Like a Kamikaze pilot swooping to certain death, Brave Dave Cameroon’s lard-fed, neighbour-from-hell candidate in the UK’s mid-term byelection signals her commitment to the cause of right-wing ignorance with a shrill affirmation of her deepest prejudice. Given the parlous condition of the Lib-Dem incumbent party, I am reminded of my (right-wing) undergraduate professor’s observation that British politics is essentially about waiting for the Conservatives to shoot themselves in the foot.
Posts Tagged ‘British politics’
Tory, Tory, Tory
February 16, 2013Thought food
January 31, 2013Here is a rather powerful piece of writing – particularly the historical analysis in the first half — encouraged by The Guardian’s George Monbiot having turned 50.
It connects up to this article about Nick Clegg who, I think, fails to recognise that if the Liberal Democrat party cannot be more principled than the Labour party, then there really is no reason whatsoever for its existence.
Completely separately
Have I entered a parallel universe, or did I just give a speech to a large conference in the US at which these were the newspapers people were reading?
Book review: School Wars
December 30, 2011If you have children, and you have not read a history of the British education system, then this book is already worth reading. It is far from perfectly organised, and it fails to make some — to me — obvious and powerful points about education policy. Indeed the book might have been better as a more closely focused pamphlet of 120 pages rather than the 200 pages that it is. But overall, School Wars contains enough good information to leave you grinding your teeth at the weakness and hypocrisy of British politicians in all three major parties. It has proven, in Britain, easier to have a rational debate about homosexuality than about education.
Why? The proximate reason is that the British establishment is still overwhelmingly educated in elitist schools which refuse to accept poor or more difficult to teach children. The apex of this system is the roughly 7 percent of children who go to private schools and the 5 percent who go to grammars. But if you count in other church and non-church state schools which cherry-pick their intake, there is probably one-fifth or more of families and kids which undertake their education on the unspoken basis that it is reasonable to leave everyone else to fend for themselves.
In a country like Italy, the elite plunders the state directly. In Britain, the approach to making sure the establishment gets more than its share is far more subtle. Indeed one can only admire the refinement of the hypocrisy. Instead of grabbing what you want directly, you give yourselves an unassailable advantage by creating selective schools for those with more money, more accumulated learning and better social networks and then ‘compete’ with people who have had to undertake their education in the real, everyday world of mixed incomes and abilities.
School Wars fails to make the most important point about this system — that those who support it are anti-competitive. The British education system exists to prevent children having equal educational opportunity and therefore from competing on an equal basis. It is a myth that the rich and powerful like competition — it is a threat to their status. What they like is competition according to rules they set, just what the British education system offers.
Another thing School Wars fails to address is the false fear that most people have about a nationalised education system, where each school would educate a fair cross-section of the population. Such an arrangement would create a more genuine free market, but it would never mean that the monied classes could not bring their money to bear on their children’s advancement. Such support would simply have to occur outside school, as is the case in Scandinavian countries, continental European ones, north-east Asian ones, or Canada, which have non-selective school systems and post higher average educational scores than Britain. Money still counts in those countries. However you cannot move your child to some ‘gated’ educational community free of the poor.
It may seem there is a lot missing from Melissa Benn’s book. In fact, there is a lot in it. She is good at showing how real improvement in Britain’s education system cannot come from piecemeal change. Britain needs a simple, straightforward commitment to education as a public good. Everything else leads back, through any number of byways, to manipulation of the system by more powerful interests against less powerful interests. The loser is the aggregate quality of education. As constructed today the British school system is really an experiment to prove the existence of middle class selfishness. We knew that existed already.
What I meant was more tank engines
November 29, 2011
As I stop for a tuna sandwich, the Fat Controller has left the Treasury and is heading for parliament. Here is what I predicted in January. Let’s see how Osborne’s admissions today measure up.
Next day:
1. Osborne changed his growth forecast for 2012 from 2.5% to 0.8%, so at this point he was out at the start of the year by a fact of just over three.
2. There will be a few more tank engines, but any real impact from the Fat Controller’s plan depends on the private sector coming in to leverage about £5 billion of public money. HM Treasury explication of its ‘clear’ infrastructure plan is here.
3. It is very small beer from Osborne, less than I expected. Outlook has to be that growth will fall even further than he now says and there will be some additional capex stimulus in the first half of 2012. He is going to follow the curve rather than influencing it throughout this crisis.
4. Politically the FC is taking the low road of a blame game. It’s all the fault of the Eurozone and the previous long-lived Labour government. There is a sufficient kernel of truth in this to deflect attention from the fact that Osborne himself has no new ideas about anything.
Stuck in the middle with you
August 14, 2011
The English riots story runs and runs. There have now been something like 1,700 arrests — which is equivalent to about 2 percent of the entire United Kingdom prison population. The courts are meting out quick justice, which is a good thing (magistrates have been sitting through the night in special sessions), but they are also meting out retributive justice, which is not good. One man who walked into a shop that had been broken into and took £3.50 of bottled water has been given six months in jail. That is nothing more than a magistrate responding to the calls of Brave Dave Cameron and the moronic right that everyone involved be given a good caning.
England is stuck in the middle with its underclass problem. On the one hand it could go the American route, have a bigger underclass, but use much higher levels of state violence to keep it in place. That means more ghettoisation and more police with guns. In essence, it would mean that every time you arrived in an English city (like an American one) the taxi driver would tell you which part of town you can’t go to ‘cos they might kill you’. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t necessarily true (Among others, I have survived the south side of Chicago, south-east DC and some bad bits of NYC), the taxi driver’s advice is a short-hand for the political choices that have been made.
The other route is the continental European one. We should clarify at the outset that we are not talking here about the continental European immigrant underclass, which definitely exists and is nicely down-trodden. The immigrant underclass has rioted in France, but for the most part immigrants live on sufferance and their very low expectations keep them from going over the civil unrest brink. What we need to talk about in continental Europe is the treatment of the least fortunate part of the indigenous population, including (usually second generation) naturalised immigrants.
This latter group has never, to my knowledge, rioted because of what can be called ‘inclusion’. Since the Second World War, continental Europe has implemented policies designed to maintain society as a single unit. The most important of these, I believe, is nationalised education. There is no educational ghettoisation in continental Europe that can act as a stepping stone to social ghettoisation. In towns throughout the European mainland, the children of the wealthiest entrepreneurs grow up going to school with the children of mechanics and barbers. This is overwhelmingly the case, and it is absolutely overwhelmingly the case at a primary level of education. Largely as a result, people growing up in continental Europe in the past 50 years have largely been denied the sense of exclusion and jealousy that pervades the Anglo-American underclass.
It is interesting that Ed Milliband, the Labour leader, is talking at every opportunity — in the wake of the riots — about the need to give people a stake in society. He even plans his own ‘enquiry’. But the Labour Party (the true party of bullshit in British politics) won’t go near the socially cancerous education issue. Boarding-school educated Tony Blair would not touch it and the new ‘lefty’ Labour leader will not do so either.
In consequence, Britain is destined to remain stuck in the middle. We have a sub American-scale underclass but we don’t have the guns to keep it in the ghetto. Once in a generation the underclass rampages down English high streets nicking whatever consumer durables its miserable existence has led it to crave. This generation is worse than the 80s one in that it is utterly bereft of any political consciousness. It appears to have been neutered by a combination of television, the moral cesspool of Premiership football, and the apparently limitless selfishness of reproductive underclass males.
Joe Strummer used to sing that anger can be power. But these days the only thing that anger can be is a flat-screen tv and a pair of new trainers — which most of the looters probably had anyway.
Latest:
Bob the Builder must be fuming. After Obama already stole his ‘Can we fix it? Yes, we can!’ refrain for the US election, Brave Dave Cameron is making another raid on Bob’s core IP with his new ‘Can we fix Broken Britain? You jolly well bet we can, matey’, campaign.
To be fair, Brave Dave has some reasonable points, but in the end I reckon he’s a fiddler not a fixer — a Polyfilla Blagger as Bob might say.
On the US copper — Bratton — to run the Met saga I am instinctively on Brave Dave’s side. But then he appointed Theresa May Home Secretary, so whaddya do? Remember that he also cut the political legs off Fatty Clarke, having first promised to be sensible about punishment issues. Brave Dave just can’t decide whether to hug a hoodie or lash one to a post and thrash him. It is so very hard being a modern Tory.
Unrelated, but quite funny:
I had not realised that Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s finance minister who used to work as a tax law expert and this week imposed a ‘solidarity tax‘ on high earners, also worked in the past as a university lecturer in ethics. He currently stands accused of paying a fast-living political aide who is under investigation for serial corruption €1,000 a week in cash to live in his apartment in Rome. It would be fun to publish Mr Tremonti’s course notes, if someone has them.
Is Obama an idiot?
July 31, 2011There is a very powerful leader out in The FT about the likely US debt deal this week, which you should read if you have a subscription. Clive Crook has a knife in either hand for Obama, accusing him of leading ‘from behind’ and landing the US with fiscal cuts just when the country needs fiscal stimulus to offset a stuttering recovery. In essence, the argument is that Obama has caved to the moronic right, known officially as the Tea Party.
I suspect Crook underestimates Obama, as almost everyone in the US seems to do. It looks like the cuts that Obama is promising the Prozac Party are very heavily backloaded over a ten-year period. In other words, almost no impact over the next, critical 12-18 months. Meanwhile the Adderall Party have agreed there will not be another debt ceiling negotiation before the presidential election, next November. That, for me, is the key thing. In another 18 months, when Americans go to the polls, unemployment will be very high but signs of recovery will be such that people can draw sufficient breath to remember that it was actually not Obama, but a combination of Bill ‘Grinning Idiot’ Clinton and George ‘Not As Smart As Bill’ Bush who landed them in this mess. Either that, or the masses really do tend to the right every time, and we should all give up on democracy.
My disaster-waiting-to-happen politics bet remains on the UK chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne. Fiscal stimulus-wise, I reckon he needs to do more than Obama, and will do less. I am also completely flummoxed by his Liberal running dog Treasury minister Danny Alexander, who is the subject of a fawning profile in today’s Observer. The weekend papers tell me that Obama’s a flake and Danny Alexander has got his hands round the British problem. I’m not so sure.
Lawyers, by a mile
May 24, 2011It is said that estate agents are worse, but at least the average estate agent has the moral (if not legal) defence that he or she is ignorant. Lawyers, by contrast, have all had the chance of a university education, and so will surely have more to answer for when they arrive in hell (presumably to be greeted at the door by a lawyer). The latest antics from Italy’s legal profession beggar belief, so utterly selfish are the lawyers in putting their personal interests ahead of society’s interest. This country really has become one whore-story after the next.
No other rich nation can hold a candle to Italy’s professional classes, but lest the British be accused in the Umbrian expression of beingmosche bianche (white flies), take note also of the British Director of Public Prosecutions’ performance this week. Keir Starmer should have decided to prosecute policeman Simon Harwood for manslaughter last July. He is now being forced to do so because of the outcome of a public inquest and makes the most pathetic attempt to construct an argument that the evidence produced in the inquest could not, or would not, have been brought out in a criminal trial. You know that a lawyer, like Starmer, is on the back foot when he starts using verbs like ‘adduced’. It is tantamount to saying: ‘Please take it for granted that I am very clever and doing the right thing, and not at all the stereotypical yes-man who is given this job.’
People like Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, or Gareth Peirce are the Halley’s comets of the legal profession. You are lucky to know one lawyer who cares about more than their new Audi and their holiday in the Maldives in a lifetime.
Lush places
March 31, 2011The Star, The Express, The Times, and The Telegraph. Are there any other British newspapers that are now run for less than five quid a week? This, from The Telegraph, is a collector’s item. Evelyn Waugh could not have made it, or indeed the photo of the 13-year-old author, up. (Apologies that the typeface becomes WordPress standard.)
For pics you likely have to go to the Torygraph original, here. But the text is a feast of itself:
David Cameron out of stride with wife Samantha
Huffing and puffing, a red-faced and heavy-legged David Cameron plods along a pavement on his weekly jog, forcing one foot in front of the other on the unforgiving tarmac.
Both David and Samantha Cameron have enlisted the help of personal trainer Matt Roberts (Right) Photo: STEVE BACK
By Nick Collins 7:30AM BST 28 Mar 2011
Meanwhile his wife Samantha breezes through a leafy park accompanied by personal trainer Matt Roberts, looking confident, relaxed and brimming with energy.
Perhaps Mr Cameron was feeling drained or short of sleep, but a careful look at the recent photographs leads to a different conclusion – that while his wife would be well-equipped to tackle a marathon, the Prime Minister is simply not as adept at running as he is at running the country.
In fact, if Mr and Mrs Cameron decided to take exercise together or compete in a race, Samantha would be likely to comfortably outpace her husband, according to an expert analysis of their respective running styles.
While Mrs Cameron’s relaxed upper body enables her to make the most of her energy, the Prime Minister appears rigid, uncomfortable and exhausted – hardly a surprise given his primitive technique.
Despite having recently given birth, Mrs Cameron’s wider stride means she covers almost a third more ground each time she puts her foot down than her husband, and is at much lower risk of injury.
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By taking too narrow a stride, lifting his toes too high and running in an upright position the Prime Minister is not only slowing himself down but risking shin splints, knee problems and arthritis, according to analysts.
Sam Murphy, a running coach and author of Running Well, said: “I would say Samantha needs a bit of tuition – but compared to her David has appalling technique.
“The first thing I noticed about the Prime Minister was the straightness of his leg on landing – he should bend his knees to dissipate the shock and aim to land with his foot below the knee rather than ahead of him to decrease the impact force.
“People tend to think running is like walking, and that if they want to go faster they should put their leg out further, but actually it is more like cycling. If you want to go faster you want to turn your leg over more quickly.”
To add to Mr Cameron’s embarrassment, he ought to be better at running than his wife because his masculine frame gives him an innate head-start, she added.
“Women biomechanically have more issues to overcome, for example their pelvis is wider, so their thighs are more likely to roll inwards which can put excess force on the knees. There isn’t any advantage that Samantha Cameron would have over David – quite the opposite in fact.”
Both David and Samantha Cameron have enlisted the help of personal trainer Matt Roberts – whose clients include supermodel Naomi Campbell – to help them stay in good shape.
But while Mrs Cameron appears to be benefiting from the fitness expert’s guidance as she jogs alongside him, Mr Cameron may not have taken quite so many lessons on board.
Bob Pritchard, an Olympic trainer with 40 years’ experience of analysing and improving athletes’ technique, said Mr Cameron’s stride width of 50 degrees, compared with his wife’s 65 degrees, is one of the lowest he has ever seen.
In a blog posted on the website of the California-based Somax Performance Institute, Mr Pritchard wrote: “David Cameron recently led some of his Afghan troops in a run and provided an excellent example of how not to run.
“David Cameron is covering 40 per cent less ground than the average, slow marathon runner. Good marathon runners have a stride angle over 100 degrees, which means that Cameron is covering 60 per cent less ground than they are.”
The difference in the couple’s stride angles may not sound like much, but even an extra degree of width can make an enormous difference to the amount of ground a runner is able to cover.
Mr Prichard said in an interview: “The Prime Minister’s wife has a bigger stride angle than he does, though not by much.
“But since you cover two per cent more ground with each stride for every degree you increase your stride angle, she covers 30 per cent more ground with each stride than her husband.
“As in governance, it is not how much you do but how efficient you are that counts.”
The key problem behind Mr Cameron’s awkward style, Mr Pritchard said, is tension – hardly surprising in a man with one of the most demanding jobs in the country.
“Basically, he is tense and stiff. You can see evidence of this tension in his toe lift, which is a phenomenal 27 degrees. Good runners don’t bother to lift their toes when running, as it is a waste of energy.
“Plus, when the toes are lifted like Cameron’s, it forces the runner to land on his heel, which slams the foot flat on the ground, violently stretching the very muscles that the runner is contracting to maintain toe lift.”
Mr Cameron could face worse than the humiliation of being overtaken by his wife if he fails to adapt his style because a short stride can lead to the softening of the cartilage around the knee, long-term knee problems and even arthritis in later years.
Forced stretching also tears fibres in the shin muscles, which can lead to problems as severe as shin splints and stress fractures, the British-born coach said.
However, Mr Cameron is unlikely to change his running style any time soon if he heeds the advice in the official London 2012 Olympics running guide, according to the expert who wrote it.
John Brewer, professor of sport at Bedfordshire University, said: “I have seen lots of top runners and many of them have styles which on the face of it look slightly ungainly, but these are elite runners and that in itself must suggest that they are doing something right.
“In my opinion, the more you try to change someone’s running style through analysis, the more likely it is that you will cause an injury. Naturally the body will need to adopt a running style that suits the individual.”
The danger of comparing the two pictures, he said, is that they only capture a moment in time – but even that is enough to draw some conclusions about the Camerons’ respective running styles.
Mr Brewer said: “Samantha looks fine. The key thing when anyone is running is to stay relaxed and she certainly looks as if she is doing that. The Prime Minister looks more tense, so I would recommend he stretches more before running to improve the flexibility of his hamstrings and calf muscles. That will help him push off more firmly, take a longer stride and make each stride seem that much easier.
“His head is looking more upwards and his neck and shoulders are tensed, so he certainly looks more rigid than Mrs Cameron. His hands are also clenched – that makes you tense and also prevents you losing a lot of heat from your palms, which is important when you are running.
“A lot depends on how tired he is – as people get tired they tend to tense up. But on the face of it Samantha Cameron is certainly the more aesthetic looking of the two.”
Come the revolution
March 7, 2011The Liberal Democrats keep sending me emails complaining that opponents of voting reform in the UK are running outrageous and unethical advertisements. Perhaps it is just my naive faith in the average person, but it really doesn’t worry me if some inbred Tory eejit or some equally self-serving Nooo Labour eejit is suggesting that babies will die 
because of the alternative voting system (referred to ‘instant run-off’ in the US and ‘preferential voting’ in some other countries). Much more likely, the ads will have the same effect Winston Churchill engendered in the 1945 election when he said that a Labour victory would mean communism in Britain. People looked at Clem Attlee and thought: ‘I’m not so sure, Winnie.’ And they voted Labour.
The truth is that people get dangerous idiots in charge of them not because they are conned, but because they choose self-evidently dangerous idiots to be in charge of them. This explains why they vote for dangerous idiots again and again, the only mitigation being that the stupidity is much easier to spot than the danger. Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi are classic examples. What is interesting about them is not some supposed con, but why people repeatedly vote for a Tone or a Sil despite the mounting evidence that they are absolute plonkers, incapable of running their own lives, let alone anyone else’s. Anger, frustration, the hopelessness of the opposition, the different voter pattern of female electors (who always, I am sad to mention, vote disproportionately for reactionaries) — this is the stuff of psephological analysis, not some tripe about how clever advertising convinced us all to tick the wrong box.
So the political message is: state your case with maximum clarity to the maximum number of people. And what better opportunity to put this into practice than the AV referendum, which is surely an idea whose time has come. It is an almost-no-risk improvement to the voting system in a country where 35 percent of votes now go to parties other than the biggest two, compared with less than five percent after the Second World War. AV doesn’t favour small and silly parties. It keeps MPs answerable to geographic constituencies. Above all, it makes politics more competitive, which is why indolent and self serving people do not like the idea one bit. 
Martin Wolf in the FT (subscription needed) likes it, and though he is called Wolf, he is not exactly Wolfie out of Citizen Smith. Here’s the nub of what Wolf has written:
‘Why, then, might the switch to the alternative vote be justified? The answer is that over time the present system has become increasingly unrepresentative, to the point of threatening its legitimacy. We have, above all, seen a huge decline in the share of votes going to the two leading parties, from 97 per cent in 1951 to 65 per cent in 2010, a record postwar low. 
Under the current system, parties with less than 40 per cent of the votes are potentially able to win large majorities in the House of Commons. Thus, the House risks becoming so unrepresentative of the preferences of electors as to lose its legitimacy. Ultimately, that threatens the effectiveness of government, as well. Under the alternative vote, however, candidates would need to obtain the support of a majority of constituents. That is highly likely to increase the representation of currently under-represented voters.’
The case is so compelling that I write to the Liberal Democrats in Cambridge asking for 100 pro-AV badges and some pens to boot. Their web site says this stuff can be had for free, though I told them I was quite willing to pay for it. I have to be in the UK to attend a exclusive actors’ party on the roof of the National Theatre and there seems no better place to undertake some effective propaganda work. I will pin an AV badge on the lapel of Maureen Lipman, or someone even more famous…
Unfortunately, there is just one hitch. It being the Liberal party that backs the AV, they don’t get it together to send me the badges. You just know that if you had phoned Tory HQ and asked some random Sloane for 500 Shoot the Badgers stickers, they would have been sent round the same day. If the revolution goes pear shaped on 5 May, my liberal comrades, do not blame me.
More:
This wikipedia entry on the Alternative Vote system is helpful, and tells you all the places where the system is already employed.
Beloved irony
February 8, 2011Isn’t life a bitch? Just when you have good use for a few tens of billions of dollars to support a bit of old-fashioned modernisation in north Africa, it turns out you spent your whole budget for the next decade on a pointless war in Iraq. Dang, America’s Mr. Obama be kickin’ himself under the table.
It is the fifteenth day of protests in Egypt and the Arabs — despite much media conjecture to the contrary — show no sign of going home and being quiet. Cash-strapped Washington doesn’t know what to do. Hilary Clinton has said she would like the (ex-intelligence service boss) vice-president to run the country until scheduled elections in September. Obama’s special advisor on Egypt says that Mubarak must stay until the election. The crowd appears to be backing outlandish demands for a representative transitional government.
Cripes. ‘Representative’ in the country that is the intellectual birth-place of Islamic fundamentalism and al-Quaeda? ‘Transitional’ in the country that has ‘Remember Algeria’ written all over it in CIA spray paint? No wonder we backed a dictator and encouraged economic policies that consign Egyptians to poverty and to an 80 percent youth unemployment rate. Why can’t we just have the same deal again?
It is really very tedious how unprincipled foreign policy comes back to bite you in the arse, like some whacked out dog you once threw a bone to. Much more of this and the Arabs will start to resemble the Persians, who are still hung up on us getting rid of their silly Mr Mossadegh, who thought he could nationalise our oil companies.
I am not terribly well read on Arab history, particularly the modern stuff, but if I were to recommend a single, highly readable and well researched tome to put contemporary Egypt in perspective it would be The Looming Tower. The Guardian contains a brief history of the main Islamic opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood; it isn’t great and contains a very taciturn interview with a current MB leader, but it is readily available.