Category: Media

A battle against ideas??

There’s an anti-intellectual, anti-ideas, anti-authority (academic as well as political) mood out there, encouraged and fired up by the media. In the USA by Fox and shock-jocks, and Trump and his cohorts. In the UK by much of the popular press and, sadly, by Brexit campaigners. See below for two contributions, both with Facebooks videos, which highlight the dangers such attitudes present.

One, a Barack Obama speech to the Rutgers University Class of 2016. ‘In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about… But when our leaders express a disdain for the facts, when they are not held accountable for repeating falsehoods and just making stuff up, when actual experts are dismissed as elitists, then we’ve got a problem.’

See: https://www.facebook.com/BusinessInsider.Politics/videos/1015027085240290/

As seen from the UK – ideas are out of fashion, reliable sources of information are cast as biased, or worse – establishment. Boris’s suggestion yesterday that Cameron had bought the support of big business by offering government contracts is the latest, and most absurd, example.

There have been dubious claims from leaders on the Stay side. But the weight of misinformation put out on the Brexit side takes some beating.

Almost every organisation of note, business and European, every country in Europe, groups like the Five Eyes security group (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) – they have all come out in favour of staying in. Are they all tainted, biased, dishonested, bribed? Are they all to be damned as elitist and establishment?

Obama’s is a rallying-cry, and a reminder of what we stand to lose.

And, two, there’s a Brexit ‘film’ doing the rounds… It begins with the words, ‘We, the people are being cajoled… into surrendering our democracy and freedom.’ ‘The EU is turning into a dictatorship.’ But, given that we’re a key member of the organisation, the selfsame EU, which determines those regulations, and if we leave we’ll have them foisted on us, it’s a very dubious argument.

Happily you don’t have to put up with any further commentary from me. There’s a very good riposte: https://www.facebook.com/scientistsforeu/videos/787984157970262/

If Scientists for EU will forgive me I’ll quote the first paragraph:

‘The whole documentary is about the need for deregulation. It’s fundamentally a neoliberal infomercial, painting history through the mantra of deregulation leads to growth and regulation leads to stagnation. They tell us that the EU is over-regulated, so we need to get out – and then we will economically prosper. That’s the thesis. The only problem is that they have no business/ economist backing whatsoever. Instead of interviewing CEOs of Airbus, Rolls-Royce, etc (all of which have come out for Remain), the documentary interviews just the standard clique of Nigel Lawson, Daniel Hannan, James Delingpole, Nigel Farage, etc… Politicians and right-wing journalists – with Kate Hoey thrown it.’

Do check it out.

 

And if we leave?

If you prefer me writing country notes, or you’re American, and you’re not too interested in British or European politics, do give this post a miss! Though there are a good few parallels with Trumpery.

Also, if you’re expecting me to be mild-mannered, and avoid personalities, well, not this time. There is some pretty egregiously bad behaviour out there.

If you read the press and indeed listen to the BBC news you can get depressed, even feel beleaguered if you support staying in the EU. Michael Heseltine’s demolition of Boris Johnson yesterday, primarily over his linking the EU and Hitler’s ambitions, was featured in the Times, but not in the popular press. Heseltine would be ‘very surprised’ if Boris ever became the leader of the party, and that of course is an implicit part of the Brexit agenda. (How left-of-centre Brexit supporters can justify to themselves facilitating a Boris premiership I don’t know.) So however absurd Boris gets, he remains untouchable – and he is of course aware of that.

I don’t believe for a moment that Michael Gove shares Boris’s view of European history. I wonder (to myself only so far!) whether he might just change sides at the last. He is already tainted by association.

I also wonder what will happen if Boris does, after a Cameron resignation, become PM. Would all his party fall into line? I somehow doubt it – the party is badly split.(Just how far will all this mutual abuse extend?)  So he wouldn’t of course command a majority in the Commons, and in the event of an election there’s a very good chance that a pro-EU parliament would be returned. Would the Tories be able to campaign as a single party? If they did and they’re returned as the largest party, but well short of a majority, would they then still try and force through Leave legislation?

Another scenario: Nigel Farage asserts that, if the result is small Stay majority, there will be a clamour for a second referendum. I haven’t heard it from the Stay campaign yet, and I guess they’re too wise to make the comment – but if the result is a small majority for Leave, I expect there will also be a big clamour for … a second referendum.

Oh the joys of uncertainty and chaos!

If we weren’t all so deeply involved, if a potential Brexit hadn’t got calamity written all over it, these would be fascinating times. They will make good history ….

 

Three absurdities: 3) privatising the BBC?

And one more, absurdity that is, along similar lines to my last post:

Listening to two Tory MPs on Radio 4 debating the BBC (there’s a White Paper on the BBC about to be published):

one MP recognising that the BBC is much-loved and works well as it is –  we’ve all misgivings, but we can be proud …

and the other arguing that it would do much better in the private sector, as a subscription channel, and there it could do so much more. Precisely what I wondered, and how would it in the end differ from Sky?

An example of the kind of private-sector lunacy which affects and afflicts the Tory right.

They’ve a doctrinaire fear of the state, a ‘we’re all disciples of Hayek now’ mentality, a libertarian impulse which misreads history, scorns the role of the state and government, fails to recognise how state and enterprise can work together (and have done so remarkably over the last two hundred years) – and in the event disregards what the ordinary person wants.

It’s a perverse form of elitism. It’s a fetish, a dogma, which also infects the EU debate, a shadow agenda hiding behind the issues of immigration and sovereignty.

 

Three absurdities: 2) selling off council houses

And another absurdity –

I’ve been reading (Prospect magazine, on the future of cities) about Porto, in Portugal, and how the mayor, Rui Moriera, ‘has pledged not to sell a single council house and instead invest in a programme of renovations and converting derelict buildings into new ones’.

‘We could easily make 10% of our budget every year by selling houses. If you do that you can build a lot of bridges and lots of mayors like that. But it will kill the city. The city will lose all the flair that attracted people in the first place.’

The government here plans the further sale of council houses, and new bridges are planned for London of course. And in time as we lose the social mix, and city-centre estates are replaced by new ‘mixed-use’ developments, London will lose its flair.

In London, and across the country, building more social housing, allowing councils to start building again, encouraging housing associations, has to be the way forward. Not obliging them to sell off their stock, when housing is a vital commodity, more than that, fundamental to our future, and existing private sector plans simply aren’t coping.

Doctinaire considerations – private over public – bid down the practical. (See my third blog, my third absurdity.)

Taking the measure of Shakespeare

Justice and mercy – concepts which Shakespeare simply takes in his stride. His characters take up the arguments: Shakespeare himself stood above the fray. A way of avoiding arrest for sedition? ‘No, that’s not what I believe,’ he might have said, ‘that’s Angelo, or the Duke, or Isabella.’

They are concepts which weave their way through Measure for Measure, which I’ve recently read for the first time. The title refers to a passage in Matthew’s gospel: ‘…and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.’

For the story in outline – read on.

Angelo, left in charge by the Duke, who isn’t too keen on worldly affairs (‘I love the people,/But do not like to stage me to their eyes…’ – a reticence many in our time could usefully copy), sentences Claudio to death for the offence of – put simply – sex before marriage. Is this justice?

At the time he’s arrested Claudio accepts his guilt – and it seems, his fate: ‘Our natures do pursue,/Like rats that do ravin down their proper bane,/ A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.’

The Duke likewise supports the rule of law and its stern implementation:

‘Now as fond fathers,/having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,/Only to stick it in their children’s sight/For terror, not to use, in time the rod/Becomes more mocked than feared: so our decrees/Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,/ and Liberty plucks justice by the nose,/The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart/Goes all decorum.’

Now, quite apart, from anything else, the language is extraordinary. As a fond father I never threatened with twigs of birch, but I did try and ensure that the baby didn’t beat the nurse – or the dad. I love the half-rhyme of ‘nose’ and ‘nurse’. Stating the supremely obvious, Shakespeare was one hell of a poet.

I won’t recount the full story. But Claudio has a beautiful sister, Isabella, a novice nun, no less. Isabella pleads for mercy for her brother – pleas rejected by Angelo – in language reminiscent of Portia in the Merchant of Venice. Compare:

(Isabella) ‘…Well, believe this,/No ceremony that to great ones ‘longs, /Not the king’s crown, nor the deputed sword, /The marshal’s truncheon, nor the judge’s robe, /Become them with one half so good a grace /As mercy does.’

(Portia) ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d,/It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;/It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:/’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes/The throned monarch better than his crown;/His sceptre shows the force of temporal power…’

But then Angelo suggests a cruel bargain. He promises to free Claudio – if Isabella will sleep with him. Back to the Bible, and seeing the mote in another’s eye and not the beam in your own. (I grew up with metaphors such as this – but I doubt if my children would understand…)

The Duke has wisely kept Angelo under surveillance, and Angelo is tricked into sleeping with his ex-fiancee, Mariana, who he has cast aside, while thinking it’s Isabella – a very Shakespearian stratagem. (Always check who you’re sleeping with – that might be the warning here!)

There’s more, but it’s enough to remark how Shakespeare supports authority, but with a light touch – reminding us of the hypocrisy which too often (I was going to say always, but maybe we should let the Duke off – he seems an all-round good guy) goes hand-in-hand with authority.

Shakespeare never preaches – he leaves that to his characters. Sexual desire is part and parcel of life, and the rough, and the tumble, and the illicit and the licit, it’s all of a piece, all part of his story. To take out sexual desire would be ‘to geld and spay all the youth of the city’ (in Lucio’s words).

I could find all sorts of parallels with our own time. We have the current case of the Culture Secretary, and his affair with a hooker, and the press of which he’s in charge of regulating claiming that they didn’t report the story before because it wasn’t in the public interest. Hypocritical tosh of the highest order.

But that’s enough – let Shakespeare speak for himself. He is the world in microcosm, and even though he was writing four centuries ago the characters who walked the stages of the Globe or the Swan still walk our streets and share our beds today.

 

Workers or shirkers

There was a BBC2 programme on ‘workers or shirkers’ last night, exploring a division which dates back to Victorian times (and earlier), to notions of the deserving and undeserving poor.

Ian Hislop (and it came over very much as his programme) provided some interesting background detail, taking us back to the 1830s and Edwin Chadwick and the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which established the Victorian workhouse. We had Chadwick’s categorisation of the population from worker to able-bodied vagabond (I don’t have access here to the exact categories), all very utilitarian, but it was often brutal in its effects, and stigmatised poverty. Hislop of course doesn’t stigmatise but he fails in his programme to get to grips with what being an outsider in society entails. A wiser programme might have used that word – those destined to be ‘outside’ the mainstream – the unemployed, the handicapped, the uneducated, the illiterate – people from broken homes, with no parental role models, in reduced circumstances, people losing jobs in towns where there are no jobs available or only the most menial. The poor – and, too often, the elderly.

The very use of the word ‘shirkers’ is playing the tabloid’s game. Likewise using George Osborne’s 2012 Conservative Party conference speech: Osborne’s imaginary worker, setting off to work seeing the ‘closed blinds of [his] next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. The polarity is totally wrong. Yes, there is a category of able-bodied worker who chooses not to work when there are good opportunities for them to do so – the press parades them when it can find them.

My own experience (not least of education) suggests that it’s de-industrialisation, the switch from industry to services, available jobs now being of a fundamentally different kind, and in different locations, which lies at the heart of the problem. In Victorian times the surge to the cities brought problems of poverty on a massive scale. Today it’s the re-location of industry away from existing cities and towns, not least in the north of England, and the growth of new industries, especially service industries, in very different areas, which has brought new problems. Urban poverty has always been with us, and too easily becomes institutionalised. What we’re not faced with, contrary to what some would have us believe, is a wild and wilful recalcitrance.

If you’re ‘working class’, probably with a rented home, little by way of savings, limited education – when you’re world goes wrong you have nothing to fall back on. Maybe there’s a job sweeping streets, or loading shelves, paying little – much less than in a previous job. If you’re ‘middle class’, educated, home-owner, with friends and relations who may be able to help – you’re sheltered from the worst. And – if you’re lazy, don’t feel inclined to work too hard, or to get on too far in life,  it doesn’t really matter. Your circumstances will be reduced, but there will be no-one out there pointing a finger at you.

We’re back – and I’ve argued this many times – to compassion, and at the heart of compassion lies understanding. Hislop never once mentioned compassion, and never once tried to understand, to get inside the mind, the reality, of being an outsider.

That simple polarity – you’re a worker, or you’re a shirker. Hislop ended his programme by repeating it and pronouncing, ‘I’m with the workers.’ As he claimed most people are when presented with that false division. And that division has of course become the stock-in-trade of the press. Forty years ago we accepted and were proud of the welfare state and we had moved a long way from that Victorian divide. But it’s now back, and it’s pretty brutal, and where once the BBC might have been expected to show some neutrality – and indeed recognise the plight of society’s outsiders, it’s no longer fashionable to do – or maybe, and simply, the BBC no longer dares to show a heart of its sleeves.

And finally – Hislop made no mention at all of the extraordinary population growth in the early 19th century, consequent upon the industrial revolution, and the major problems faced by cities such as Manchester. See Alison Light’s Common Ground for the situation in Cheltenham. The Poor Law Amendment Act was a response to a perceived and real emergency. We have no such excuse in our own times.

Yes, there is a continuing discussion to be had about whether or not austerity has gone too far, and payments of some benefits have increased to an extraordinary degree in recent years. There are issues to be addressed but the worker-shirker divide is entirely the wrong context.

Iain Duncan Smith – can I not be cynical? 

A challenge.

My last post suggested that Good Friday is a day not to be cynical. And then we have Iain Duncan Smith. And he presents a challenge! After more than five years in post, knowing all the while his government’s agenda, and being a living breathing (I think) part of that agenda, making an apparent heart-on-the sleeve resignation, in a way that could not have been more public. Or damaging.

Another challenge to my self-imposed ban on cynicism is the Daily Mail. How I wondered did it respond to IDS’s resignation? They support a pensioner-friendly, undeserving poor, scrounger-hating agenda, so I expected they’d come down heavily on soft-hearted Iain.  So no surprise – his resignation was a ‘silly and petulant act’.

On the other hand, IDS is a leading Brexiter, and isn’t the Mail rather keen on Brexit? I’d like to have been at the Mial editorial meeting which decided which line to take. If I read the Mail more avidly maybe I’d pick up on the nuances of its response. (Although for a Paul Dacre-edited paper it doubt if there’s too much ‘nuance’).

What I’d love to see is legislation requiring as part of the freedom of the press agenda the publication of the editorial meeting minutes (and maybe a few private e-mails as well – thinking Hillary Clinton!) of the Daily Mail.

And while we’re at it – all owners and editors fully UK domiciled and tax-paying.

That’s enough cynicism for one Good Friday.

OK – mild by some standards!

Cod steaks and Venice

Cooking a birthday meal for my partner yesterday – cod steaks cooked with romano and chilli peppers – I’m enjoying this cooking, shame it’s taken me a few decades to realise it. And there’s another side to it I like. You occupy your mind when cooking – by thinking, by singing, by listening to the radio. I don’t like voices or music when I’m reading or desk-working or writing. But cooking – the radio’s a great companion. I could be revisiting hits from the 1960s. Or listening to the news or (God help me) phone-ins on topical subjects – legalising drugs or street cleaning or whatever exciting topics they dream up. Brexit! No – not Brexit!

So last night – what was on the radio? A Radio 3 feature in the Venetian ghetto – its origins, its role as a magnet for Jews from Spain after they were expelled in 1492, its remarkable musical and literary culture. I’m fascinated by Venice, and by Jewish history, so here was a perfect case of serendipity. And it took me back to walking the Camino, and that sense I had of a remarkable medieval culture, when Moor and Christian and Jew lived in creative tension cheek by jowl.

So there you have it – cod steaks, Venice, the ghetto, Spain. I need life to be a little like that. When the small things come together in ways you don’t expect, and – put simply – make you happy.

The only problem,  for Hazel, she had to listen to me explain as we sat down to eat why a radio programme on the Venetian ghetto was special. She smiled, patiently.

The Foreign Secretary wobbles …

One final post before I put this blog to rest for a week or two – I’ll be on a retreat and, I trust, out of touch with the world!

My starting point this time: Bronwen Maddox’s interview (before an audience of 250 within the Foreign Office) with Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, in the March edition of Prospect.  Richard Dawkins was, curiously, in the audience. Not always a favourite – his views on religion aren’t mine (though I read his books!) but on this occasion he pinned Hammond beautifully.

Dawkins: “On something as important as Europe why hand it over to the British people.’ (How tongue in cheek that was I don’t know.)

Hammond: ‘There speaks a true democrat – too important for the people to decide.’

Dawkins: ‘We have a representative democracy – we want politicians to make judgements on our behalf.’

And that is indeed how we avoid the excesses of populism, and rule by the popular press and an unaccountable media. Referenda are dangerous instruments: the ‘popular will’ is a fickle thing, easily roused by rabble-rousers, and the damage once done hard to put right.

Hammond, justifying his position on Europe, then commented: “What’s gone wrong is very simple. The economic benefits haven’t been materialising for Britain, so many people feel that the dynamism and entrepreneurialism of our economy has been held back by the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy.”

Does he really believe this? To quote an article elsewhere in Prospect (by Springford and Tilford), “there is next to no evidence that EU membership is a significant constraint on the supply-side of the UK economy. For example, according to the OECD, Britain’s markets for goods and services are the second least regulated in the world.”

If we’re not reaching markets – and that is especially true  compared to our European neighbours in countries outside the EU – it isn’t the EU’s fault.

Look elsewhere, Philip, and you might begin to do your job encouraging British firms to get stuck into markets round the world.

(It’s interesting to speculate on why British firms do underperform outside Europe. Two related suggestions: the size of our domestic market, and more broadly the English-language market, so there isn’t the same urgency there is for others; and a certain discomfort dealing with other countries and other languages. The world dominance of English may actually count against us.)

Obama chops Trump down

Lovely to see – to hear – Obama chopping Trump down. Being president is not about a being a talk show host, about marketing, about publicity, it’s about making difficult decisions, and some are unpopular, some will hurt people, and being well-briefed in your dealings with other world leaders – they too have ‘their own crowds back home’. That last point I especially liked – you, Donald, are not alone in this world.

There’s a piece in the Economist on American conservative talk radio, hosted by the semi-crazed (Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck) who somehow in the rarefied air of the prairies don’t just to get a hearing but strike a few big chords – or a few bum notes. If bum notes are all you hear, would you recognise a chord?

Does it give joy to Trump to be supported by such people – how much of a conscious game is he playing with them – feeding them pap?

Ted Cruz is no better, but while you feel that for Trump it is a big game, and a big ego, for Ted Cruz it is deadly, evangelically serious. He also feeds the talk shows with great material. The trouble is – he believes it all, and he can express himself with a degree of coherence. And he is so sure he’s right that compromise and balance, which is what the American constitution requires, gets shown the door. And America becomes ungovernable, as it halfway is now.

What also bugs me is Cruz’s call on the Bible, and Jesus, to support him. He sure as hell – almost literally – wouldn’t get close to the pearly gates. America has always been too good – the prairies again – at creating its own religions.

Only one small pleasure in all this – a little bit of humour – Fox News almost the good guys. They do at least have a small idea that politics is about governing – and governing, as John Kasich the best of the Republican contenders has made clear, is a serious matter, about results and balanced budgets and not public platforms.

The UK is – to use totally the wrong expression – a different ballgame. But we also have the same populist right-wing nonsense to deal with and it’s big in the media – thank God we’re spared talk shows. But we do, sadly, have the Mail.

Obama mentions that one aspect of government is looking out for the underdog – ‘standing up for people who are vulnerable and don’t have some powerful political constituency’. And that is the ultimate litmus test of any politics.

To quote Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom, which I’ve done before:

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed/ For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse/ An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe/ An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing