eastern Europe).

Mick Fealty of Brassneck presents a measured review of media reactions to McCain’s running mate in Sarah Palin steals the end of Barack Obama’s Convention.

Speculations abound as to McCain’s motives for choosing her. The Heresiarch of Heresy Corner in First Lady? voices his approval: “(…) if I were John McCain, she is the one who I would have chosen as my running-mate. In fact, she strikes me as not only the right choice, but the only plausible contender – unless there were another 40ish, relatively independent, middle-of-the-road woman available. She isn’t black, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.

To counteract McCain’s negatives, she had to be relatively young, and she probably had to be a woman (though he might have got away with a man who was black or Latino). In a campaign likely to be dominated by visuals as well as visions, it also helps that Palin has the looks of a former beauty-queen”.

He goes on to muse whether McCain has hit upon a cunning means of siphoning off support from the Democrats, particularly those miffed at Hillary having been passed over (I agree it was rather churlish of Obama): “Sarah Palin is everything Joe Biden isn’t: not experienced (but why does she need to be?), not a Washington insider, not an old white guy. To Hillary’s army of female supporters, who yesterday said ‘Yes, we can (just about)’ when asked whether they could, after all, swallow their disappointment and lend Obama their vote, Sarah Palin presents an interesting dilemma. Do they vote for the candidate who promises many of the policies they want to see, or do they vote for the woman? A no-brainer, you might think, especially since Palin’s traditionalist stance on abortion (…) is unlikely to be to the taste of many ardent feminists”.

Cranmer of the eponymous blog positively glows with praise for her in Sarah Palin for vice-president – an inspirational choice: “She is in her mid 40s and really quite beautiful. But it is not for her aesthetic qualities that Cranmer is delighted by the choice (though they help), but because this remarkable women manages to combine having a large family (five children – one with Down’s syndrome) with a successful career, first as Mayor and then as Governor. Her eldest is in the army, and her youngest is still mewling and puking. She can clearly multi-task, being adept at running Alaska, carrying a baby and bringing up a family simultaneously.

And Governor Palin is a Protestant Evangelical Christian. Moreover, she is strongly ‘pro-life’, not like the à la carte Catholic Joe Biden who supports abortion. It will be difficult for any ‘pro-choice’ group to attack her on this, not least because she lives every day with the very real difficulties of bringing up a Down’s child – a child which the vast majority of pro-choicers would have denied the right to life. And not only is she pro-life; she is pro-marriage, hunts, fishes, and enjoys dog sledding and drilling for oil”.

In other words, McCain’s choice is astute rather than smacking of desperation: “And yet while there is a constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state, there is still a very significant contingent – made up largely of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals – who do not believe in the separation of faith and politics. And since, for the majority of these, the issue of abortion outweighs all others, it is most certain that they will now flock to the McCain-Palin ticket.

Barack who?”

Abortion is equally symbolic for feminists. If we were to be compelled to surrender ownership of our bodies to priests or politicians, it would propel us straight back to the Dark Ages. Control of one’s body is fundamental to personal autonomy and, as such, is non-negotiable. As Andrea Dworkin states in Right-Wing Women (New York, Perigee, 1983), abortion is viewed with loathing by conservatives: “Right-wing women regard abortion as the callous murder of infants. Female selflessness expresses itself in the conviction that a fertilised egg surpasses an adult female in the authenticity of its existence” (p32). Indeed, she is quite unflinching in her dissection of the rationale underlying their distaste: “right-wing women accuse feminists of hypocrisy and cruelty in advocating legal abortion because, as they see it, legal abortion makes them accessible fucks without consequence to men. In their view, pregnancy is the only consequence of sex that makes men accountable to women for what men do to women. Deprived of pregnancy as an inevitability, a woman is deprived of her strongest reason not to have intercourse. Opposition to birth control is based on this same principle.

Right-wing women saw the cynicism of the Left in using abortion to make women sexually available, and they also saw the male Left abandon women who said no. They know that men do not have principles or political agendas not congruent with the sex they want. They know that abortion on strictly self-actualising terms for women is an abomination to men – left-wing men and right-wing men and grey men and green men. They know that every woman has to make the best deal she can. They face reality and what they see is that women get fucked whether they want it or not; right-wing women get fucked by fewer men; abortion in the open takes away pregnancy as a social and sexual control over men; once a woman can terminate a pregnancy easily and openly and without risk of death, she is bereft of the best way of saying no – of refusing the intercourse the male wants to force her to accept. The consequences of pregnancy to him may stop him, as the consequences of pregnancy to her never will. The right-wing woman makes what she considers the best deal. Her deal promises that she has to be fucked only by him, not by all his buddies too; that he will pay for the kids; that she can live in his house on his wages; and she smiles and says she wants to be a mommy and play house” (pp103-4).

I for one hope that disillusioned Hillary-ites won’t vent their frustration in a protest vote that would end up doing more harm than good and side with Zhora Moosa of The F-Word in The ‘race’ is on: “Is it more important to have a woman, any woman, in the White House than a pro-choice President that is a man? No. Don’t do it America – a woman does not a feminist politics make!”

Gene of Harry’s Place in John McCain’s disturbing choice wisely counsels us to take a long hard look at whom Ms Palin associates herself with, more particularly the extent of her involvement in the 1996 Pat Buchanan campaign. As I tend to give American politics a body swerve, the article’s link to the Anti-Defamation League’s record of the nauseating bilge Mr B has spewed over the years proved as illuminating as it was revolting. I will confine myself to quoting his views on gender as published in the Washington Times in 1983: “Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism…The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is”.

Culture

In the light of the vigorous resurgence of militancy amongst the religious, full marks to cabalamat of Amused Cynicism for reminding us that the Bible is not all shepherds, mangers, angels, lambs and doves, but that, far from being timid or evincing compassion for the frailties of His creations, the Old Testament God is vengeful, bloodthirsty and eager to mete out terrible punishments for disobedience in A great book for Bible studies. What Christianity (and monotheistic religion in general) boils down to is regulating, or more accurately, suppressing female sexuality and handing over control of fertility to men, coupled with the denial of full humanity to women. The not so glad tidings can be summarised as subordination and inferiority as divine design (against which struggle is mere folly and wasted energy), the systematic oppression of women expressing the “natural order”. As the no-nonsense illustration shows, men are more than willing to enforce their domination through violence in the face of female disobedience.

Given that it exposes scriptural teachings in all their nonsensical ugliness, I wholeheartedly endorse cabalamat’s conclusion: “This is just the sort of book that ought to be used in compulsory religious education lessons in schools” (for further excerpts I recommend Hemant Mehta’s source piece at the Friendly Atheist).

Continuing on the theme of religion and its implacable hostility towards women, Natalie Bennett of Philobiblon introduces us to Gary Macy’s The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West in The other story of Abelard and Heloise. The Church’s pathological unwillingness to concede any semblance of authority to women as manifested in the controversy over women’s ordination is nothing new: “And, Macy adds, Abelard was far from alone in this in his time, but by the end of the 12th century, the memory of women’s ordination was being written out of church history. One of the early proponents of the “it never happened” school was Rufinus, writing between 1157 and 1159, who defined “real ordination” as ordination to the altar and everything else as mere commissioning to a job. Consequently, Macy concludes: “In one of the most successful propaganda efforts ever launched, a majority of Christians came to accept that ordination had always been limited to the priesthood and the diaconate and that women had never served in either ministry”.

In a delightful essay Roy Booth of Early Modern Whale demonstrates that a rodent famed for its drowsiness was firmly ensconced in the English imagination long before dozily popping its head out of a teapot in The early modern dormouse. One of many fascinating quotes pertains to their use in remedies for a variety of ailments. Glad that medical science has advanced since it was penned in 1607 (I for one certainly prefer the contemporary hearing aid): “A live Dormouse doth presently take away all warts being bound thereupon. Dormyse, and field-mice being burnt, and their dust mingled with honey, will profit those which desire the clearness of the eyes, if they doe take thereof some small quantitie every morning. The powder of a Dormouse, or field mouse rubbed upon the eyes helpeth the aforesaid disease. A Dormouse being flayed, roasted and anointed with oil, and salt, being given in meat, is an excellent cure for those that are short winded. The same also doth very effectually heal those that spit out filthy matter or corruption. Powder of Dormice, or field-mice, or young worms, being mixed with oil doth heal those that have kibes on their heels, or chilblains on their hands. The fatte of a Dormouse, the fatte of a hen, and the marrow of an Ox melted together, and being hot, infused into the ears, doth very much profit both the pains and deafeness thereof”.

Chris Partridge of Ornamental Passions acquaints us with the architectural splendours of Southwark Health Centre, Walworth Road SE1. The motto above its main entrance proclaims “The people’s health is the highest law” – if only today’s NHS would take this injunction to heart!

That stalwart of the Britblog Roundup Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England once again shepherds us in the direction of a hidden pearl, more specifically, a baptismal font in St Mary’s, Wellingborough, so exquisite that even the most hard-hearted of unbelievers would be cured of their affliction at the mere sight of it in Atheists and Dolphins.

Whereas no human artefact could induce me to genuflect in worship of an invisible oppressor, if you must insist on a deity, then Mr Ashley’s vision (supporting Durkheim’s thesis) pottering about and generally minding his own business is less harmful than many other contenders: “(…) my God is tending his Gertrude Jekyll-style cottage garden, his snowy white locks disguised under a Panama hat, occasionally mopping his brow with a big red-spotted handkerchief. Whenever a motorbike roars noisily by his front gate the rider mysteriously falls off at the next bend”.

The ever-enjoyable Camden Kiwi casts an expert eye over Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, the Movie.

Jonathan Calder of Liberal England reminisces about memorable performances at the Festival at the Edge in Polly Bolton: Call of the Siren with a helpful clip from Youtube for those of us unfamiliar with the singer.

Feminism

Louise Livesey of The F-Word laments how the results of a survey of 1,527 people conducted by the Yorkshire Building Society carried out as a vehicle for advertising an insurance product were contorted by the Daily Telegraph to suit its political agenda in Gender Role Research Misrepresented (again – yes I know we shouldn’t be surprised.

The source piece at easier.com attests to the longevity of traditional concepts concerning appropriate gender roles: “Gender stereotypes are alive and well with research showing the top three things most valued by men in their partner being domestic tasks, namely, taking care of the home (44%), cooking (39%) and cleaning (33%). Women, on the other hand, most value good listeners (41%), financial stability (38%) and their partner being a great parent (27%). Domestic tasks appear further down the list with only 12% of women relying on their partner to do the cleaning”.

I share Louise’s dismay that men’s priority is for a live-in skivvy to provide for their comfort.

Penny Red cogitates on the reasons behind the rise in demand for penis enlargement surgery in Eeep: “It’s not only the mentally ill who mutilate their genitals in private: you can pay a surgeon to inflict far more radical damage, a snip (literally) at £3-12,000. I’m talking, of course, about the booming industry of surgical penis ‘enlargement’, the nearest male equivalent to labiaplasty. We’ve all had versions of those relentless spam emails, offering in poor English to furnish us with a magnificent schlong for the price of a university education. Well, they keep coming because some people keep clicking – millions of anxious men and boys, in fact, all over the world, every day.

Yes, it’s fucking political. Male sexual neurosis is massively damaging, to feminism, to society, and to men themselves. This is not male apologism, or backsliding, it’s one feminist’s request for more discussion of a damaging socio-sexual taboo, in the context of a blog post in which I get to shout ‘COCK!’ a lot.

There, I’m glad I got that out of my system”.

Commercial exploitation of anxiety about inadequacy, literally not measuring up, now blights the lives of men as well as women: “The cultural markers of femininity are worn like a cloak and meticulously judged – from breasts to width of the waist and hips to degree of ‘curviness’ to hairstyle to set of the face and features. For men, only one specific part of the body is sexualised, and it’s kept under wraps, endlessly mythologised and certainly not featured in any fashion spreads. Feminists might argue that because women’s whole bodies are inevitably sexualised, men have it easier. Those feminists are right: men do have it easier. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t get a raw deal too – where little girls grow up seeing examples of perfect sexual bodies plastered everywhere they look, little boys experience the opposite – the cock is spoken of in hushed tones and never revealed, fictionalised, aggrandised, reduced to a few furtive glances in locker-rooms and arcane priapic symbols scrawled on playground walls and toilet cubicles”.

Miscellaneous

Reynolds of Random Acts of Reality provides a taxonomy of suicides in If They Hadn’t Woken, which alerts the reader to a slightly macabre anecdote from Area Trace No Search, recounted in Ambos and Tea Spots: “Both of the ambo lads were paramedics, who usually work on the solo fast response cars. One night shift in the very early hours of the morning, they had parked up by the river next to each other for a chat and a cup of tea, whilst waiting for the calls that never came.

Of course, warm drink, heaters on, both of them fell asleep.

As one of them described it “The next thing I know, a pissed wailing banshee is hammering on my window and screaming at me”’.

Kate Fox, in her brilliantly funny examination of our foibles and deficiencies, Watching the English (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2004) deems our recourse to choreographed exchanges highly instructive: “Social dis-ease is a shorthand term for all our chronic social inhibitions and handicaps. The English social dis-ease is a congenital disorder, bordering on a sort of sub-clinical combination of autism and agoraphobia (the politically correct euphemism would be ‘socially challenged’). It is our lack of ease, discomfort and incompetence in the field (minefield) of social interaction; our embarrassment, insularity, awkwardness, perverse obliqueness, emotional constipation, fear of intimacy and general inability to engage in a normal and straightforward fashion with other human beings. When we feel uncomfortable in social situations (that is, most of the time) we either become over-polite, buttoned up and awkwardly restrained or loud, loutish, crude, violent and generally obnoxious. Both our famous ‘English reserve’ and our infamous ‘English hooliganism’ are symptoms of this social dis-ease, as is our obsession with privacy. Some of us are more severely afflicted than others. The dis-ease is treatable (temporary alleviation/remission can be achieved by using props and facilitators – games, pubs, clubs, weather-speak, cyberspace, pets, etc. – and/or ritual, alcohol, magic words and other medications), and we enjoy periods of ‘natural’ remission in private and among intimates, but it is never entirely curable” (pp401-2).

Swiss Toni of Swiss Toni’s Place recalls his experiences of the politeness reflex, avoidable interactions and the pitfalls of allowing oneself to become ensnared by small talk in It’s a fashion that we follow that we should be forgetting… I am sure we can all empathise with: “I sometimes find myself having terrible dilemmas when I see people that I vaguely know standing in a queue that I’m about to join. If I join the line behind them, then small talk is inevitable because horrible, awkward, forced small talk is clearly much better than blanking someone and pretending that they’re not there. This happens quite a lot at work, and I have to say that I will quite often delay my coffee for 5 minutes just to avoid a mildly uncomfortable social situation. It’s ridiculous. I know it’s ridiculous, but there you go”.

Anne of I like takes us on on nostalgia-filled visit to the Museum of Brands and Packaging, in a charming and lavishly illustrated evocation of the days of hallowed memory when dire warning labels and nutritional analyses did not take up half the packaging of anything we were likely to ingest in Brands R Us, which I am sure will strike a chord with many of my compatriots: “It’s funny how the merest glimpse of a product can take you back decades. For me it was the sight of Mackintosh’s Toffee Cup which I used to love. Seeing it through the glass I was instantly transported back to childhood, going to the paper shop to buy one, unwrapping the thin foil and biting into it. The toffee was really light and thin and would make giant toffee deathslides when you took a bite. It was more delicate than a Cadbury’s Caramel so I used to kid myself that I was quite refined eating one, probably with a can of Top Deck to wash it down”.

Jason Cobb of onionbagblog warns us that the upsurge of interest in cycling prompted by the Olympics can have its drawbacks in Crash Course. Although the main focus is on the absence of track etiquette among the “Beijing boys”, I was amused by the revelation that beneath the eco-friendly, quiche-munching, sandal-wearing façade, even cyclists succumb to petty rivalries: “Welcoming new riders to Herne Hill is all very well, but as with most sports, there is both a competitive, and snob factor on show. Especially so in cycling, where in all honesty, it really is All About the Bike.

The hired frames from the Herne Hill lock up stand out from the hand crafted, titanium track bikes. And then there’s the lycra…”

Ooh err!

To close with a smile, diamond geezer’s hilarious tips for the advanced procrastinator, lists 100 unproductive activities. A snippet ought to be enough to whet the appetite: “(…) watch a DVD, watch all the DVD extras, watch the DVD again with director’s commentary”. Or: “(…) flick through all the channels on Sky and end up watching a carpet cleaner infomercial because there’s nothing better on”. Or: “(…)check your email, check your email again just in case, have sex (n.b. side effects may include keeping you busy for an additional 20 years)”.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon. As usual, please submit your nominations to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

Welcome to the 175^th Britblog Roundup, the post-solstice, summer sunshine edition with the nesting birds chirping all around, the lilac’s glory browned to make way for the buddleia. The capital has become a more hospitable place once again, the barbed wire barriers with their cruel spikes cleared away, the police have swapped their riot gear and shields for a uniform less redolent of conflict, the fuel price protestors have retreated, anger vented, as have the heads of state and government. Most nominators, it would seem, are out replenishing their vitamin D levels as are many bloggers, whose wise and witty words would normally be presented for your perusal, so, rather than detaining you in front of your computer screens in rooms with the shutters down, this will be a review “lite”.

Politics

Jonathan Calder of Liberal England weighs up his party’s strategic options in Press barons, by-elections and David Davies, which draws an interesting parallel to a similar situation in 1916.

Subtle thinker Tim Worstall takes simplistic thinker Caroline Lucas to task for the logical inconsistencies in her stance that global competition should be jettisoned in favour of global cooperation: “Err, she’s obviously entirely unaware of the fact that the market itself is the most glorious example of human co-operation: not just tens of millions, hundreds of millions, but billions of people co-operate right around the world to bring you the things that you use in your life.

Quite seriously, any and everyone who has bought a metal halide light bulb anywhere in the globe in the past decade has relied, in part, on a small group of Kazakh uranium miners and the work they did in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, just about anyone who has driven down a road lit by street lamps has done so”.

Bill Jones of Skipper responds with good-natured humour and insight to two articles lambasting the civil service by Anushka Asthana and Alasdair Palmer in The Civil Service, Rockall and Government Competence by recounting a Homer Simpsonesque “Doh!” moment.

The criticism levelled against the Unseen, Unaccountable Unsackables to the effect that we are pathologically risk-averse is quite accurate. This ailment malignantly metastasises with incredible rapidity until your entire system is terminally riddled with it. The steady progress up the hierarchy dulls the mind, extinguishing any flair and stifling originality of thought. As Mr Jones so astutely points out, the anonymised little cogs in the vast machine are not encouraged to see beyond the tip of their noses, focusing entirely on following the instructions issued to the letter, never quite grasping the bigger picture: “My little contribution dates to the roll call of incompetence dates back to 1972 when the then Conservative government decided to reinforce British sovereignty over the island of Rockall(see picture) by installing a navigation beacon atop of it. The job of organising the expedition was given to a very junior trainee Sir Humphrey by the name of ‘Jones, DS5′: i.e. me”.

KT Dodge of the eponymous blog celebrates the Rethink on co-payment rules for NHS.

Unity of Ministry of Truth makes profitable use of the publication by the Department of Health of its annual statistics (conveniently summarised here by Louise Livesey) on abortion to savage Nadine Dorries in Mad, Sad and an utter Hypocrite. There are many reasons to commend this exemplary exercise in debunking, but one passage in particular, concerning the hymen-fixation common to many faiths seemed particularly apposite: “Nad’s prescription is the usual nonsense about bombarding teenagers with moral homilies on the subjects of marriage and virginity, an approach that not only doesn’t work but, when taken to its logical conclusion, i.e. abstinence-only sex education, has actually been to have a distorting effect on sexual behaviour in teenagers.

The study most often cited as having demonstrated the efficacy of abstinence-only education is ‘Promising the future: Virginity pledges and first intercourse [Bearman, P. S. & Brueckner, H. (2001) American Journal of Sociology, 106, 859-912.], which continues to be held up as proof of the value of such education despite its ‘headline’ findings having been challenged and soundly overturned by more recent research. However, what is most interesting about this study is not those findings that supporters of abstinence-only education chose to publicise but a number of findings that they chose to avoid mentioning at all cost, not the least of which being this observation:

‘An abstinence movement that encourages no vaginal sex inadvertently encourages other forms of alternative sex that carry a higher risk of sexually transmitted disease’

What the study found is that girls who has received abstinence-only education, and particularly those who taken virginity pledges, were up to six times more likely to have engaged in oral or anal intercourse than girls who have received conventional sex education – only 2% of the non-pledge group indicated that they’d consented to oral or anal intercourse during the period covered by the study compared to 13% in the pledge group. These findings were broadly supported by 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that 55% of girls who had taken a virginity pledge admitted taking part in oral sex while 50% of those in the 15-17 age group considered that oral sex did not compromise their pledge of abstinence”.

In the dim and distant days when my judgement was impaired by the affliction of religion (the particular strain that infected me being born-again, charismatic Christian fundamentalism, difficult to credit though that may now seem), I was taught that all forms of sexual activity outside God-sanctified marriage were sinful. Now, apparently, as long as the holy hymen isn’t rudely torn like the curtain protecting the sanctuary, you are still modestly “saving yourself”. Thus the refrain for the generation brought up in the Internet age has been modified to suit the Bill Clinton School of classifying intercourse as penetrative vaginal sex only: “Jesus still loves me, yes I know, for the pornographers tell me so”. I agree with Unity, this really is quite nauseatingly hypocritical.

At this juncture I have a confession to make: I would never voluntarily read a politician’s blog, though I do take my duties as host seriously (the Britblog Roundup’s editorial policy is set out succinctly here). As ideologies converge politicians become ever more blandly interchangeable irrespective of nominal party affiliation. Whereas it can credibly be argued that any blog is little more than a self-promotional tool for its author there are differences of degree and I cannot help but view the politician-blogger as parasitical upon this mode of expression. The relentless and wearying clamour for attention is a professional imperative, akin to the “publish or perish” commandment for the academic: out of sight is out of mind, out of votes and out of power. This explains their voracious hunger, their insatiable appetite for publicity exacerbated by an unhealthy dose of vanity (though, surrounded as they are by sycophantic bag-carriers aspiring to their exulted position, with their every movement tracked by the paparazzi and the less belligerent interviewers hanging on their every word, this unappealing trait can at least be understood). It may likewise be true that all blogging is an exercise in image management, involving the projection of a carefully manipulated public persona, but politicians already have party spin doctors and spokespersons aplenty at their disposal. Perhaps they are keen to demonstrate that they are net-savvy, wired directly in to the electorate’s concerns, but, really the term bandwagon is what most readily comes to mind.

Which brings me to Tom Harris’ blog, more particularly his musing on happiness entitled Heaven knows we’re miserable now: “In our own country today, despite the recent credit squeeze, our citizens have never been so wealthy. High-def TVs fly off the shelves at Tesco quicker than they can be imported. Whatever the latest technological innovation, most people can treat themselves to it. Eating out – a rare treat when I was a child in the ’70s – is as commonplace as going shopping. And when we do go shopping, whether for groceries or for clothes, we spend money in quantities that would have made our parents gasp”.

He ventures tentatively into the realm of what he deems “heavey [sic] stuff”: “There are more two-car homes in Britain today than there are homes without a car at all. We live longer, eat healthier (if we choose), have better access to forms of entertainment never imagined a generation ago (satellite TV, DVD, computer games), the majority of us have fast access to the worldwide web, which we use to enable even more spending and for entertainment. Crime is down.

So why is everyone so bloody miserable?

Are our crippling levels of cynicism and pessimism simply part of the human condition? Were we always like this? Or is a consequence of the ‘instant gratification society’ that, having been instantly gratified, we must resent the society that manipulates our desires in this way?”

At time of writing, this unremarkable post had attracted 123 comments. Amazing what a few targeted plugs on Radio Scotland and the Today programme can achieve…

To his credit, Harris has endeavoured to strike a “candid” pose, abandoning the more customary evasiveness of his caste (Who could forget the famous 1997 Newsnight broadcast with Paxman badgering Michael Howard, the latter as determined not to give anything away as the journalist was to extract a clear answer?). He has, moreover, kept the comments open, unlike the more cowardly denizens of the corridors of power who plead lack of time to read and react to them…Why bother flirting with the blog format, at all in that case? Surely one of its defining features, beyond instantaneity and (potentially) wide reach is precisely its interactivity – the unique opportunity it affords to really come into contact with the views of the humble voter. Without comments, a politician’s “blog” amounts to nothing more than the Internet equivalent of a glossy propaganda brochure, its opinions as radically airbrushed as the beaming and pristine accompanying mugshot. Very few possess the intellectual calibre or stylistic gifts of a Churchill, churning out soulless and spineless stream-of-consciousness inanities, contributing solely to background chatter in an environment already characterised by chronic noise pollution.

I would primarily recommend this for the comments, which contain a wealth of suggestions for further reading matter alongside the replies to his queries, some more flippant than others. What struck me was the virtual absence of gratuitous insults hurled by that Internet-dwelling species of knuckle-dragger so familiar to bloggers, the troll, the seriousness with which those who took the trouble to offer their thoughts approached the task (a compliment in itself). Perhaps this has something to do with the awareness that the author enjoys some authority (by virtue of holding ministerial office), perhaps because by their own admission many had been nudged in his direction by the BBC (the civility of the tone struck linked to realisation that a wide audience could be expected for the sentiments aired). Even whilst mauling him or articulating their rage, the comments did not stoop to puerile name-calling, expounding their positions at length and with careful thought. I cite Louise as an example: “I’ll tell you why people are so bloody miserable because they literally cannot afford to live. Every day is a struggle. I don’t have high-def TV’s or two cars outside my house. I don’t even have one car. I am a sick single mum of 2 boys, one who is 13 and one who is 9. My 13 year old is sick too but the DSS refuse to pay his DLA saying he isn’t sick enough yet because of his illness my expenses are increased not double but triple. And because I have an illness that requires special investigation at St Thomas hospital, I have to travel from Liverpool and the DSS refused to cover my accommodation and taxi fare expenses and subsequently I have had now had to cancel two appointments. I am on income support and child tax credits. I am not on DLA. I don’t drink or smoke. The last time I socialised with friends was in October last year. Yes I have high speed internet access and struggle each month to pay it. You know why I have high speed internet access? Because both my sons’ schools require it. Both children’s homework is put online. If they don’t have high speed internet access they don’t get their homework done and then land up in trouble. And I’m sorry but they have so much homework to be sat in a library every night. I have gone without food so my children have food. I have had to scrimp and save just so my children can have a haircut. My son’s birthday has just gone and he got a £20 present. Luckily my son understands my financial hardship at the moment and knows that when I am healthy again I will make it up to him. So before you go around making comments about people being better off than before because they can afford High Def TVs at Tescos (oh yeah some of us can’t afford to shop at Tescos either) you should take a look into the real world and not just at your surrounding friends, family and colleagues”.

Blogging and Censorship

Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes, all providing input to the chaotic and colourful variety that distinguishes the Internet from all other information sources, from teenagers posting YouTube clips and gossip about classmates in cryptic text-messaging-style slang through to ambulance drivers, magistrates and, as we have seen, politicians. 112.8 million blogs are registered on Technorati alone. Newspapers, television channels and product-peddlers alike have all latched on to the popularity of the World Wide Web and its immense revenue-generating potential. Indeed without an Internet presence a company might as well not exist.

As with all creative output, it is incumbent upon the consumer to sift the wheat from the chaff, to discard the dross in favour of the worthwhile or the entertaining. A modicum of discernment, a bare minimum of mental application is required, yet we take being in possession of more than an ounce of common sense for granted, and do not as a general rule look consider ourselves as ignorant dimwits unable to tell the difference between the Financial Times and the Sunday Sport as repositories of accurate reporting. No public health warning needs to be printed on the front page for us to apply our critical faculties to the publications. The political class is remarkably unwilling to concede even this much to us, however, as evinced by the draft report from the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament on concentration and pluralism in the media, rapporteur Marianne Mikko (PES, Estonia). It is important to emphasise that this document has not been adopted in its definitive version (it will be voted on in the part-session in Strasbourg in July). It can still be amended and the passage about blogs removed. Moreover, as Jon Worth of Euroblog notes, it is a recommendation, not a piece of binding legislation like a Directive or Regulation.

Recital O reads: “[W]hereas weblogs are an increasingly common medium for self-expression by media professionals as well as private persons, the status of their authors and publishers, including their legal status, is neither determined nor made clear to the readers of the weblogs, causing uncertainties regarding impartiality, reliability, source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits”.

Paragraph 9 makes a proposal to remedy this unhappy state of affairs: “Suggests clarifying the status, legal or otherwise, of weblogs and encourages their voluntary labelling according to the professional and financial responsibilities and interests of their authors and publishers”.

In the news article entitled User-generated content and weblogs – a new challenge [a markedly toned down version compared to the offensive original: Malicious bloggers under scrutiny in new report] on the Parliament’s website, Ms Mikko is quoted as saying: “‘[T]he blogosphere has so far been a haven of good intentions and relatively honest dealing. However, with blogs becoming commonplace, less principled people will want to use them’”.

When asked whether she considered bloggers to be ‘a threat’, she replied: “‘[W]e do not see bloggers as a threat. They are in position, however, to considerably pollute cyberspace. We already have too much spam, misinformation and malicious intent in cyberspace’”, adding, “‘I think the public is still very trusting towards blogs, it is still seen as sincere. And it should remain sincere. For that we need a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why’”.

As the likes of Janet Street-Porter is only too eager to sneer at regular intervals (when her muse has temporarily abandoned her), the vast majority of bloggers are not journalists. Nor are they professional writers in the sense of deriving their primary or sole source of income from the activity (though many display infinitely more talent than deadline-harassed, unreflective payroll hacks and the works of authors whose words are reproduced on dead trees rather than in pixels). Nor would journalists want us to be placed on an equal footing, as this would simultaneously bolster our challenge to their authority and further undermine their claim to superiority.

The issue of what would be classified as “malicious” blogging is deeply worrying. Even if lawyers pore over the minutiae of a definition with the most pedantic obsessiveness they will not be able to cover every conceivable eventuality, to preclude the possibility of abuse by a vengeful politician smarting from a perceived slight. However, this is beside the point. The freedom of speech ought to be sacrosanct. We should not allow anyone to chip away at it under the pretext of protecting the gullible and the guileless. We should not permit anyone else to do our thinking for us, to dictate to us what we can and cannot read and we certainly should not hand the authorities a mandate to indulge in the totalitarian surveillance of every “rambling”, “muttering” or “rant” to use but a few of the labels bloggers self-deprecatingly employ to describe their sites.

The parallel drawn between blogs and spam is horrendously ill-informed and betrays quite stunning ignorance. Unlike spam, blog posts are not sent unsolicited into your inbox, a notification of an update only dispatched when the recipient has deliberately chosen to subscribe to a feed. As for cyberspace “pollution”, there are plenty of commercial blogs out there unscrupulously masquerading as personal online diaries, yet reading a line or two usually suffices for the penny to drop and it only takes one click to move away. Nobody can force you to continue reading a blog. If you come across something that offends you, just close the window or, if you are in a more combative frame of mind, engage in discussion via the comments box.

The likelihood of stumbling upon any blog is limited by search engine ranking, condemning most bloggers to quiet, unassuming obscurity, perhaps dreaming of being “discovered”. As for the “malicious” nature of their content – how does the Internet user find any site? By entering certain terms. Instead of launching an unprovoked and unjustifiable attack on bloggers, why not clamp down on the pornographers who exploit the propensity to misspell certain web addresses? I recall the horror of being directed to the Palace of Pussy with images more graphic than you would expect to see in a gynaecologist’s examination room by typing hotlail instead of hotmail to the great amusement of my colleagues.

And, on reliability, although columnists might have lost out to more skilful commentators online, the major newspapers have been anxious to preserve their market share by reaffirming their authoritative status. Bloggers have not yet won the battle to be taken seriously (although the irony of this report is that it does, albeit in a backhanded and negative way). To return to the example given earlier, who is the reader more likely to place their trust in, the FT, Dave from Dagenham or Sadie from Scunthorpe’s diary? True, you could retort that it very much depends on what the reader is looking for.

As Clairwil (amplifying the alarm bells set ringing in The Devil’s Kitchen, and I sincerely hope that his prediction “I absolutely guarantee that the EU will attempt to constrain blogging at some point. Apart from anything else, these bastard control freaks cannot bear to leave anything unregulated”, does not come true) pertinently asks in Please Tell Me This is a Prank: “Exactly who will be dishing out this ‘quality mark’ and what in Gods name has it to do with the European Parliament who is blogging and why they choose to do so? What will being denied the ‘quality mark’ mean? What happens if you go ahead and blog without it? What relevance is why someone blogs to anyone let alone Marianne Mikko and chums? Why can’t they mind their own bloody business? Does it not occur to them that blogs are seen as ‘sincere’ because they are by and large honest about their views unlike say self-serving politicians for example?”

That last question touches a raw nerve, I suspect. Some readers might prefer to glean information from blogs, regarding us as intrinsically less biased than the official mouthpiece of a corporation, organisation or institution (our much derided “amateurism” not a defect for once, lending us credibility). Who are you going to listen to more sympathetically, the manufacturer who sold you the gadget and has a vested interest in depicting it as the pinnacle of perfection or the dissatisfied (or even satisfied) customer? The sheer mind-boggling blandness of the blogs penned by politicians should act as the most eloquent warning against the imposition of externally imposed standards. Imagine this extended to the blogosphere as a whole. It’s enough to give you the shudders, isn’t it?

Yes, a lot of nonsense is spread about the EU, yet “Brussels” does itself no favours when it adopts an arrogant posture, showing disdain both for the results of the Irish referendum and for its own rules, according to which the Treaty of Lisbon should no longer be a viable proposition, whereas it apparently boasts more lives than your average moggy. No wonder disillusionment has set in. Repressive measures against bloggers are not the way to dispel our doubts. In his explanation of vote (Wednesday 18^th June), Chris Heaton-Harris dealt with the matter with masterful irony: “I am an English soccer referee and I therefore fear every Polish politician in this House who wants to kill such a person. However, I was thinking, after watching the football last night – especially the France-Italy game – that maybe the French team should do what their political masters do and completely ignore the result and turn up at the quarter finals anyway, because that is what we are going to do with the Lisbon Treaty in this place”.

Feminism

Feminist Avatar of the consistently excellent An Open Letter by a Feminist writes on a subject dear to my heart in Housework, in this instance examining the reasons why employing a cleaning lady is problematic.

She explains why, no matter how hard the Happy Housewife brigade try to put a positive gloss – (Mr) Sheen? – on intrepidly donning your rubber gloves to wipe away the most unsavoury of stains they are doomed to failure:“[H]ousework is seen as demeaning as it is women’s work. This, of course, is never explicitly said, but why else would such disgust arise at the idea of doing housework. Housework is not that difficult; it’s not that disgusting. I have cleaned houses for money and would much, much prefer that to, say, to having to bathe and dress elderly people, which is considered to a be a respectable (women’s) occupation. It is far less disgusting than working in an abattoir or cleaning out stables. For the queasy stomached like myself, it is far less disgusting that stitching up gushing head wounds or cutting out people’s hearts. The work is not that physically hard and it is only as demeaning as you are treated. I personally had much more patronising and sleazy employers in retail than in house cleaning. Furthermore, while it is not often recognised, housework is an essential part of the economy. If houses weren’t cleaned and laundry left undone, workers would not be able to go to work in clean clothes, or make themselves food; they would eventually be made ill by bacteria, germs and mould; eventually (ok this would take a while but…) houses would decay and fall down, leaving worker’s homeless. Housework is only considered demeaning because it is something that women do”.

The Chameleon household appears to be in the middle of conducting an experiment to determine quite how long it might take for such decay to set in, with grey cobweb strands dangling perilously close to being sucked into the Hungarian’s nostril as he snores, the dust obscuring my son’s school portrait like an exotic fungal growth and as for the toilet bowl, it is a microbiologist’s paradise – goodness knows how many new strains have developed there since disinfectant was last squirted beneath the rim. This neglect is not so much attributable to scruples as inertia (although I did feel uncomfortable on those rare occasions when my former cleaning lady was mopping the cherry-wood parquet whilst I was sitting around on call). I have never found a replacement for the (white) student whose income we boosted during the transitional stage in her life between leaving school and entering full-time formal employment, assuaging my guilt by making her cups of honey-sweetened mint tea. Most of my colleagues have relied on the services of Polish women long before the 2004 enlargement (the observant eye will notice, driving through the streets of Waffle Central, how many vehicles have number plates from Bialystok, the plumber, or more likely multi-skilled general handyman, long since having ousted the over-priced, sour-faced and unreliable native). For the professional woman who leaves home before her offspring are loaded onto the school bus in the morning and returns long after they have been tucked into bed there is little alternative to appropriating the labour of another woman to act as a stand-in, although this can gobble up a large proportion of her salary. For couples, housework is a minefield to be painstakingly negotiated (the most common male avoidance tactic being to assure his partner that he will indeed do the dishes and resolutely continue slouching on the sofa until the clean plates have run out – and the stack is growing a beard – and she can tolerate waiting no longer, only to be treated to his protestations that he really had been going to get round to it, he was simply otherwise engaged), a cleaning lady a neat way of sidestepping the issue and avoiding arguments.

One of the more radical moments in the recent remake of Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig echoed the scene in Dr No when Ursula Andress emerges like a Venus from the waves, the first time in my (admittedly patchy) recollection that the hero himself had been held up for the kind of admiration as a sex object, which has been the sole purpose of the pouting legion of nubile Bond-ettes. Fleeting though it was, it nonetheless constituted a rare concession to the female viewer.

The dashing secret agent was most definitely a figment of the imagination of the 60s, emerging from explosions shaken but not stirred, testing out all the coolest gadgets (jet packs), wrecking top of the range sports cars with even greater abandon and more spectacularly than the Top Gear team, maintaining his reputation as the Red Baron of sexual conquests when permissiveness was still a novelty and always ready with a devastating riposte in the face of imminent death (preceded by castration by laser beam). All innocent fun?

Abby O’Reilly is prompted by a report in the Daily Wail on the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathic thrill-seeking and callousness and Machiavellian exploitativeness that supposedly combine to make Mr Bond (and his less glamorous emulators) irresistible: “While Ian Fleming’s fictional creation makes for good viewing, let’s not forget that Bond is a character that exists on paper – in novels, film scripts – he is not real. And to list “killing people” as a throwaway interest that apparently enhances Bond’s sex appeal (although I know he does only kill the “baddies”), can’t really be used as a prototype for real life because if such a character were to exist, rolling around the UK, killing those with facial disfigurements, disabilities, penchants for cats and clear psychological disorders culminating in their desire to take over the World, then I’m sure, aside from the fact the recruitment process for the Civil Service would be brought into disrepute, he would be arrested. He would be considered a psychopath. (Plus, wasn’t his throwaway babe attitude towards women and relationships fostered by the fact he was burned by a woman who betrayed him? Isn’t he just a man launching an assault on the female sex in order to prevent himself from getting hurt once again? And did this revelation make Bond less attractive?) I’ll stop being facetious and will try to look at this logically, and assess the attributes with which Bond is invested that can be transferred to the everyday man. OK, he’s independent, confident and saturated in self-belief. He’s a charmer, intelligent, and isn’t afraid to use violence if the situation presents itself, and always wins. If you were with Bond and some other cheeky young scamp tried to woo you or feel you up you know JB would have him by the nuts. While you’re with him and he wants you, he will treat you with respect, albeit superficially. He considers women as nothing more than disposable goods, while at the same time treating the one he is with as the most beautiful sensual thing ever to exist. Other women envy you when you’re with him, but can’t handle him themselves. Sounds good and bad, no? So what’s the problem? Well, he doesn’t really mean it. He is ruled by his desire to get laid, to conquer, to be the first to have the stand-offish stunning woman who everyone wants but only a few will get. Is it true that we want strong men, men who will take what they want when they want it? Do we really want to loose control? And by default, do we find something gratifying about being treated badly? About pouring our heart and soul into a few clumsy encounters with a man we adore, only to be tossed aside like a dirty old porn mag? Or rather to we like the bad boys because we hope upon hope that somehow we will be able to change them? We hope that he will become so enamoured with us that he will be forced to change his wily ways – he’ll simply be unable not to, and in this respect is it not our own vanity that comes into play?”

I am the wrong girl to ask – my first crush was on the sensible, Val Doonican cardigan-wearing look-alike Virgil Tracy of Thunderbirds fame (yes, I even had the wallpaper!) rather than his show-off brother Scott and, tarrying for a moment longer in the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson universe, the dangerously masculine Captain Black with his menacing stubble was never able to compete for my affections when his clean-shaven adversary Captain Scarlet was around.

Miscellaneous

To conclude, a beautifully crafted contemplative essay on learning the lessons of empathy and forgiveness by Deek Deekster of Blog of Funk, Annie’s Horses: “Another [thing the author knows] is when I should stand up to an accuser. Sometimes, I just need to remind myself not to give a flying fuck, no matter how intrusive, misguided or hateful the words, and to remember that whatever it is that weighs them down need not be any major concern of mine, however bad I might be already feeling about my own sins, past or present, real or imaginary, connected to them or not. Another one is that sometimes, no matter how innocent you actually are, or whether you meant to do harm, you should simply apologise if harm was the outcome”.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Susanne Lamido at Suzblog. If you are interested in keeping track of the hosting rota or in perusing the text archives, please consult (and bookmark) the Britblog Roundup Central site. As ever, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

Welcome to the hot, sticky, sweaty edition of the Britblog Roundup spread out for your delectation like a tablecloth on a perfectly mown lawn covered with a wicker picnic basket’s worth of naughty indulgences. The sap is rising along with the temperature and trees and shrubs everywhere shamelessly flash passers-by, intoxicating them with the heady perfume of their lust…

Enough of such distractions, let’s get down and dirty with the more serious business of the week…

Politics

Allow me, by way of a preface, to quote from a non-blog source. In Short Cuts (London Review of Books, 10^th April 2008) John Lanchester contemplates the notion of a Boris incumbency with a modicum of dread: “Boris Johnson as mayor of London? It’s hard to imagine, and if it happens it’ll be hard to take. I know quite a few people who know him (we overlapped at university) and the general view is that he put on a buffoon mask to become a celebrity, and now he can’t take it off. He’s very ambitious, everyone agrees on that, and he deliberately sought to become famous as a way of furthering his political career. The idea was that celebrity is the currency of politics in the way that money once was: instead of becoming rich before going into politics, as Tories once did (the Heseltine route), the contemporary path to power is first to become famous. Electors are much more likely to vote for you if they know who you are. For someone who markets himself as a bit of a throwback, this is a very modern and very American idea. Johnson is the first British politician to give it a real try.

Johnson’s electoral prospects improve by being viewed at a distance. Not that people don’t like him at close range – they do. Some people think he’s funny, and he clearly enjoys his own schtick, but that isn’t really the secret of his appeal, which is more to do with amiability and the ability to get himself into scrapes in a way which seems endearingly unpolitical. I find him likeable, but I wouldn’t want him to be in charge of Key Stage One at my son’s primary school. Livingstone must have wondered whether to portray Johnson as a serious person and therefore a serious menace to London, or to laugh him off, and let us marinate in the implausibility of Johnson as mayor. So far he’s done the first thing, which is understandable but might be a mistake. Just as 12 years for ken would be too much, Boris is surely unthinkable in a major public office with real executive power”.

Although I admired Red Ken in the 1980s when he appeared to be the only person with the gumption to stand up to Maggie, deftly dodging the lethal swing of her handbag, he fell out of favour with me when he decreed that feeding the pigeons of Trafalgar Square a punishable offence. There may be fewer spatters on the pavements and facades, perhaps it was a bit of a menace wading knee-deep through the ground-strutting flocks that gathered around the old biddies scattering breadcrumbs (not to mention the tourists for whom the experience of feeding the birds meant partaking in a ritual that had passed into the mythology of the city), but the ban served as neat shorthand for all the hectoring, killjoy impulses associated with the Left.

Not that I would seek to reduce the result to performance in front of the relentless and unforgiving lenses of cameras and microphones sensitive enough to pick up on the slightest faux pas, but Ken’s media presence was hardly the most imposing and I cannot be the only outside observer who had long since grown tired of his whiny, snivelly voice. New Labour’s misery was compounded by the drubbing they received at the local elections, a clear indicator of the extent of the disillusionment that has set in, the electorate beyond the confines of the capital likewise throwing out the lumber in a cathartic bout of spring cleaning (Justin Hinchcliffe of Hunter and Shooter speculates on the Red Warrior’s future in Exclusive: Sensational news from the Haringey Soviet!).

Meanwhile, as the furore dies down Quaequam Blog wonders Just how many spoilt ballot papers were there?

There will be no honeymoon period for Boris, I suspect. He will have to shake off his bumbling, fumbling for words tendencies (as commented upon by Arnie in an unguarded moment) and prove that his appointment was not an error of colossal proportions. One of the first tests of political mettle he and his fellow Assembly members will have to face is, as Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium points out in London Tories hint at trouble for BNP, how to deal with the uncomfortable fact of that party having gained a seat. As Andrew correctly notes, Richard Barnes’ response (haughtily refusing to cooperate in finding them the staff to which they – like it or not – are entitled) is calculated to fuel their strategically adopted martyrdom complex (“See what a bunch of snobs they are? They don’t respect their own rules – we were legitimately voted in and yet they deny us the share of the resources to which we have a right. Foul play!”): “Are they trying to give the BNP more publicity? Petty moves like this are just foolish and counterproductive. This also feeds into the BNP mindset that they and their voters are being shut out by the establishment.

These sorts of ideas are why the BNP got more than 5%.

He will press for the Union Jack to be flown permanently over City Hall, for burkas to be banned from public buildings and for official celebrations to mark St George’s Day. He will resist the planned construction of a huge new mosque, the biggest place of worship in Britain, in Newham, East London.

One thing about neo-Nazis is they know how to be populist and talk out of both sides of their mouths. I bet that if you said the above to many people without mentioning the BNP they would agree.

If you want to quell the BNP vote then politicians need to address the issues of the most disenfranchised grouping in Ken’s London…the white working class. They need to be address and made to feel as though people in city hall are actually listening to them. Under Ken any criticisms of his policies were met with charges of one or more isms. The bullying and intimidation of working class whites was palpable.

A city hall sponsored St George’s Day parade would be a very good start.

Boris needs to be a mayor for all Londoners not just the ones who bitch the loudest or have the pushiest representatives”.

Jim Jay of The Daily (Maybe) alerts us to the extremely disturbing news of Frank Ogboru’s death at the hands of police in Another day another death by cop: “What’s clear from the report is that Ogboru was completely calm and presented no threat to the police. They only decided to arrest him when they said he had to leave the place he was temporarily staying on his visit to England, which had all of his things. He was sprayed with cs gas in order to handcuff him, despite the fact he does not seem to have resisted arrest and was then restrained by four police officers who held him face down. Caught on film one officer’s knee is over Mr Ogboru’s neck while his head hangs over the kerb. Despite his cries they continued to restrain this man who had committed no offence”.

This blatant instance of unreasonable force will not be greeted with so much as a slap on the wrist: “These officers will not face prosecution or disciplinary charges despite being caught on film and being seen by dozens of witnesses. Unfortunately this is not the first nor the last time that the Met police will kill unnecessarily. According to the [source article in the Daily] Mirror there have been 501 deaths in custody in ten years – the number of prosecutions? Zero. That’s right my friends, zero”.

Thus another challenge for young Boris and his team becomes immediately apparent: “They often say the police have rooted out much of their racism – and I want to believe them, I can’t believe things are as bad as the seventies – but the evidence points to a very disturbing story of an unaccountable police force who can and do use lethal force without fear of having to properly account for their actions. There’s a long way to go before we have truly accountable law enforcement agencies and with Sir Ian Blair still in charge of the Met, still complicit in shielding his men from the consequences of the deaths they cause, there is little hope that things are about to start changing anytime soon”.

Susanne Lamido of Suz Blog resoundingly endorses Mr J’s swift fulfilment of one of his election pledges in Boris bans alcohol on the Tube: “All I can say is that’s just great. Good on you Boris. It’s so horrible to have to sit with the lager louts drinking on the tube. The smell is bad enough but it fuels shouting and bad behaviour. Very unnerving

Folks are asking how they will enforce it. Don’t think it will be a problem, people will snitch on drinkers I’m quite sure about that. Most people hate it as much as I do. There’s already continual announcements about not smoking over the loud speakers at all stations so now we can expect it to include alcohol”.

This is not, of course, the only promise on which Boris has already begun to deliver, as MayorWatch make clear in Mayor Asks LDA Bosses to Quit and Announces Audit.

One further item on the democratic process pertains to the forthcoming trek back to the polling booths in Crewe and Nantwich. Guido Fawkes positively salivates at the news that ICM Whisper Number Puts By-Election Closer Than Thought: “What will have the mobile phone ricocheting around No. 10 is the startling finding that Labour voters would rather have Cameron than Brown as PM. Gordon is a dead man ranting”. The words of his fictional compatriot Fraser from Dad’s Army must surely be ringing in Mr B’s ears: “We’re doomed, we’re doomed!”

However, as Rupa Huq surmises in The British Cicciolina? journalists might not concentrate on the litmus test for a Labour rout angle with Gemma Garrett of the Beauties for Britain Party in the running…whether you wish to interpret her candidacy as a symptom of the debasement of politics with the intrusion of pseudo-celebrities (ahem, Boris), or a breath of fresh air to blow away the fusty old cobwebs is entirely up to you.

Venturing slightly further afield than the capital, greenman of Greenman’s Occasional Organ provides a date for the diaries for all those seeking an antidote to and defence against rampant global neo-liberalism in IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] To Hold Historic Meeting in Notts: “The IWW continues to grow rapidly in Britain and now has over 400 members in this part of the world. These are organisers in workplaces and communities, some holding dual card membership of existing TUC affiliated unions and long histories of activism. The basic idea of the IWW is to organise industrially rather than by craft or trade and to be uncompromising in rejection of business unionism, bureaucracy and sell-outs. As an organisation based on our common class interest as employees rather than the finer points of political programmes the IWW unites workers with a variety of political viewpoints and all workers are welcome provided they agree to the aims and principles and do not seek to use the IWW for the benefit of their own current or party. This is a refreshing atmosphere for those of us used to the sectarian wrangling of much of the British Left. Unity is strength!”

Sticking with Green issues (well the colour at least matches the verdant splendour of the foliage around us), Molly of Gaian Economics extols the virtues of buying locally in From ethical to bioregional consumption…and production illustrated by photographs of the purchases concerned, a mug and a rather fetching piece of headgear: “For me these items exemplify everything about bioregional consumption. Obviously the first and most important factor is that they are made locally with local inputs. But there is the depth of relationship between me and the person who made the item that fills me with delight every time I have a cup of coffee or go out wearing my hat. Of course for me they are also object lessons which people I meet – unfortunately for them – cannot escape.

Perhaps most importantly of all, they are expensive. In the global economy you seek the lowest price. In the bioregional economy the adman’s slogan ‘reassuringly expensive’ may be a better guide. My rush hat cost £24. Given the amount of work for Sheila in cutting the rushes, preparing them, and weaving the hat this is an absurdly small amount of money. But if it had been made by a Chinese slave it would have cost a fifth of this price. So when you consume bioregionally you will have much less stuff, but it will be of vastly better quality.

It’s not just about consumption; it’s also about production. I came to know Sheila because I am learning basket-making from her. If you are the sort of person who bemoans the fact that there is so little available to buy from local producers you can start by choosing to buy what there is and paying a just price. But the next step is to start making something yourself – the guidelines are that it should be something that is genuinely needed in the community and that you can find the materials locally”.

A mere year or two ago who would have imagined that the subject of rubbish could enflame the passions as much as it currently does? The ubiquitous wheelie-bin has been transformed into a symbol of the struggle for civil liberties, indeed of everything that has gone so badly wrong in contemporary British society, with continuous interference from over-zealous, petty officials and their self-righteous intrusion into every aspect of our personal lives raising the blood pressure of suburb-dwellers behind their privet hedges across the country. That ever-reliable source of indignation, the Daily Mail (or Daily Müll as my German friend aptly calls it, which will be the focus of our scorn soon) seethes with stories of spy chips recording the weight of waste deposited with a view to imposing fines for failing to recycle enough, or cases such as the young bus driver who overfilled his bin by four inches and now has a criminal record to show for it, none of which is calculated to popularise the activity of careful sorting of refuse to the general public.

As Recess Monkey informs us in Rubbish Tory in court (and it is not his political performance that has landed him in trouble), alleged fly-tippers are being relentlessly pursued irrespective of rank.

Against this backdrop, Glenn Vowles of Vowles the Green in Knowles reports on the latest wrangle in Row over the introduction of corn starch bioplastic bags in Bristol is the wrong row to have!!! The council seems to be ignorant of world events (now there’s a surprise…). Apparently, the controversy has centred on the matter of the price of these bin liners (proposed in reaction to complaints about maggots and vermin being attracted to food scraps – yet another justified lament being the inconvenience of fortnightly as opposed to weekly visits by the scaffies – refuse collectors to translate for the benefit of anyone born outside of Tayside – just long enough in weather like this for the contents to come back to life again albeit in slightly less appetising form), which the council wants residents to obtain from the supermarket, where they are likely to be charged up to ten times as much as the cost price of tuppence. This reminds me of the system we have over here, whereby we fund disposal through the hefty 30 Euros that we stump up for 20 brown bags (for general waste, with slightly less expensive blue bags for tins and plastic bottles and brown bags for grass and other clippings and other compostable material). What might have seemed like a chore at the beginning quickly becomes a habit like any other as the counter-productive punitive approach has been recognised as unworkable. Indeed, the only reprimand the non-compliant will ever receive is the scolding “wrong contents” sticker, which is not only embarrassing in front of the smugly perfect neighbours, but also means that the bag in question is unceremoniously left behind, thereby entailing the hassle of emptying it and transferring the articles into a pristine replacement (my knowledge stems from the one and only occasion on which my other half failed to rinse out the cocoa milk bottle, leaving it to advertise his neglect through a chocolate-coloured stain – he has never repeated the mistake). Loath though I am to admit it, the Belgians – who splosh mayonnaise on their chips with gay abandon – can sometimes behave more sensibly than us Brits…

I am in complete agreement with Mr Vowles when he writes: “Clearly the bags should not be introduced at all and we should continue to contain brown bin food waste in material that already exists, such as used newspaper or other waste paper such as paper bags. Just like the push for biofuels has helped to force up food prices so has the push for bioplastics. In addition just as there is great controversy about how biofuels actually increase environmental impacts instead of decreasing them, so the same argument applies to bioplastics. As soon as you start to grow crops for turning into fuel or plastics you are competing with food production and are clearing land as well as using chemicals and fossil fuels for the farming and processing (…)To be sustainable biofuel and bioplastic production should be from waste oils and fats that already exist”.

In the aftermath of Cyclone Nagris, Sid of Pickled Politics reveals that something that ought to be perfectly straightforward (helping the desperate victims of a natural disaster) can become fraught in unfavourable political circumstances: “Can there be a case for refusing to supply humanitarian aid? There is nothing to stop the Burmese junta refusing to accept aid if they feel that they are being pressured into reforms and compromises which they are simply unwilling to accept. The dilemma is that this is a government which permits its armed forces to open fire on its own citizens. If they refuse to comply with the ‘advocacy package’ that comes with the aid, it will only increase the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable people”.

The vote at Second Reading stage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has been brought forward at short notice and two demonstrations have been scheduled accordingly. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science highlights the first (in support of the Bill) in White coats protest on hybrid research bill: “Like most people I generally can’t be bothered to protest or write huffy letters to my MP about things like embryonic stem cell science and animal-human hybrid embryo research, because I have a vague notion that nobody will listen to the religious fruitcakes anyway and it will all take care of itself.

In the case of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill I’m no longer convinced that sense will prevail”.

Mr Goldacre’s fears are well-founded – emboldened by all the attention that has been paid them over recent months, the religious fringe has become increasingly vocal and increasingly militant. Do we really wish to emulate our American cousins when it comes to the hysteria surrounding the mere mention of reproduction, “tampering with God’s creation”, precluding any rational debate?

Penny Red of the eponymous blog gives notice of the emergency gathering outside Parliament in defence of abortion rights, more specifically to oppose the amendments tabled by Nadine Dorries, which would perniciously lower the 24-week limit. In 24 reasons for 24 weeks: a pro-choice call to arms…Penny Red exposes the pseudo-science and downright lies that have been marshalled by those who would overturn a key achievement of feminism and drive women back into the clutches of shady “practitioners” whose methods might not be more subtle than the coat hanger of yore. Whereas I would happily paste the entire rebuttal here, I will show uncharacteristic restraint and confine myself to two of the arguments: “There are many far better ways to reduce the number of late-term abortions. People who object to late term abortions should be fighting to make early abortions easier to access, and to increase the availability of proper sex education and access to contraceptives”.

And: “Some vulnerable women need late-term abortions because severe abnormalities in pregnancy, such as Edward’s syndrome, are rarely identified until 20-21 weeks. Reducing the time limit would force some women to carry severely impaired or dying foetuses to term – an horrific experience”.

Blogging and Journalism

Now to a topic which has become something of a recurrent theme of late, the schizoid relationship between creative writers who are paid for their efforts and who have a built-in readership through sharing in the prestige of the publication employing them and those whose rewards (by and large, there are exceptions) are not financial. (Please note my steadfast and deliberate avoidance of the terms “amateur” and “professional” – although dross is to be found everywhere, much of the output of the blogosphere is nevertheless of far superior quality to the dismal column-inch-padding regularly found in papers).

Summer is often referred to as the silly season for journalists (and let’s face it, we have moved from winter to summer without the transition formerly known as spring), the heat seems to addle their brains, the world seems a more hospitable place, the doom, gloom and despair which they peddle is temporarily banished, our political masters migrate to the residences of their chums abroad, in short, there is no ready inspiration, so they attach a peg to their noses and turn to the Great Unwashed of Blogdom…

On the one hand, journalists are only too happy to sneer at us, condescendingly reminding us of their lofty status by emphasising the constraints within which they operate (editorial control, accountability and the like), whilst on the other, they have no qualms whatsoever about shamelessly filching from blogs when it yields a salacious story, nor do they – in spite of the much-vaunted safeguards – balk at distorting and misrepresenting blogs in the process. Gordon McLean draws our attention to a particularly flagrant violation of any semblance of ethical conduct in An open letter to journalists (to which we shall return in a moment).

By way of background, a contributor to the Daily Mail’s Femail section contacted Natalie Lue, author of Tired of Men who agreed to be interviewed as a means of promoting another of her blogs, Baggage Reclaim and was left reeling when she discovered that her entire blogging career had been diminished to a one-dimensional parody: e-venge. This galvanised Ms Lue into carrying out a detailed statistical analysis of the relevant archives: “That means that out of 72 posts written in 3 months, 1 PERCENT of the posts were dedicated to him!

8% referenced him.

1% referenced the engagement ring.

Now what they don’t know is that FORTY THREE PERCENT!!! of posts in June 2004 seem to mention toilet seats and the fact that I was living with that strange man boy who literally couldn’t p*ss on a toilet seat to save his life!

Now, how the hell did the Daily Mail come up with the idea that I set up a revenge blog when I wasn’t even writing about him, never mind taking revenge? What was I doing? Taking revenge on toilet seats and men that can’t pee right?

Oh and I went from being engaged for 14/15 months (I forget now after soooo much time has passed) to being engaged for FIVE years! We’ve been broken up for five years and I’ve lived in London for seven… I’m only thirty so did they think I was some sort of frickin’ child bride?!

Twenty frickin’ bloody six inaccuracies or just outright fabrications about me in one poxy article and to add insult to injury, they didn’t even mention Baggage Reclaim which was the only reason why I had initially agreed”.

Her conclusion (as featured in Dollymix): “The Daily Mail have confirmed what I have long suspected, which is that they seem to have a pathological dislike of women. That and the fact that they employ lazy journalism tactics and choose to write what they want as opposed to dabbling with the truth. Their articles love ‘pouring scorn’ on us with digs about women’s weight, weighing in with their voice of doom and judgment and lacking any sort of sisterhood in their editorial room. They don’t empower women; they just try to hobble us at the frickin’ knees!”

Indeed, which is why I find it so invaluable as a seam of information about prevailing attitudes. It articulates what many would hesitate to stammer if put on the spot in an actual conversation.

Gordon’s characteristically mild-mannered, courteous rebuke eloquently demonstrates why sloppiness will always backfire: “Like I say, I know that it’s only a few of you that are falling into this bad habit, and I guess that if you weren’t misquoting and badly researching your articles around blog stories, you’d be doing it on some other topic, but here’s the kicker.

We bloggers read each others blogs. We know them well, like old friends. We know the history, we know the personality behind the blog, so we know when all you’ve done is do a few quick searches and cobbled together a twisted view of reality.

And, really, we’d all kinda like you to stop doing that. Feel free to contact us, ask us questions, learn about who we are and why we blog, and most times we’ll be so accommodating you won’t believe it. Honest, most of us are pretty decent people just like most of you”.

He also encourages us to follow Natalie’s example and notify the Press Complaints Commission of such abuses. Sound advice.

In a similar vein, Johnny B of Private Secret Diary fame was alerted by a neighbour to the Sunday edition of the same paper in I receive an alarming telephone call!!! A 392-word excerpt had mysteriously found its way into the tabloid-with-pretensions-above-its-station without Mr B’s knowledge or permission. He decided to send the editor a bill: “Not having worked for the Mail on Sunday before, and a stated wordage figure proving elusive, I pluck a conservative amount out of the air and stick it on the bottom of an invoice, which goes off via the kind auspices of the G.P.O. To the Mail on Sunday’s credit, they pay me my two hundred quid quicker than most biggish companies would, and John Wellington sends me his (what I am sure are sincere) apologies.

There’s nothing quite so Rikfromtheyoungonesesque about people with blogs getting on their high horse about print journalists, except perhaps print journalists getting on their high horse about people with blogs. Clearly, however, there’s a little bit of a mutual-understanding issue here. I always go for cock-up over conspiracy, but one paragraph of his reply to me does seem a bit… a bit not quite fitting in with what I thought things were about.

‘We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.’

Discuss”.

Apart from its mind-boggling arrogance, the editor’s Snot Factor Nine (to adapt a phrase from the Star Trek universe – and in this particular case, the chief engineer would most definitely be proclaiming with impeccable Scottish dourness “She canna take it, Captain!”) remarks are very revealing of the mindset of Fleet Street’s finest: we dilettantes should, like some submissive toy poodle, ravenous for affection roll over and allow our tummies to be tickled in tongue-lolling, ecstatic gratitude. A raised middle-digit to you, sir!

The incident prompted Zoë Margolis of Girl with a One-Track Mind to address the issue of copyright in relation to blogs in Fight for your writes: “With the proliferation of blogs in the world (112 million and counting, according to Technorati), and their availability for viewing open for all (if you’re not in a country that filters the internet, that is), do newspapers have the right to use content from them for free? Many bloggers, myself included, think not. Online publishing does not mean an automatic negation of copyright; the creator of the material still has the right to be asked permission for usage and paid for their work, especially if it is used for commercial gain”.

According to the UK Intellectual Property Office, protection of original writing as a literary work extends to web-published musings. Acknowledging that further clarification is probably needed, Ms Margolis judiciously surmises that our patience is wearing thin: “The free culture movement, (including the widely used Creative Commons copyright notices, found on many blogs), which stems from the free software movement, argues that having the freedom to distribute and modify creative works prevents intellectual monopolies occurring, and that laws protecting companies that seek such protectivist [sic] legislation are against the public interest.

However, that said, when it comes to commercial companies – newspapers – using bloggers’ content for free, if the context of the material is not ‘fair use’ (e.g. for a critique or review by the publication), I think payment to the original writer needs to be made, ‘amateur’ blogger or not. Newspapers pay journalists to fill space, so if they’re going to use material from bloggers, they need to pay for that too. With more and more bloggers learning of their rights, the ‘in the public domain’ argument is not going to suffice for much longer. ‘Old media’ watch out: expect a few more invoices coming your way, soon”.

Feminism

In an essay which endeavours to salvage pornography as a literary genre, Susan Sontag, distinguishes between pornography in social history, as a psychological phenomenon and a minor convention within the arts. Her The Pornographic Imagination (1967) sums up the Establishment’s attitudes towards texts designed to stir the loins: “At least in England and America, the reasoned scrutiny and assessment of pornography is held firmly within the limits of the discourse employed by psychologists, sociologists, historians, jurists, professional moralists, and social critics. Pornography is a malady to be diagnosed and an occasion for judgement. It’s something one is for or against (…) A near unanimous consensus exists as to what pornography is – this being identified with notions about the sources of the impulse to produce and consume these curious goods. When viewed as a theme for psychological analysis, pornography is rarely seen as anything more interesting than texts which illustrate a deplorable arrest in normal adult sexual development. In this view, all pornography amounts to is the representation of the fantasies of infantile sexual life, these fantasies having been edited by the more skilled, less innocent consciousness of the masturbatory adolescent , for purchase by so-called adults. As a social phenomenon – for instance, the boom in the production of pornography in the societies of Western Europe and America since the eighteenth century – the approach is no less unequivocally clinical. Pornography becomes a group pathology; the disease of a whole culture, about whose cause everyone is pretty well agreed. The mounting output of dirty books is attributed to a festering legacy of Christian sexual repression and to sheer physiological ignorance, these ancient disabilities being now compounded by more proximate historic events, the impact of drastic dislocations in traditional modes of family and political order and unsettling changes in the roles of the sexes” (in Styles of Radical Will, London, Vintage, 2001, pp36-8, emphasis in original).

She perceived in the more “sophisticated” works more than mere bald reductionism: “The prominent characteristics of all products of the pornographic imagination are their energy and their absolutism.

The books generally called pornographic are those whose primary, exclusive, and overriding preoccupation is one with the depiction of sexual ‘intentions’ and ‘activities’. One could also say sexual ‘feelings’, except that the word seems redundant. The feelings of the personages deployed by the pornographic imagination are, at any given moment, either identical with their ‘behaviour’ or else a preparatory phase, that of ‘intention’, on the verge of breaking into ‘behaviour’ unless physically thwarted. Pornography uses a small crude vocabulary of feeling, all relating to the prospects of action: feeling one would like to act (lust); feeling one would not like to act (shame, fear, aversion). There are no gratuitous or non-functioning feelings; no musings, whether speculative or imaginistic, which are irrelevant to the business at hand. Thus, the pornographic imagination inhabits a universe that is, however repetitive the incidents occurring within it, incomparably economical. The strictest possible criterion of relevance applies: everything must bear upon the erotic situation.

The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived as a set of sexual exchanges. Thus, the reason why pornography refuses to make fixed distinctions between the sexes or allow any kind of sexual preference or sexual taboo to endure can be explained ‘structurally” (op. cit., pp66-7, emphasis in original).

Pornography has displayed an unparalleled ability to divide feminist opinion into warring factions. Pamela Paul recently interviewed over a hundred self-confessed (heterosexual) porn users, ranging in age from 21 to 59 (approximately 80% of whom were male) about the role pornography plays in their lives as well as commissioning the first nationally representative poll of Americans to deal with pornography for her book Pornified (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2005). In it she examines the profound change in context brought about by ease of access and the sheer volume of the stuff: “Men and women who came of age during the sixties, seventies, or eighties, or whose experience with pornography dates to those eras, think of pornography in terms of gauzy centrefolds, outré sexuality, women’s liberation, and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle. Back then, the lines between softcore and hardcore pornography were clear and distinguishable. Mainstream nudie magazines differed fundamentally from the tawdry interiors of adult stores and even from the pages of Hustler magazine. You could easily limit your consumption by selecting the desired publication. Likewise, the lines between the pro-pornography and the anti-pornography forces were distinct. To be for pornography was to stand in favour of civil liberties, sexual liberation, and science. Opposition to pornography was considered repressive, reactionary, and anti-sex. Dislike or disgust with obscenity could simply be reduced to some form of religious superstition, sexual shame, or fear” (Paul, op. cit., pp3-4).

The parameters of the debate need to shift to keep pace: “The latest wave of pornography crusaders is not only railing against moralising on the part of the government and organised religion, the argument that dominated the family values-obsessed eighties. Nor is it just about a libertarian or free-market fight against government regulation. Today, pornography advocates are also and perhaps equally rebelling against what they view as the excesses of liberalism and feminism of the early nineties, in particular, the extremes of political correctness. Defending pornography seems to have become a way for people who think of themselves as progressive, liberal, and open-minded to revolt against the closed-minded, PC police of university campuses and corporate human resources guidelines. Denouncing pornography is akin to mocking what is derisively known as ‘sexual correctness’.

But no matter how distasteful knee-jerk political correctness may be, it’s hard to ignore the equally illiberal nature of porn itself. Certainly, it’s hard to find anything more retrograde, repressive, or closed-minded than the sexual clichés peddled by pornography. Rather than a mark of escape from the past, the dominant morality of pornography reeks of Puritan and Victorian prudery; it creates a world populated by virgins and whores, by women who are used and shamed for being sexually voracious. Their degradation is deserved, according to the prim sexual vision of the pornographer. Even when the woman isn’t overtly degraded, she is deemed less than the man watching her by dint of being paid to please him sexually in a public forum (…) In pornography, sexuality frequently accompanies or provokes disgust and hatred – something to be done quickly, and just as quickly disposed of. In the world of pornography, sex is generally dirty, cheap, and – in the end – not much fun. Surely it is this Pornified version of sexuality that deserves denigration, mockery, and rebellion” (Paul, op. cit., p248).

Uncomfortable a topic as it may be, no parent can afford to turn a blind eye to the effect it might have on their child’s development: “Pornography is frequently the first place boys learn about sex and gain an understanding of their own sexuality, whims, preferences, and predilections – their desires filtered and informed by whatever the pornography they watch has to offer. As adolescents, many boys learn through pornography to direct their sexual feelings toward the opposite sex, to explain the source of their desires and the means to satisfy them – lessons traditionally supplemented by sex education, paternal guidance, peer conversation, and real-life experience. Whether mediated by outside sources or not, the pornography lesson is nothing if not straightforward; most is geared toward the adolescent mind: simple, primal, hormone-driven, results-oriented, a winnable game. Pornography depicts sex as an easy process that provides a welcome refuge from the tangle of sexual politics teenagers encounter in the real world” (Paul, op. cit., pp16-7).

Its ready availability has led to its incorporation into everyday life: “In a pornified world, pornography has become seamlessly woven into the wake-up routine, the workday Internet break, and the bedtime ritual. It’s part of revving up in the morning and relaxing at the end of the day. It’s a prelude to sex or an alternative to sex. As an accompaniment to masturbation alone, pornography exerts a powerful pull” (Paul, op. cit., p24).

Paul explains its appeal to men: “In so many ways, a man’s ability to observe is restricted by social norms that demand men not treat women as sexual objects, no matter how provocatively tight her jeans. But in the porn world, none of those restrictions apply. Men can look at whatever they want in whatever way they choose for as long as they desire to do so.

Walking down the street, a woman has the ability to look the other way or to sneer at the man who passes by her. In the office, she can write a more effective business plan than her male co-worker or outperform him in a board meeting. In a bar, she can refuse to give a guy her phone number or brush off his attempts at conversation. But in the porn world, she has none of these options. She may retain the power to reject a man by the very nature of her femininity, but in pornography she chooses not to reject. In porn, she treats a man the way he wants to be treated, relieving him of the fears that plague everyday male-female interaction. In the porn world, men retain the power and the control. It’s an incredibly seductive fantasy” (Paul, op. cit., pp32-3).

Part of its allure lies in the elimination of the distractions, uncertainties, anxieties and insecurities of skin-to-skin interactions in the real world: “The beauty of pornography is that there are never any hiccups in courtship. Nobody fails to get an erection, the woman doesn’t have trouble achieving orgasm, nobody fears their guts look too big or they’re sweating too much or they can’t catch their breath. If a man tries to take a woman from behind or tie her up or asks her to spank him or ejaculates on her body, the woman doesn’t wince or object or ask questions. In pornography, no one needs to make pillow talk. There’s no expectation that a man will tell a woman he loves her, or to get up and make her breakfast. Nobody gets genital warts or heaven forbid the AIDS virus. Nobody gets pregnant or wants to get married or tries to pin down a date for next weekend” (Paul, op. cit., p41).

The actresses are endlessly nubile and pliable, bending to His Inexorable Will: “The women in pornography exist in order to please men, and are therefore willing to do anything. They will dominate or act submissive. They can play dumb or talk back, moan quietly or scream, cry in anger or in pleasure. They will accommodate whatever a man wants them to do, be it anal sex, double penetration, or multiple orgasms. The porn star is always responsive; she would never complain about a man being late or taking too long to come. Her hair never gets trapped under his elbow and her thighs never tire. She’s easily aroused, naturally and consistently orgasmic, and malleable. She is what he wants her to be. She’s a cheerleader, a nurse, a dominatrix, a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a teenager, your best friend’s mother. She is every woman who was ever out of your league. She’s the girl next door, the prom queen, the hot teacher, the supermodel, the celebrity. She is every woman who ever did the rejecting. She used to be the lesbian, she used to be frigid, she used to be afraid of sex. She is every woman who cannot be had. Now she loves sex, she can’t get enough of it; she can’t get enough of sex with you. She is every woman who should appreciate you. The women in pornography are undiscriminating – it doesn’t matter what you look like, if you’ve got bad breath or can’t keep an erection. She certainly doesn’t care about occupation, reputation, or history. Each encounter begins anew, meeting as welcome strangers and parting with gratitude.

Of all the requirements for enjoyable pornography, men most commonly cite the appearance of a woman’s reciprocal pleasure as key. She has to seem as if she’s having fun; she should be smiling, welcoming, and at ease, and she should make the viewer feel that she’s doing what she does because she wants to – not because she’s being paid. Even when the sex acts depicted are clearly made to look non-consensual or painful, most men (there are exceptions) insist that she not seem too distraught” (Paul, op. cit., pp44-5, emphasis in original).

The introduction and spread of video recorders was responsible for the first major expansion in the market, but the real revolution was brought about by the Internet (and the plethora of new devices able to download digital content), which has made it possible to cater for every conceivable appetite, however unsavoury: “According to a major study of pornography across various media, with each iteration in technological advancement, pornography has become increasingly violent and non-consensual. For example, in one study, a random selection of pornographic material, 25 percent of pornographic magazines showed some form of violence, ranging from verbal aggression to torture and mutilation, compared with 27 percent of pornographic videos. Usenet groups on the Internet depicted violence 42 percent of the time (…) The authors then concluded that as new pornographic technologies emerged, pornography would become increasingly violent – both to satisfy earlier, upgraded demand and to bring the viewer to the next level” (Paul, op. cit., pp59-9).

Saturation can have a detrimental numbing effect that can compel addicts to seek out ever more disturbing “entertainments” for stimulus in a diminishing returns trap: “Pornography leaves men desensitised to both outrage and to excitement, leading to an overall diminishment of feeling and eventually to dissatisfaction with the emotional tugs of everyday life. Men find themselves upgrading to the most intense forms of pornography, glutting themselves on extreme imagery and outrageous orgasms” (Paul, op. cit., p90).

Personally, the gape-mouthed, simulated ecstasy phallic worship of pornography makes me queasy with its population of women who are nothing more than a collection of orifices to be poked, prodded, skewered or whatever other verb you might find apposite to describe penetration. Completely devoid of autonomy and humanity, they represent an absolute and abject negation of everything that feminism has fought for, conniving at, indeed exulting in their own debasement (self-abasement), revelling in the nihilistic extinction of their selves that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the believer aching to merge with God (as Sontag hints at).

Laura Woodhouse of The F-Word expresses her concern that Internet porn has relentlessly pushed back the boundaries of the acceptable in Porn and Abuse: “If, like me, you grew up without directly accessing porn, you may well learn a lot about sex from experiences with someone who did. And in today’s culture, even if both partners grow up without watching porn, the porn industry’s influence is growing: the images of women on lads’ mags covers in your local newsagent, the trend in ripping out all your pubic hair, thongs for tweenies, women performing stripper moves in music videos, the list goes on.

If it wasn’t for porn, would this guy (and many more, if you read the comments thread) think it was fine and dandy to shoot off in a woman’s face without so much as a by your leave? Would some guys think ejaculating on a woman’s body is similarly bog standard, no-need-to-ask-first behaviour? Would so many young women think sex with a guy requires pre-removal of all body hair? Or fake orgasm noises?”

As the mother of a 16-going-on-17-year -old boy I have an understandable interest on how porn might be corroding his perceptions of a healthy sexual relationship. His best friend regularly sends links to sites that fill me with revulsion, such as one dedicated to celebrating freakishly large male members (I know because he found it so hilarious that he treated me to the main page). Insistent that the purpose of the visit is to derive amusement from the feeble plots that justify the action the impression he gained was plainly different to my own, which could not see beyond the girls’ faces plastered with spurted semen and their accounts of how much it hurt to insert such a prodigious piece of equipment and the portrayal of an exaggerated hyper-masculinity based on brutality, sadism and inflicting pain in the pursuit of possession and domination.

And I am fairly certain that what he and his classmates laughed at was pretty tame compared to some of the online fare on offer, which is why I welcome the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill’s initiative to curb the worst excesses. It defines an “extreme image” as follows: an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life; an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals; an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse, a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.

Red Pepper carefully sets out both sides of the argument in a series of articles on the subject, including An extreme insult by Penny (from the campaigning group Backlash): “Right… so what is ‘life-threatening’ or ‘serious’? And what do ‘appears to’ and ‘likely’ mean? Is fisting imagery going to be banned because incompetent fisting can cause tissue damage? If you take a picture of the office lads doing naked skydiving for charity, do you become an ‘extreme pornographer’ based on whether or not you get the parachute in the picture?”

And: “The only possible use for that self-congratulatory impulse is as a distraction from real issues, such as trafficking and the need for regulation in the porn industry. Nobody doubts that a very small minority of porn is made under coercive conditions – but this porn is just as likely to be ‘mainstream’ as ‘extreme’, and a witch-hunt against ‘extreme’ material that is produced by consenting adults for consenting adults can only draw police resources away from the investigation of real crimes”.

Debs of The Burning Times in When does kinky sex become illegal? is also sceptical of the Bill, but on quite different grounds, returning to the murder that sparked calls for a clampdown: “So, someone somewhere has decided that these are the types of images which are damaging, and all other pornography is okay? I don’t get it. Seriously. It’s either porn or it’s not, and if it is porn it