tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14927885642958321412024-03-12T18:03:02.884-07:00Third Class on a One-Class Traindigitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-25468866221184375252012-05-03T10:41:00.000-07:002012-05-03T14:09:47.821-07:00From the people who brought you Cleggmania<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg491ZAs4_uKPZwAjy-3f0txBV6AOR2_bqpw1gF-PK3vRQHGNWfAsyiD-XDxt9y-E1cWAZCkhSMMxXuRsC9LJjN7Imm_a2J4568EUbUB2tLdVzYFlPxgbsZmuhfn3HhG-qgshuLwJTHPVw/s1600/ind.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg491ZAs4_uKPZwAjy-3f0txBV6AOR2_bqpw1gF-PK3vRQHGNWfAsyiD-XDxt9y-E1cWAZCkhSMMxXuRsC9LJjN7Imm_a2J4568EUbUB2tLdVzYFlPxgbsZmuhfn3HhG-qgshuLwJTHPVw/s320/ind.jpg" width="288" /></a></div>
The Independent, there. Great paper. Always something that has me massaging my temples and going 'tssshhh'.<br />
<br />
What we have there is the distinction Owen H padded around in 'Uncommon' - the point where provincial subculture kids affecting disdain for their bullies grow up into metropolitan liberals mocking chavs, and don't grow any more subtle social consciousness along the way.<br />
<br />digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-67284366548484203322012-02-24T15:10:00.005-08:002012-02-25T04:01:50.940-08:00well-meaning individuals persecuted by business-hating elites, againFollow my pointing finger in the direction of the always-diligent <a href="http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com/">Watching A4E</a> for their coverage of the decline and fall of the A4E empire. Uncannily, the wider media seem to have noticed that government contract companies tend to be run by shady chisellers who soak up vast amounts of money for delivering distinctly ropey results. Those business-friendly types in government haven't been quite so perspicacious. Last time we checked - two weeks into a perfect storm of shameful news - guess who's the preferred bidder on a major prisoner rehabilitation contract?<br /><br />Of course nothing can discourage the <span style="font-style: italic;">definitely authentic</span> commenters who drop by to say things like 'at least they're TRYING to help people,' 'nobody's PERFECT,' 'who among us HASN'T committed major institutional fraud,' and so on.<br /><br />Update: <a href="http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/">The Void</a> also doing a bang-up job monitoring the weapons-grade bullshit being manufactured by the government as they frantically try to staunch the bleeding.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-48188699985657892902011-11-26T08:59:00.003-08:002012-02-24T14:08:24.709-08:00broken recordDisagreement up on Mount Olympus. The <a href="http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2011/11/cleggs-youth-con.html">£1bn found behind the sofa cushions</a> to subsidise employers who recruit young people does kind of put the lie to the position hitherto occupied by the Coalition: that <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/8364820/Iain-Duncan-Smith-there-are-lots-of-jobs-for-the-unemployed.html">'the jobs are out there'</a> and the fault's with the unemployed. In fact this means that the government are taking a more nuanced position than the notoriously biased taxpayer-hating BBC, whose recent interventions on the subject of unemployment were enough to make you nostalgic for the days when the issue was a media blind spot.<br /><br />First there was John Humphrys, given an hour-long programme to explain his Parsonsian theory about the decline of the Decent Working Class. He began by telling us that, in his youth, there had only been one deadbeat dad in Splott, and that he'd been looked down on by the entire neighbourhood (a stark contrast with the modern era, when those on benefits are venerated as national heroes.) In his spirited campaign to revive working-class shame, Humphrys did briefly entertain the radical idea that the unemployment figures there (as high as 24%) might be due to the state of the job market, but such outlandish notions were put to rest by a visit to the local jobcentre, where he found 'friendly staff' and '1,600 jobs'. At this point he went back to collecting anecdotes from curtain-twitchers, while viewers struggled to digest the inferred conclusion that Cardiff (plus the surrounding areas) has a population of just over 6,400. Patient examination <a href="http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/10/john-humphrys-is-wrong-on-social-security">here</a>, if you're inclined.<br /><br />Next, safely ringfenced away on BBC3, a panel discussion-cum-reality show called 'Up For Hire', which put four young jobseekers through a variety of employment-rated challenges while discussing the issues around the subject with guests and a live audience. The show's remit was very limited. It illustrated perfectly how insubstantial the discussion of unemployment becomes when anything political is pre-emptively taken off the agenda. So we talked about things like how young people might need to adopt more creative jobhunting strategies, like walking around town with a sandwich board, without stopping to consider why this was being reported as a quirky That's Life! human interest story rather than a sombre indictment of our entire economic and political system. The show boiled down to the same hilariously point-missing question posed over and over again: <span style="font-style: italic;">'there are 2.5m unemployed - what are they all doing wrong?'</span><br /><br />The programme's studio guests - mostly celebrities and business owners - weren't short of suggestions on this.* Footage of one of the contestants overreacting to some negative feedback in a challenge was spun into a ten-minute collective philippic on how thin-skinned and coddled young people were today, and how they all needed to toughen up, face reality, and so forth. From laziness to scruffy appearance to lack of imagination, everyone wanted to pitch in with their incredible one-shot diagnosis of youth unemployment (based of course solely on their small sack of personal anecdotes - cf <a href="http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/">Kaplan</a>, 'someone who has actually been there'). One point everyone agreed on is that 'graduates shouldn't expect to walk into a job' - a neat piece of ideological sleight of hand, that, evoking as it does <span style="font-style: italic;">arrogance</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">entitlement</span>, whereas in fact (for graduates and non-graduates alike) it's surely not so unreasonable to expect to have some decent chance of finding work.<br /><br />As it happened, the young people (contestants and audience members) all seemed rather bright, articulate and well-adjusted, with no particuar illusions about their prospects. At one point (with the discussion focussing on preciousness, and how young people were unwilling to get their hands dirty in 'real' jobs), the visiting celebrities regaled us with tales of they'd all worked briefly in low pay/service sector jobs before striking it rich, and the panel all reached the consensus that kids should take any job they can and work their way up to something better. A sharp malcontent in the audience leaned forward and asked <span style="font-style: italic;">'but how long are you supposed to stay in that job if nothing better comes along?'</span> The panel stuttered along the lines of <span style="font-style: italic;">'well, er, forever'</span> before the host quickly moved the discussion on. A simple realistic counter-factual question was enough to derail the magical voluntarist received wisdom.<br /><br />If the young people acquitted themselves well, the same couldn't always be said of the guests, whose purported expertise and insight looked distinctly tired and threadbare. Worst of all was Katie from 'The Apprentice', who boomed out <a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011852.html">unpopular populist</a> talking points (<span style="font-style: italic;">'media studies is a waste of time... if you went to a polytechnic, blow yourself up'</span>) like a drunken relative at Christmas dinner, while the audience cringed and shuffled their feet. That particular line of argument - that the problem is airy-fairy education which should be tailored to be more directly relevant to employers - is another one that's gaining traction. We can only dream of a world in where the reverse was true.<br /><br />What's increasingly clear is that magical voluntarism is the only game in town. The ever-windy CBI's best idea on the economy is to strip away employee protection - or, as the only slightly insane Evening Standard <a href="http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/poll/poll-54221-details/ques-56112-id/city+poll:+sovereign+debt/poll.do">poll</a> had it, <span style="font-style: italic;">'should it be made easier for firms to sack people to help tackle joblessness?'</span> Of course, if employers want to take on conveniently disposable staff without employment protection, they could just hire agency temps, but never mind. Everyone enjoys a race to the bottom.<br /><br />The Institute of Economic Affairs, meanwhile, suggest 'suspending' the minimum wage; in fact, between apprenticeships (£2.60ph, impossible for anyone not living with very tolerant parents, with no guarantees at the end), the ever-more-compulsory internships, and the looming encroachment of workfare, everything we do seems to be based on the possibility of getting everyone doing a day's work for considerably less than a day's pay. The Citizens UK Living Wage campaign itself, which seemed to be making some tentative progress into the mainstream, has disappeared into the long grass.<br /><br />The government staunchly deny the existence of the working poor; confronted with the statistics, they preach that the solution is to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15796685">'make work pay'</a>, something achieved not (as a foolish man might assume) by increasing wages, but by capping benefits. The vultures are circling around tax credits. Household incomes are falling for most, while managerial and boardroom posts remain <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/23/uk-household-earnings-fall?CMP=twt_gu">untroubled</a> by austerity. The Tories, who are imposing their policies on the basis that we must tackle our deficit, have <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8904118/David-Cameron-deficit-harder-to-clear-than-first-thought.html">admitted</a> that they may not be able to reduce the deficit after all.<br /><br />If you see anyone out on the streets, mind, they're just protesting for protest's sake. Back to you, Dermot.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">*A fine example of the species is the role model Philip Green, who decided to share his pearls of wisdom on youth unemployment <a href="http://t.co/eqPbXq7x"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></a><a href="http://t.co/eqPbXq7x">on the same day</a> that he threw a few hundred young people on the dole. Unfair to blame him personally, perhaps. But it follows that if we praise these men for 'creating' jobs in more favourable times (as if employing someone was ever a selfless act), we can also blame them for 'destroying' those jobs later on.</span>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-29398599941903679342011-10-31T08:10:00.000-07:002011-10-31T08:15:04.523-07:00Beckhamology AND Beckhamonomy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyw_Ylpo8jzKUHrXIJCeiAdE9tn_w5BaN1hyphenhyphenECjBL1qtUo5z_cYkRzCMBKGO_iVBBBh349n0IKhipPmzGoCZnmO7lrhPrJYVkpls81QC2VZROoXbsBzlWOOc5z24gABp1-5C11vlv19tI/s1600/recwisdom.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 137px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyw_Ylpo8jzKUHrXIJCeiAdE9tn_w5BaN1hyphenhyphenECjBL1qtUo5z_cYkRzCMBKGO_iVBBBh349n0IKhipPmzGoCZnmO7lrhPrJYVkpls81QC2VZROoXbsBzlWOOc5z24gABp1-5C11vlv19tI/s400/recwisdom.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669674150383422434" border="0" /></a><br />(extract from p177 of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Received Wisdom Book of Modern British History</span>, HarperCollins, 2010.)digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-52476226390640168682011-10-03T15:28:00.000-07:002011-10-03T15:59:49.715-07:00tighten your belt and consume<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTBrUtZbxzt411UEkNYL6H7e4reSHN7phDunECzxyrYsfGNiJjwqYhONhcA-5Njt7b8xn8qzNwkzt_44UX7vBUChxE8jlDwaPZ4od30wIlp03FuykGwUGT9zI0e-t2Z1Z88K2DYSmZQyU/s1600/sulli2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 57px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTBrUtZbxzt411UEkNYL6H7e4reSHN7phDunECzxyrYsfGNiJjwqYhONhcA-5Njt7b8xn8qzNwkzt_44UX7vBUChxE8jlDwaPZ4od30wIlp03FuykGwUGT9zI0e-t2Z1Z88K2DYSmZQyU/s400/sulli2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5659397422041006818" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Please tell me more about this opportunity!<br /></div><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpu4ms722O4hGqPbIMzfhgmOxm7iu-So2k4u4LuvevGX_6vk347FrTLVHp1neBlv8UK3wScOQEqnhKlDOz1Luxp2cywRA3Cq8nDob3_cGXgakhlQSvxLl1V_vwfKRsXAyrRhxr9uUdHE8/s1600/sulli1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 316px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpu4ms722O4hGqPbIMzfhgmOxm7iu-So2k4u4LuvevGX_6vk347FrTLVHp1neBlv8UK3wScOQEqnhKlDOz1Luxp2cywRA3Cq8nDob3_cGXgakhlQSvxLl1V_vwfKRsXAyrRhxr9uUdHE8/s400/sulli1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5659397554908802546" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Oh thank goodness. There is an alternative after all. The alternative to hunkered-down, ostensibly contrite, faux-prudent survival capitalism is... a return to unfettered speculative consumer capitalism. The alternative to moralising neo-Victorian priggishness is... complete embrace of anything you want, right now, because<span style="font-weight: bold;"> you're worth it. </span>No need to feel guilty!<br /><br />Remarkably strident in the circumstances - practically cheering individuals and businesses into taking unsustainable risks that will likely lead to nothing but personal debt and bankruptcies. Because, let's not kid ourselves, even when the money starts moving again, it isn't going to trickle down. When you've jettisoned politics - given up on the possibility of any kind of structural change - this is what you're reduced to. The way to be a hero and save our economy is to BUY STUFF.<br /><br />It's a neat illustration of the awkwardness of the current neoliberal position. The crash of 2008 required a public display of financial discipline and condemnation of irresponsible consumer borrowing - but the problem with the nostalgic Make Do and Keep Calm for Victory rhetoric is that (real) thrift and prudence are inimical to the interests of capitalism. The Tories in particular were always more comfortable as the party of boom and bust - maybe, based on this, we'll see a movement within the party to return to those good old days?digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-1404783799686136122011-09-18T06:31:00.000-07:002011-09-18T06:48:30.022-07:00Clampdown - postscript<a href="http://ridingthirdclass.blogspot.com/2011/07/working-for-clampdown.html">The cargo cult of popular opinion. </a><br /><br />Johnny Marbles agreed to take part in a BBC Radio phone-in last week. Almost all of the callers were furiously angry and chided him for bullying a helpless old man and/or interrupting the sacrosanct proceedings of the mother of all parliaments. Lots of callers insisted on treating him as if he'd carried a deadly weapon rather than a foam pie (because it <span style="font-style: italic;">could have been</span> a gun, or bomb - a whole metaphysical maze there). "The security guards should have been armed, and they should have shot you". One caller began "Now, I don't agree with the things Rupert Murdoch did, whatever they were..."<br /><br />After JM had left the programme, one last caller said that throwing a foam pie into Rupert Murdoch's face was disrespectful to the family of Milly Dowler.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-27371081599416714742011-09-06T13:22:00.000-07:002011-09-06T14:07:37.090-07:00Some top-class 'comment'.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS-YQjQ-0y6m9DR0Nlr0nio2oaerw7e6Ygn8iSK-IsUVYkLj6rU2kWGH4RQtwJP0DSQDuL8UCcoIIi6VpdC9mSR781i3LGmfFCSPabnLdh-lsNjxuleyc_i5R0dvJaDltbRWdRWkG6dt8/s1600/class.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 525px; height: 233px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS-YQjQ-0y6m9DR0Nlr0nio2oaerw7e6Ygn8iSK-IsUVYkLj6rU2kWGH4RQtwJP0DSQDuL8UCcoIIi6VpdC9mSR781i3LGmfFCSPabnLdh-lsNjxuleyc_i5R0dvJaDltbRWdRWkG6dt8/s400/class.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5649344973764375762" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center; font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:78%;">Inverted commas used there to imply chuckling dismissal of the notion that there was ever such a thing as a working class. Surely they were just a myth invented by governesses to frighten children?</span><br /></div><br />As Daniel Barrow observed, <span style="font-style: italic;">"It probably seems fairly obvious to those involved in the riots that they exist in a particular relation to the means of production, e.g. having to sell their labour in an open market (& getting nowhere). The fact that the media don't seem to get that seems pretty symptomatic to me."</span><br /><br />But, yeah, correcting the rioters on their social self-construction is absolutely the right move to make right now. Everything'll flow from the use of the correct nomenclature (handed down by approved media outlets, naturally).<br /><br />Stupid Tyrone, though - if only he was<span style="font-style: italic;"> proper</span> working class (respectable, unionised, and employed in a production job), he'd be out of poverty in no time. He's only got himself to blame.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-13865072763791565222011-07-21T09:51:00.001-07:002011-07-21T13:00:36.398-07:00(working for the) Clampdown<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWUINXK2uQsB-iymSDwkHYqEDeht5zUfprVihaFLtNgjNFy1MgvjZF1sq-uJEojHjzxNpOen8P76xRQqZy1drThWHsEDG5lwvMOjT072dd50vzHWg8wfUb_1H1mKiQuG24WgxZoBAKpY0/s1600/freepaper.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 253px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWUINXK2uQsB-iymSDwkHYqEDeht5zUfprVihaFLtNgjNFy1MgvjZF1sq-uJEojHjzxNpOen8P76xRQqZy1drThWHsEDG5lwvMOjT072dd50vzHWg8wfUb_1H1mKiQuG24WgxZoBAKpY0/s400/freepaper.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5631849584451327922" border="0" /></a><br />Fearsome stuff from the letters page of Britain's most discarded newspaper.<br /><br />We're all tired of it, it's not a big story, and it would have been perfectly okay if Milly Dowler and those servicemen's families and the other people had all been paedophiles, wouldn't it, eh? Didn't think of that, did you?<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">(The Metro would of course be carrying page upon page of in-depth, carefully-researched coverage of the East African famine if only if it didn't have to keep up with ridiculous fripperies like phone hacking.)</span>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-34883410792690845842011-06-05T01:12:00.000-07:002011-06-13T07:35:34.312-07:00Metamorphosis<blockquote>The crab begins to change into a new sort of creature, one that exists to serve the parasite. It can no longer do the things that would get in the way of <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Sacculina</span></span>’s growth. It stops moulting and growing, which would funnel energy away from the parasite. Crabs can typically escape from predators by severing a claw and regrowing it later on. Crabs carrying <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Sacculina</span></span> can lose a claw, but can’t grow a new one in its place. And while other crabs mate and produce a new generation, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">parasitised</span> crabs simply go on eating and eating.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Carl <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Zimmer</span>, 'Parasite Rex'</span><br /><br /></blockquote>Inviting a Big Oil executive to determine the future of this country’s higher education produced the unsurprising recommendation of the elimination of public funding and introduction of market-based solutions. The Browne Report itself was a cocktail of smooth-flowing bromides about <span style="font-style: italic;">choice</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">quality</span>, notably unburdened by specifics, and taking a <a href="http://publicuniversity.org.uk/2011/03/03/when-ideology-meets-reality-integrity-suffers/">relaxed</a> approach to accepted academic practice on selection of evidence and other such piffling issues. The Cable-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Willetts</span> axis disappointed Browne by not implementing his plan in its totality - they approved the complete removal of the central teaching grant in non-STEM subjects, but opted to introduce a fees cap of £9,000 rather than leave institutions completely free to set their own levels.<br /><br />As is so often the case, those who celebrate liberalising market reforms show a curious reluctance to push them to their logical conclusions; Browne may have been displeased by the government’s timidity regarding the fee cap, but his own commitment was less than total. If, after all, the market could be relied upon to preserve high-quality education, there would be no need to ringfence STEM subjects; doing so was a tacit admission that the plans would have a detrimental effect on unprotected subject areas. As it had no real fidelity to principle, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">wouldn</span>’t even save money (more on which later), it’s hard under the circumstances to conclude that Browne was anything but a blatant and cynical attempt to reshape the British university, and turn it into a ‘new sort of creature‘.<br /><br />The promise of providing better funding to universities was dubious even at the report stage. The cost of the 80% <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">HEFCE</span> cut would be balanced if universities charged around £6,000 per year; a small increase in income could only be obtained by charging £7,000 or more. Whereabouts would universities set their fees? Cable concluded that the (itself fearsomely high) level of £7,500 per year would be ‘economically rational‘, and suggested that <span style="font-style: italic;">"students will search for value for money and compare the offers of different universities."</span> What actually took place (as Tom O’Shea observed) was an instructive lesson in economics: when market protections were removed, the outcome was not fair competition driving down prices in the consumers’ interests, but a cartel tacitly agreeing to charge as near to the maximum fee as their reputations would allow. Your town’s Russell Group university would charge £9,000 - the local ex-polytechnic would ‘compete’ by charging £8,500.<br /><br />If Cable and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Willetts</span> were surprised, they were the only ones. The removal of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">HEFCE</span> grants for non-STEM subjects meant that institutions were faced with an enormous funding gap. Vice-Chancellors up and down the country - already accustomed to chopping ‘unproductive’ departments to pay for management consultants and sundry bed-feathering - immediately realised that even balancing the books would now require them to ramp up their money-extraction programmes. Were these men ever going to diffidently demur at an opportunity to put the screws to their students? With Higher Education holed and taking on water, it was no surprise to see the usual collection of superfluities rushing the lifeboats, and never mind the women and children (squint and you can see Billy Zane pushing through the crowd, clutching a bundle of MBA courses -<span style="font-style: italic;"> ‘Let me on board! I’m all she has!</span>’).<br /><br />The fig leaf of social-liberal cover on all of this, much cited by Liberal Democrats, was the two-tiered nature of the cap. There is a ‘soft cap’ at £6k, which universities have to seek permission and meet certain conditions to exceed, before the absolute cap at £9k. The requirement for universities to apply for permission to set top-level fees, for all the oxygen wasted on the subject by Cable, turned out to be a formality. Universities intending to exceed the soft cap have to get a go-ahead from the Office of Fair Access, who evaluate the application based on the institution’s performance on access targets, and make recommendations for changes if necessary.<br /><br />The central role that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">OFFA</span> were to play in the fee-setting process evidently came as a surprise to them. Browne was probably surprised too - elsewhere in his report, he’d recommended that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">OFFA</span> be abolished and its functions absorbed into a new ’streamlined’ body, the Higher Education Council. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">OFFA</span>, it should be noted at this point, is a micro-department which (at the time the reforms were announced) had a total staff of five, headed by a former vice-chancellor. The universities were so intimidated by this imposing body that most casually flouted the April 1st deadline for returning their applications. Once the size of their task dawned on them, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">OFFA <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/03/tuition-fees-university-charge-access">tried</a></span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/03/tuition-fees-university-charge-access"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span></a> to put a brave face on things, and hurriedly hired two more staff to chip in with the pile of late applications.<br /><br />The actual sanctions available to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">OFFA</span> are nebulous. Universities who fail to meet <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">OFFA</span>’s access guidelines are obliged to spend 30% of their over-£6000 fee intake on improving access arrangements. Institutions who are in line with their targets make a smaller contribution. This is all very nice, but you’d hope that someone along the chain of command would have realised that it simply gives failing institutions another incentive to ramp up their fees to offset these ‘losses’. What’s more, the definition of ‘access improvement activity’ used is very broad - advice and information services to schools count, for example. There are no binding requirements for failing institutions to meet any kind of target for actually <span style="font-style: italic;">admitting</span> disadvantaged students. Sending out leaflets and prospectuses - activities most universities would be carrying out in any case - simply gets moved under a different heading in the accounts.<br /><br />The IFS (that respected and august body of hard-headed thinkers, who peculiarly morph into a bunch of irrelevant academic <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">cloudcuckoolanders</span> when their conclusions no longer mesh with Coalition policy) calculated that, for all the noise made about ’access’, the poorest 30% of students will be worse off under the new HE system. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">OFFA's</span> own website bashfully admits that, over their history, they have completely failed to improve university access for the poorest 10% of the population*. If that was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">OFFA</span>’s success rate <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">pre</span>-Browne, what kind of results can we expect when they’re overworked and overloaded too? The closest thing to an idea to bring in more students from low income families was the idea of letting rich candidates buy places at universities, which would allegedly open up more places for poor students to attempt to earn. The ‘concessions’ wrung out by the Liberal Democrats evaporate in strong sunlight; the contemptible bad faith and pathetic self-regard of those Lib <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Dems</span> who abstained from the parliamentary vote make an excellent precis of that party’s entire character and philosophy in government.<br /><br />Rolling Nick <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Clegg</span> in front of the cameras to point out that the system was ‘free at point of use’ was an insult; the same term could equally accurately describe your kneecap-breaking neighbourhood loan shark. Perhaps the Coalition genuinely believe that today’s youth are a generation of temporal orphans with no grasp of the passage of time, or of the concept that there may be consequences of their actions. The fact that young people may be concerned precisely <span style="font-style: italic;">about</span> their futures and the impact of debt on their later lives apparently <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">didn</span>’t occur to anyone; all the more surprising seeing as this is a Government which never misses an opportunity to remind us that we risk burdening our children with debt if the deficit is left unaddressed.<br /><br />As long as we mention deficits and red ink, would the Browne reforms at least cut Government spending? In short (taking into account a little balance-sheet juggling) : <a href="http://www.hepi.ac.uk/478-1905/HEPI-publishes-analysis-of-Government-concessions-on-HE-funding-and-student-finance.html">no</a>. From the point of view of immediate expenditure, reforms are counter-productive. The loans are subsidised by the taxpayer ‘at point of use’, so don‘t save money in the short term - the higher the fees go, the more money is spent right now. Browne naturally envisaged the loans paying for themselves in the long term once the repayments start, but of course his team’s calculations were based on institutions charging low average fees. The IFS predicted that if every institution charged the maximum fee, something like three quarters of graduates would fail to repay them before the thirty-year amnesty. At a fleeting glance, a student loan looks like a good investment for the lender - that initial £27k could bring home over £80k if the graduate pays it back slowly over the maximum period of time. If three in four graduates default on their debt, suddenly it looks about as shrewd an investment vehicle as a US <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">subprime</span> mortgage circa August 2006. What’s more, if defaults become widespread, we may see pressure for the kind of federal loan-underwriting legislation that was passed by the Bush administration in the US - next time, it could be organisations dealing in <a href="http://www.bit.ly/ijPmUi">SLABS</a> (Student Loan Asset Backed Securities) that are ‘too big to fail’.<br /><br />These thoughts - combined with the indications that young people (rational economic agents that they are) will simply opt out of higher education rather than continue to pay through the nose for uncertain rewards - do eventually seem to have permeated at least one of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Willetts</span>’s brains. He has conceded that upfront savings brought about by the Browne plan look set to be smaller than he expected. Naturally, he blamed the vice-chancellors for setting their fees so irrationally high, and threatened that he would be forced to make cuts in ‘other areas’ (presumably to the teaching grants in hitherto protected subjects) unless the vice-chancellors agreed among themselves to charge lower rates and thus attract more students. But you can’t expect that kind of enlightened collective action in a market of competing individuals. Not for the first time, you wonder whether we’re being ruled by sinister conspirators or by utterly inept charlatans who don’t stop to consider any of the logical consequences of their actions.<br /><br />The media, as in 1997, have largely missed the point. Back then, the introduction of tuition fees sparked far more of a furore than the simultaneous abolition of the student maintenance grant, which would have by far the greater impact on the sector and on the lives of students. Last year, the liberal broadsheets wrung their hands at the vast increase in the individual costs of going to university, while directing relatively little attention to the removal of almost all central funding for Higher Education in Britain. Plenty of columnists wanted to agonise about the ‘hard choices’ that faced their sons and daughters as they considered HE; nobody seemed to want to examine exactly what shape HE will have taken by that time. Our crusading liberal media only seem interested in the <span style="font-style: italic;">individual as consumer</span>; Browne himself would applaud.<br /><br />We’re already getting an impression of the impact the Browne reforms will have in the long term. Like the poor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">sacculina</span>-infested crabs, schools are shedding limbs with no prospect of ever being able to grow them back. London Met, an institution which has some of the best rates of low-income engagement in the country, might expect to be rewarded for their commitment to ‘access’ - instead, management are cutting 70% of courses off the books, including virtually the entire humanities department. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Keele</span> has joined <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Middlesex</span> in dropping philosophy entirely; Glasgow has made cuts across the board including seemingly ‘productive’ and vocational courses like Nursing and Social Work. <a href="http://www.strathclydetelegraph.com/web/news/358-students-and-staff-protest-course-closures-humanities-is-compacted-to-make-room-for-business-school-alleges-lecturer"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Strathclyde</span></a> is the clearest example yet of the metamorphosis most universities will experience. If you have reached the conclusion that all of this is somehow good for education in this country, perhaps you ought to go back and re-examine your premises - it certainly buries the notion that Browne will give consumer-students more choice. Future <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/the-value-of-higher-education-made-literal/"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">employability</span></a>, and the endlessly-cited <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/an-inconvenient-superman-_b_716420.html?view=print">competition</a> with China and India, will become the sole factor that determines the future of courses, and of institutions. As always, the changes are justified with reference to some alleged customer demand: <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">UCL</span>’s occupation, expressing solidarity with their threatened teaching staff, made an elegant statement of principle that undercut this at a stroke: <span style="font-style: italic;">‘we refuse to be divided from our lecturers and treated as disgruntled consumers.’ </span>Education is not a market. Students and staff know this, even if managers and policymakers don't.<br /><br />Embracing complete liberalisation might distribute rewards effectively in some abstract economic model, where the field is level at the start; otherwise it merely tends to entrench privilege. Without a central teaching grant, and with the majority of prospective students strangely unwilling to mortgage themselves up the eyeballs, the only institutions that will be able to afford to teach the humanities are those where the born-wealthy cluster. The public-school 7% are already hugely over-represented in law, journalism, publishing, the media, and, especially insultingly, politics. Those <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Delingpoles</span> who will claim that this is due to their intrinsically superior abilities might do well to consider that in the areas of human endeavour that rely more heavily on pure talent - hard science and sport, for instance - there is no such <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">overrepresentation</span>. Browne’s decision to retain STEM funding can be decoded into <span style="font-style: italic;">‘best keep a few of the snivelling proles around for the difficult jobs; otherwise, they can go fuck themselves.’</span><br /><br />Strangely, enough, the seemingly hopeless lack of prospects faced by our youth may lead to more throwing economic self-interest to the wind and studying the subjects they’re interested in. This determination is to be applauded; it’s unfortunate that it will only serve to prop up a rotten structure. I still believe that imaginative organised protest can reverse at least some of what's happening and give us an <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">NHS</span>-style 'pause for thought': in the long run, though, I’m increasingly settled on the belief that the future of comprehensive higher education lies outside the current institutions. I’ll direct readers to the <a href="http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/site/index/links_and_comments_on_the_free_university_idea/">debate</a> on the 'Proletarian University' over at Infinite Thought last winter, to isolated green shoots like the <a href="http://reallyfreeschool.org/?page_id=2">Really Free School,</a> and to the manifesto of the <a href="http://www.reallyopenuniversity.org/"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">ROU</span></a>.<br /><br />UPDATE: Come one, come all, to the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8557555/New-university-to-rival-Oxbridge-will-charge-18000-a-year.html">NCH</a>. This is what humanities teaching looks like in our brave new world.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Eventually <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">there'll</span> be a post along these lines dealing with Further Education, where many of the same themes will recur.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />*At this point you may want to go and <a href="http://youtu.be/kz9nq2a48Dk">watch</a> the old Armando <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Iannucci</span> sketch about pole vaulters. 'Hello, we're <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">OFFA</span>, and our only job is to widen access to higher education.'</span>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-16751252681601528482011-05-19T15:51:00.000-07:002012-01-25T09:22:38.527-08:00Ship of Theseus FCOwen turned out a great chapter on Milton Keynes – its strange car-crash of signals and associations, its uniquely (for Britain) schizophrenic soul caught between <span style="font-style: italic;">‘its utopian promises and its bland, kitsch Thatcherite reality.’</span> In New Ruins, he tries to reclaim the 'old new town', the planned, rational metropolis of the future, from its later peculiar adoption as 'city of the eighties', with all the dispiriting implications that might suggest.<br /><br />One consequence of this trend at the time was that MK always seemed to be mooted as a ‘deserving’ location for a professional football club. At the time, football was at the nadir of its media popularity, struggling with its first period of New Realism. Always-‘inevitable’ mergers (Fulham Park Rangers, Thames Valley Royals) and closures were mooted in all of the old footballing centres, at least when assorted Conservative MPs weren’t angrily suggesting shutting football down altogether. The unpleasantly tinged notion that London in particular had ‘too many football clubs’, and that there was dead wood that deserved to be removed, was a frequently aired notion entirely in synch with the spirit of the times.<br /><br />I mention all of this (believe it or not) in the context of Saturday’s Conference playoff final game between Luton and AFC Wimbledon. It’s another car-crash of associations. Not least because, among the many brainwaves that realistic businessmen came up with in the Eighties, any club based in a cramped city-centre ground within a fifty-mile radius of Milton Keynes could expect to be associated with a move there. The one that came closest to getting off the ground was… Luton.<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3DqBuXyAH83_F3CZAkajpm3GsjKwcCH3mfoU69DFvCimt9P5MLO_DdkwsyBR2uQ8yGybdOW311mmpc-CQdxS0Mxd8_lJBtSPzl92uOK-kKRY_OG8HNUxkT-J2e6UHxF2IhBLdFtejM1E/s1600/1986.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 272px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3DqBuXyAH83_F3CZAkajpm3GsjKwcCH3mfoU69DFvCimt9P5MLO_DdkwsyBR2uQ8yGybdOW311mmpc-CQdxS0Mxd8_lJBtSPzl92uOK-kKRY_OG8HNUxkT-J2e6UHxF2IhBLdFtejM1E/s320/1986.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609513239926583394" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">(WSC – October 1986)</span><br /></div><br />The difficulty identified by successive owners is that Kenilworth Road is landlocked - wedged awkwardly into the end of a street of redbrick terraces, with no room for expansion. The land is even now, post-recession, being eyed up by assorted local property dealers. It still has old-fashioned skeleton floodlights (so that there’s no need to ask for directions from the train station, despite the shortest route to the ground having been obliterated by a ring road and shopping centre in the Seventies) and from the outside seems to be constructed mainly of plywood and portakabins. It’s a nostalgic world far removed from the pedestrian-hostile new stadiums inhabited by clubs like Reading, imperiously disassociating themselves from the communities that made them.<br /><br />Ground moves have always been mooted by Luton’s owners: David Kohler dazzled the press with talk of a ‘Kohlerdome’, then walked out of the club (leaving a financial mess) when he couldn’t get planning permission for his project. Luton struggled with an initial points deduction for entering administration, and two years later dropped out of the League after being given a 30-point cumulative penalty for <span style="font-style: italic;">re</span>-entering administration and making improper payments. The unprecedented scale of the second deduction effectively made it a punitive relegation. As it happened, Luton were one of the stronger teams in the division, and some talked optimistically about achieving the 75 or 80 points they would have needed to avoid relegation. It didn’t happen, of course; heads dropped on and off the pitch.<br /><br />So it’s possible to have a fair amount of sympathy for Luton, expelled from the League as a result of official greed and boardroom gerrymandering rather than events on the field. If only they were playing any other team they’d have my wholehearted support on Saturday. But their opponents are AFC Wimbledon - a team who can tell an even better hard-luck story. Luton may not have a League club nowadays... but Milton Keynes does. For all of the enthusiasm about American sports ideas that possessed this country in the 1980s (I’m just about old enough to remember C4’s deathly serious attempt to launch gridiron as a mainstream sport), the first franchising of an English football club didn’t take place until 2002.<br /><br />I’m sure you’ve heard all of this before. It bears repeating. Wimbledon FC, deeply unfashionable and homeless for the better part of a decade, were finally relegated from the Premier League in 2000. At this point attendances slumped and the major shareholders began to make noises about the club's unprofitability (with then-chairman Sam Hammam suggesting relocations to ‘deserving’ communities in Dublin, Cardiff, Outer Mongolia, etc, before selling up and leaving with a cool £30 million in pocket). A music business promoter corralled a group of investors and PR men into presenting Milton Keynes as the club’s natural home. New chairman Charles Koppel, eager to be shot of the drain on his investment portfolio, quickly signed up.<br /><br />The Football League initially rejected the proposal out of hand. Koppel appealed on the grounds that it should at least be given a fair hearing and treated seriously. An arbitration panel upheld this objection, so the Football League Board reversed its earlier decision, appointing a three-man Commission to examine the issues properly and make the judgement. Raj Parker (a lawyer known for representing corporate clients in commercial dispute resolution, previously employed by the FA in the aftermath of Hillsborough), Steve Stride (then a director at Aston Villa), and Alan Turvey (chairman of the Isthmian League, also at the time sitting on the FA Council) reached a majority verdict approving the move.<br /><br />Time has not been particularly kind to the justifications rolled out in the accompanying Report. Primarily, the Commission were at pains to point out that the circumstances were unique and their decision was not intended to be a far-reaching precedent.<br /><blockquote><br />108: We do not wish to see clubs attempting to circumvent the pyramid structure by ditching their communities and metamorphosising in new, more attractive areas. Nor do we wish, more than any football authorities or supporters, for franchise football to arrive on these shores. We believe that giving WFC permission in this exceptional case will have neither of these consequences.</blockquote><br /><br />They were proved right, here; there hasn’t been a rush to franchised football in England. I’d like to say that was due to the huge amounts of criticism the MK move attracted, but let’s not overestimate how much attention the powers that be pay to that type of thing. What the lack of a slippery-slope effect proves is not that their pleas of unique exceptionalism were sincere, but that their concerns over the financial circumstances (and the viability of football in Merton) were either wild and hysterical or simply perjurious. Claiming that something is on the brink of collapse unless your particular flavour of reform is immediately steamrollered through is a very old politicians’ trick.<br /><blockquote><br />110: Mr Koppel has made it clear to us and publicly that WFC is committed to taking practical steps in relation to transport and maintaining WFC’s identity… it is committed to its name, ‘Wimbledon FC‘, its colours, its traditions. It is committed to retaining its identity.</blockquote><br /><br />The Report is cluttered with assurances about the preservation of Wimbledon’s identity and traditions. Koppel and Winkelman both explicitly vowed to keep the association with the Plough Lane club, and the Commission suggested that the FL take a very strong approach to enforcing these promises. Understandable; keeping the name and colours intact was the most obvious defence against accusations of introducing franchised football. Three seasons later, Milton Keynes Dons were playing in white shirts with a different club badge - it’s now probably fair to say that very young MK fans have no idea that their club was once based in South London. Those involved would probably defend themselves on the grounds that the fortuitous rise of AFC absolved them of any responsibility of conservation. Bullshit, of course. The fact that the old identity was dropped with such unseemly haste makes one wonder whether that wasn’t their intention all along, just as soon as they could reasonably get away with it. Attempting to pass the buck to AFC is disingenuous; a more recent squabble over the old club’s museum and trophy cabinet shows that MK do not in practice accept AFC as the true inheritors.<br /><br /><blockquote>116: There is no doubt that WFC has got to its current league position through sporting merit and achievement, in accordance with the fundamental principles of the pyramid structure. In the event that WFC were to go into liquidation, player registration would revert to the Football League and another club, most probably Brentford FC, would take WFC’s place in Division One for next season, not on its own sporting merit but as a result of WFC’s predicament.</blockquote><br /><br />Well - the whole point is that the league and non-league pyramid is a codified expression of sporting merit. Promoting Brentford (the highest placed non-promoted club in the division below) could arguably have been seen as granting them an undeserved boon. On the other hand, Brentford and the long queue of clubs behind them all had far more claim on the grounds of ‘sporting merit’ than any newly formed club (which, as I hope we’ve established, MKD were always intended to be). Brentford moving up to the second tier, Dagenham & Redbridge brought into the League; football has survived bigger shakeups.<br /><br /><blockquote>127: The interests of the fans are important, But the interests of most WFC fans would not necessarily be served by a decision which results in the liquidation of Wimbledon FC.<br />128: Furthermore, resurrecting the club from its ashes as, say, ‘Wimbledon Town‘, is, with respect to those supporters who would rather that happened so that they could go back to their position the club started in 113 years ago, not in the wider interests of football.</blockquote><br /><br />Except that the decision did result in the termination of Wimbledon FC. And the awarding of their place in the league to another club. How any of this served the interests of Wimbledon’s fans escapes me. At least paragraph 128 acknowledges a truth that the Board and Commission doubtless found unpalatable: that Wimbledon emerged from non-league and climbed the pyramid on merit. The route up through the divisions that was dismissed as ‘tortuous’, that Milton Keynes were so graciously spared, is a route that Wimbledon have now negotiated not once but twice. The fact that anybody involved with this decision can use the phrase ‘sporting merit’ without immediately bursting into flame is an argument that Richard Dawkins may want to consider adopting.<br /><br /><blockquote>119: The current outlook for many clubs in Divisions 1, 2, and 3 of the Football League is distinctly bleak. They are caught in a player wages spiral that seems to be out of control. As we decide this case football league clubs are going into administration. The collapse of ITV digital and the drying up of the transfer market have contributed to the crisis. In the current financial climate, professional clubs need to encourage investors.<br />120: We believe that in the current financial climate the football authorities need to apply a flexible and supportive approach to the financial plight of clubs. To facilitate financial success, stability and development it is necessary to take a flexible and progressive view of policy considerations and apply them to the currently bleak financial world the clubs inhabit.</blockquote><br /><br />‘Encourage’ here used in the sense of ‘abandon all other concerns and kowtow to’. But seriously, folks. You can begin to approach sympathy for the decision makers when you reflect that their deliberations were made in the aftermath of the ITV digital collapse and ensuing panic. Yet - here we stand, with the Football League in rude 92-club health, even when the outside world has dropped into a major recession. 20:20 hindsight, perhaps, but it does rather make them look like short-sighted carpetbaggers lacking either the desire or the capacity to make reasoned judgements.<br /><br />Finally, some further extracts of the report that are pure neoliberal realism. Further comment on these is fairly unnecessary.<br /><br /><blockquote>109: We do not believe, with all due respect, that the Club’s links to the community around the Plough Lane site or in Merton are so profound, or the roots go so deep, that they will not survive a necessary transplant to ensure WFC’s survival.<br />111: We believe that it can be fairly stated that finding WFC a home in MK will add considerable value to a large community starved of First Division football.<br />118: Milton Keynes provides a suitable and deserving opportunity in is own right where none exists in South London.<br /><br /></blockquote><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiTUGKmWvlsCw1bbSWCZxVGhyphenhyphen3zs2R4mDBhsW9Pf2N48ATBZEmCP4-O-iEvn02hTl17CjMs8TX8OomEji1tlGOvkcXJdGSHlAUCXGf12Rcw4wQ2pBzsY1F-f9scFZHu4Oo39YYJqcd_34/s1600/WimbledonFCleagueattendances.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiTUGKmWvlsCw1bbSWCZxVGhyphenhyphen3zs2R4mDBhsW9Pf2N48ATBZEmCP4-O-iEvn02hTl17CjMs8TX8OomEji1tlGOvkcXJdGSHlAUCXGf12Rcw4wQ2pBzsY1F-f9scFZHu4Oo39YYJqcd_34/s320/WimbledonFCleagueattendances.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609513849429234114" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Does the fact that Wimbledon were in a two-year attendance slump (fairly understandably, given their continuing lack of a home ground and the heroically delayed relegation) really mean that they forfeited their right to exist? Who makes the decisions about how ‘suitable’ or ‘deserving’ a particular club or town is? Congratulations: now you’re doing politics. Sport is seldom just sport.<br /><br />MK Dons have established themselves as a steady third-tier club with a tidy stadium and a respectable (if inch-deep) support. It’s more than many older clubs can say for themselves, but hardly the glorious future that the likes of Winkelman would have conceived in 2001-2. The immodest bid to host World Cup games in 2018 illustrated the gulf between MK’s aspirations and their present quotidian reality. AFC Wimbledon, meanwhile, are one of the current success stories of non-League football, but they’re still travelling to their ’home’ games halfway across South London, as has been the case since 1991.<br /><br />AFC's presence in the League would be a permanent and salutary reminder that football’s authorities cannot be trusted with major decisions; that their judgement is unreliable and their much-vaunted ‘business acumen’ is wrong far more often than right. The AFC Fans Trust has been able to run a successful club in circumstances that were dismissed as impossible. If don't particularly care about football and have bravely slogged through all of this, there's your payoff.<br /><br />C’mon you Dons.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-37933138618118609412011-05-18T03:18:00.000-07:002011-09-22T03:05:09.281-07:00radicals by defaultA belated plug for the excellent <a href="http://www.zero-books.net/book/detail/916/Non-Stop-Inertia"><i>Non-Stop Inertia</i></a>. There are so many uncomfortable aspects of modern work and non-work that mainstream criticism and analysis have between them agreed to ignore; the only problem I have with Ivor's book is that someone didn't write it earlier.<br /><br />Hard to pick a teaser quote, but I went for a section at the end that pulls back from the immediacies of precarious life (<span style="font-style:italic;">'like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube at gunpoint'</span>) and fills in some of the context.<br /><br /><blockquote>Their generation has watched the social infrastructure they painstakingly helped to build being dismantled and sold off, while at the same time having to rescue their offspring who cannot get an economic foothold. Even in our mid to late thirties, my partner and I are always chronically financially insecure, always on the verge of packing up and moving back to our parental homes.<br /><br />Bringing up a family on a modest income, improvising and making do, work was then a source of pride and stability, a solid base upon which to build. Now, for us, the pressure of precarity demands a new sort of virtuosity and a different outlook. I am aware that by now I have probably already worked in more different jobs (although that word tends to glorify most of these activities) than both my parents put together. Work is no longer a secure base, but rather a source of anxiety and indignity, both a matter of life and death and utterly meaningless, overwhelming and yet so insubstantial it could run through our fingers. It is normal to feel under threat and undervalued, to feel snivellingly grateful for having a job, any job. We must be sure not to take work for granted and yet be willing to be taken for granted ourselves. We endure a similar level of ‘making do’, but without the home or kids, and without the security of regular employment. We can barely live independently now. How will we be able to bring up children, or support them in similar circumstances? The future is no longer something to look forward to, but something to dread.<br /><br />Again, from my family I inherited no world-shaking political beliefs, just a desire to be part of a community, to do a useful job which was not driven by private profit and to cultivate outside interests rather than be defined by a 24/7 career. Such an attitude, far from being revolutionary, used to be the norm, even a non-attitude. But now the tide has come in, and anyone with such eccentric ideas finds themselves stranded way out to sea on a sandbank with the waves lapping at their feet and the vultures circling above. By maintaining the same moderate position we have become radicals by default.</blockquote><br /><br />Radicalised by default, yes: something that's going to happen more and more often as the political and economic goalposts are shifted. The issue that got me back into active <em>actually-doing-things </em>politics was the (prophetic) Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign; abstractly, the principle that non-vocational subjects should be available at non-elite universities. Twenty, even ten, years ago the question would never even have been framed.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-50111549389263980932011-03-17T08:30:00.000-07:002011-03-17T11:51:34.768-07:00I Specialise in Revenge (II)<span style="font-style: italic;">Overheard the sounds of horses' hooves, people fighting for their lives... / My brother was still watching me, back in the days of ‘83 / By 1985, I was as cold as cold can be, but no-one’s underground to dig me out and set me free...</span><br />- All from ‘Last Day of the Miners’ Strike’<br /><br />Russell Senior may have been a flying picket, but Jarvis’s main experiences with miners involved them kicking the shit out of him outside nightclubs. Working class solidarity all too often carries with it an instinctive distrust of outsiders - you can sympathise with Jarvis, who was obviously too caught up in smaller, personal struggles, to get involved in a class war (more thoughts on this subject <a href="http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2007/01/this-must-be-place-i-waited-years-to_24.html">here</a>). His streak of determined individualism was heroic in its way, but as time went on, he seemed to regret not showing more solidarity. Later on Jarvis would speak ruefully about how growing up in the sixties and seventies made him believe in better futures, the gleaming promise of modernism (‘we’d all be living in space‘), and how he had to watch this promise snuffed out, post-78, and replaced with a universal cynicism and deflation. The evidence of later lyrics suggests that he came to feel haunted by his own inaction at the time - how can an individual fight a class war, anyway?<br /><br />Fast-forward twelve years, and four songs into ’Different Class’, we find surely the greatest class-related song in Pulp’s discography: ‘I-Spy’. This is a song about sexual conquest, to begin with (<span style="font-style: italic;">‘Just another song about single mothers and sex’</span> as Jarvis would later spit), but using that as a window to a world of more interesting tensions and energies than the mere thrill of sleeping with another man’s wife. It <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> that, to be sure, but what else?<br /><br />In today’s world, structures of power are decentralised, and responsibility is diffused (defused) into faceless hierarchies. Managers, politicians, and other ostensible authority figures are all too quick to remind us how their hands are tied, how little real responsibility they have - they’re victims just like the rest of us. What kind of war can be fought by an individual against such systems? Who can Cocker blame for the death of better worlds? Yet the system that goes to great lengths to spread an attitude of corporate irresponsibility (it’s everyone’s fault, it’s no-one’s fault in particular, it‘s no-one‘s fault at all) is the same one that has dumped all of the troubles of human existence (poverty, unemployment, illness) on the shoulders of the individual, as their responsibility and their own fault.<br /><br />But if no particular individual chose, deliberately, to destroy the lives of (for example) a generation of miners, this doesn’t mean that nobody bears responsibility. Cocker reaches the same conclusion as the terrorist groups of the last century - where the head of the structure is unreachable, fight your war against those individuals who (actively or passively) collude with it. Knowing culpability is not necessary, or even particularly relevant. How can one man fight a system? By inflicting suffering on collaborators - Cocker will channel his resentment and direct his campaign of sexual terrorism at one more or less blameless bourgeois couple. He is as careless and indiscriminate as the forces he has opposed himself to - it’s self-evidently unfair, but like policies of affirmative action, it’s unfairness being deployed to counteract an existing, wider, injustice. The couple don’t even need to be Tory hardliners - in fact, it works better if they’re assumed to be Concerned Liberals.<br /><br />If you’re reading this, you have presumably heard the song many times - the stirring movie-theme arrangement, Cocker’s entirely believable delivery (even where the language verges on the absurd, as with his poker-faced recital of adolescent triumphs), all chosen to remind us that, like the victim, we should take him <span style="font-style: italic;">very seriously indeed</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">‘I will get my satisfaction,’ </span>he vows<span style="font-style: italic;">. ‘I will blow your paradise away.’</span><br /><br />Fifteen years later, this phrase has an additional resonance - today, for better or worse, the word ‘paradise’ mostly comes up in the context of Islamic terrorism. Even in 1995, the explicit violence of the threat was jarring. What does it mean to blow someone’s paradise away? We might think of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine - raging on his deathbed at the intangible, unaccountable forces that have struck him down, threatening to<span style="font-style: italic;"> ‘march against the powers of heaven / and set black streamers in the firmament / to signify the slaughter of the gods.’</span><br /><br />The paradise at stake here is a smaller, meaner one - the paradise of James Dean posters, endowment plans, and figurines, or schools near the top of the league, as disgustedly mapped by Cocker in various songs - all in a world that has long since ‘drowned the heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour… in the icy water of egotistical calculation’. The nausea and anxiety this world seems to inspire in Cocker is well documented, but here the fear is balled up and turned into anger. We are left to reflect on the image of some cluttered estate agent’s dream home, in some super-gentrified exurban Avalon, being obliterated in a firestorm - and this is before it gets <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> venomous.<br /><br />The idea that this a tale of straightforward revenge-through-sex is belied by the lyrical content - the female of the couple is mentioned in one verse, and addressed in only a couple of lines. The sexual attraction may be genuine - Ladbroke Grove looks and all that - but his concern for her is limited. He feels moved at one point to show something resembling contrition (<span style="font-style: italic;">‘It’s not a case of woman v man’</span>), and that’s as far as the conversation goes. It’s nothing personal - just business.<br /><br />Here there’s an echo of the most famous self-created avatar of vengeance in literature - Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo. At one point the Count finds himself begged by his old lover to end his near-demented, decades-planned campaign of retribution, for the sake of his love for her. He is torn - the only time the implacable Count’s mask slips - but anguishedly agrees to end the vendetta. All we can conclude here is that Jarvis is far more dedicated to his purpose, and would never let any personal feelings get in the way of his operation.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Nothing personal… just business…</span><br /><br />Jarvis always had a talent for spitting his adversaries’ words back in their faces (best seen in later solo effort ‘Cunts Are Still Running The World’). Early in I-Spy, he whispers <span style="font-style: italic;">‘I don’t do these things for real; I do these things just so I survive’.</span> Partly a ghost of an apology to the used lover - mostly a mocking echo of the words his target might use to excuse himself of any blame, if he were only given the chance. ‘Look, we’re good people underneath, we don’t really believe in any of this’ - the victims are people who keep the appropriate ironic distance from the implications of their actions. It’s the disavowal required to operate in a rotten system, and Cocker viciously taunts them for it. This, above all, is why the song makes most sense directed at people who are, at least in theory, progressives. If this distaste was still more or less inchoate in 1995, it had crystallised by the time of ‘Cocaine Socialism’ three years later (<span style="font-style: italic;">‘You owe it to yourself/ Don’t think of anybody else’</span>).<br /><br />At the crucial point in the song, as the music drops away and Jarvis gloats in his half-second of triumph, he uses the same technique again. <span style="font-style: italic;">‘I can’t help it - I was dragged up…’ </span>he sneers, slipping into cartoonish proleface, a caricature of some mindlessly hostile estate dweller - <span style="font-style: italic;">‘take your year in Provence, and shove it up your ass!’</span> But if the intricacy of Cocker’s scheme belies his victim’s casually contemptuous views of the urban poor (<span style="font-style: italic;">‘Your minds are just the same as mine’</span>), the sheer vindictive glee of the delivery reminds us that, as well as being a rhetorical ploy, the bluntly hostile car parks / birds monologue is also <span style="font-style: italic;">true</span>. The views Cocker has arrived at through his long campaign of studying and planning happen to coincide with the unthinking knee-jerk reaction the victim might have expected. Cocker has, by the most circuitous route, reached a concord with his own class.<br /><br />Toward the end of the song, following his not-quite-apology to his lover, Jarvis solemnly informs her that<span style="font-style: italic;"> ‘it’s more a case of haves against haven’ts - and I just happen to have got what you need’</span>. Deliciously, for once in the whole setup, Jarvis is the ‘have’ - he possesses the commodity in demand (in this case, his well-rehearsed ‘second-hand excuse for technique’), and, as any good laissez-faire economic liberal knows, the market must not be interfered with. We can imagine him cackling over his defeated victim - ‘Come on, what’s wrong with you? Up your game! You could be where I am if you only <span style="font-style: italic;">aspired</span> a bit fucking harder!’<br /><br />How can one individual make a difference? By turning himself into a vengeful revenant, dragging the Last Men back into history one at a time, reminding them that scores remain unsettled, that we’re <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> all middle class now. If we concede that it’s not going to achieve anything constructive in the long run, surely none of us could begrudge the man his satisfaction.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">For more of the same, only better, why not buy Owen Hatherley’s forthcoming book ‘Uncommon’?</span>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-74278999170216210842011-02-16T02:11:00.001-08:002012-02-24T14:38:14.945-08:00The politics of gloss, post-gloss<div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011750.html">‘It feels as if the winter closing in around Cameron. <span style="font-style: italic;">Neoliberalism isn't working</span>. All the boom gloss is falling away, and England feels shoddier and shabbier than it ever did in the 70s.’<br /></a></div><br />If those GDP numbers don't pick up in the next quarter, it's going to be a lot more than a <span style="font-style: italic;">winter</span> of discontent.<br /><br />For almost fifteen years, growth was New Labour’s great alibi. As long as the economy kept expanding (even if the expansion was largely powered by dubious speculation and borrowing) then all boats would <a href="http://catandgirl.com/?p=2034">rise</a>, and there would be no need to resort to divisively old-fashioned policies of redistribution. Now that growth has ground to a halt, and looks a dicey prospect for the future in general, light-touch neoliberalism is going to have a difficult time living up to its billing. Its justifications - hollow even in the good times, but I’ll get to that - begin to look as cheap and flakey as its <a href="http://tinyurl.com/6xd97gl">architecture</a>. The Coalition’s scrabble in the bins for a political discourse based on austerity nostalgia and vindictive dogwhistling shows how difficult it is write a persuasive pitch under the circumstances. Does anyone, anywhere still believe that we live under the best (or least bad) of all political systems?<br /><br />It’s at times like this - when ordinary people can no longer expect to have the occasional sticking-plaster policy like tax credits thrown in their direction - that they begin to question why even the country’s party of organised labour have no plan to reduce the greatest gap between rich and poor since the period between the wars. They start to ask awkward but fundamental questions about where the wealth is, who controls its flow, and what criteria are used to decide these things. All the governing Coalition care to offer in response is to plead national togetherness and stage a lavish Royal wedding (showing, touchingly, that love can cross class boundaries, down as far as those who are mere millionaires).<br /><br />Robert Peston, currently a BBC business correspondent, wrote a timely book on this general theme called ‘Who Runs Britain?’* Its writing and publication coincided almost exactly with the crash and the bailout. Peston spends the entire introduction to the book talking about his background, presumably to reassure readers that he’s making his arguments as a credible grown-up authority and not some typical loony lefty. <span style="font-style: italic;">‘My teenage conviction that it is always in the national interest for the gap between rich and poor to be reduced was wrong,’ ‘I gradually came to see that much of what Margaret Thatcher did was necessary,’</span> and so on. Yet the book is generally critical of lax regulation and the maniacally blinkered short-termist mindset of those making the big decisions in the financial sector.<br /><br />Peston was on television recently in a spot about China’s economy, mentioning in passing that China was responsible for almost all of the global net reduction in poverty that had occurred over the last twenty years. This doesn’t necessarily say a great deal about social justice in China - eliminating rural serfdom, perhaps, the necessary first steps to building a modern industrial economy - but it’s an arresting statistic all the same. It can hardly be denied that the West’s neoliberal policies, even before the crash, were completely unsuccessful at addressing the interests of those at the bottom of the ladder. The trickle down was marginal and irregular - sometimes enough to distract, never enough to make a real impact on the poverty figures. The story of all benefiting from growth amounted to a vague promise of jam tomorrow. Certainly there was no point at which policymakers and grandees would pause and say <span style="font-style: italic;">‘Okay, guys, that’s more than enough wealth for us - now let’s find out how we can make it trickle down faster.’ </span><br /><br />The irrational notion that it’ll all come good, <span style="font-style: italic;">eventually</span>, has survived the crisis. The belief held by most of the Opposition and the critical media is that the problems of the financial crisis were ones of excess, soon fixed by a few legislative tweaks and a tightening of regulation. But the crisis wasn’t an event of an exceptional nature - it was an entirely in keeping with the philosophies and practices of the financial sector, and the economic policies of successive governments. Talking about ratcheting up powers of scrutiny is a mistake on more than one level - a categorical error, obviously, as our problem is qualitative rather than quantitative. It’s also a tactical mistake, because it lets the objects of this scrutiny indulge their Randroid fantasies about their incredible talents being strangled by a cabal of resentful bureaucrats.<br /><br />If the standard line of opposition is weak and counterproductive, it’s a blood-soaked revolutionary cull compared to the attitude adopted by the Coalition in power. Last week, the news broke that that the level of money coming from the City into CCHQ has doubled during Cameron’s leadership, and now makes up 50% of party funding. So, back in 2008, faced with several unpalatable choices, the last government chose probably the least objectionable - opening huge lines of public credit to reinvigorate the financial sector’s shrivelled self-confidence. The recipients of this aid showed their deep gratitude by taking their newly liquid assets and investing them with a party who might find ways to be even more intensely relaxed toward them.<br /><br />One night have expected Cameron, PR-savvy as he is, to make at least a show of clamping down on the banks for some cheap political capital. In fact (assuming we can dismiss the one-off, much-downsized £2.5bn levy) they’ve carefully steered in the opposite direction. The campaigns for Tobin or Robin Hood taxes - backed by assorted Serious Figures, not just the great unwashed - have been studiously ignored*. Remuneration and bonuses are back at the pre-2007 levels. Corporation taxes are being lowered, and tax laws amended to enable <a href="http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/financebill2011_draft_leg_overview.PDF">‘large financial services companies’</a> with operations overseas to pay less tax here. The last measure in particular has to be read as a brazen, unapologetic <span style="font-style: italic;">fuck you</span> to the UK Uncut movement and its relatives. It’s pretty clear that the financial sector is exception to the general rule of shared austerity - ostensibly so they can apply their talents and get the economy growing again. It’s more likely they’ll drive it into a big fucking wall a few more times first, but even when the glorious day comes, all involved have been careful to make it clear that we shouldn’t expect the rewards to be shared around.<br /><br />With the figleaf of collective progress long since blown away, we get to see what kind of society we’ve really built. All that three decades of neoliberal supremacy have achieved is to concentrate more wealth in fewer hands, and rearrange society so that it presents as few obstacles as possible to the lives of those fortunate individuals. Our policies have made us (on one measure, anyway) less socially progressive than a country ranked 136th in the EIU’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index">Democracy Index</a>. Of all nations, it had to be China, whose much-vaunted economic success shows that there’s no necessary antagonism between a powerful State apparatus and an acceptance of free-market principles. But then it was never the existence of a large state per se that our neoliberals despised. It was just our, particular, Western state edifices, born out of the postwar social democratic compromise, that had to be painted as the enemy and ruthlessly destroyed. They were never aiming for complete deconstruction, some abstract Hayekian ideal of perfect market freedom - certain functions of the state (authoritarian ones, in particular) were not realistically going to be dispensed with.<br /><br />China has been the spectre haunting industry in the West for some time - it’s in the name of ‘competing internationally’ (ie with emerging economies) that we held back wages, cut corners, decimated workforces, and embraced the just-in-time precarious approach to manufacturing. With countries like India and China now producing a supply of highly-qualified graduates, the same rhetoric of global competition has been deployed to justify the marketisation if higher education. Next, I can only presume we’ll be attempting to compete with these countries by filing away at standards of living and basic democratic rights - what use is democracy, after all, if worrying about ordinary people holds back the economy? From a certain point of view, these things are luxuries, or weaknesses. The priority given economic performance above all else exists already - many writers have observed that the Coalition rhetoric of ‘there is no alternative’ is an attempt to sidestep politics entirely. Certainly, when you’re attempting to force down a dose of IMF-style <a href="http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/02/the-death-of-social-europe/">medicine</a> - whose glorious results can be seen in Latvia, Greece, and Ireland - it helps not to have to worry about a popular mandate. Then you’re free to bend the entire resources of your nation to ensuring that the people at the top of the pyramid scheme get their returns.<br /><br />To have to drop even the pretence of fidelity to the principles of liberty and democracy wouldn’t be such a terrible chore for our leaders. For some time now, the role of the Home Secretary has been to compete with his Shadow to see who can profess the most hostile stance toward immigrants. Those unrepentant souls who dare to use what’s left of the benefits system can expect to be put to work, even if it’s busywork conducted for the sole purpose of balming the perpetually wounded psyches of passing commuters. You could go on - heavy handed police tactics at demonstrations, <a href="http://http//flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2011/02/complaining-about-human-rights-is.html">‘human rights’</a> becoming an expression most commonly followed with an ejection of saliva - but the best illustration is our foreign policy. The international reaction to events in Egypt showed us how surprisingly ambivalent democratically elected leaders can be when it comes to <span style="font-style: italic;">other people</span> expressing the desire to choose their own representatives and take part in the workings of government. There were many reasons to cheer the <a href="http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/15909/">‘Glory of Tahrir’</a> - the infectious energy, the sheer indefatigable <span style="font-style: italic;">lust</span> for liberation that refused to be beaten down or intimidated, was one; the explosion of the usual deflationary faux-wisdom from expert onlookers was another. One to savour above the others - and one that’ll stay with us however this revolution turns out - is that it exposed certain of our leaders (who might in private moments have considered themselves champions of global democracy) as the irrelevant, corrupt hypocrites they are.<br /><br />When men like Blair and Berlusconi threw extravagant praise at their braid-chested friend Hosni Mubarrak, it was because, more than anything, they envied him. These men never really liked to think of themselves as elected public servants. Instead they were Presidents, Statesmen, reshaping not only their own parties but entire political establishments, societies, in all cases investing more power at the top. All they ever wanted was a chance, like Hosni, to demonstrate <span style="font-style: italic;">their</span> strength, courage, and far-sighted wisdom free of pesky democratic fetters. After all, what right did impudent journalists, child-like voters, or deluded leftist dinosaurs have to question their great works? And if, as a side enterprise to their tireless efforts, they wanted to make themselves as rich as Croesius and as powerful as God, that was no concern of ours. These men never gave the impression of caring a great deal about the desires of their electorate, and Cameron (though a less effective figure) is cut from the same cloth - pushing his agenda forward on all fronts at breakneck speed, despite having failed to persuade even a majority of the public to vote against their own interests and place their trust in him.<br /><br />There is a certain grim humour in watching the blithely confident Coalition struggle with reality - Gove’s humiliation on school-building, the State Department worrying that Cameron and Osborne are ‘lightweight’, the endless weary rebukes from volunteer leaders. They’re the leaders nobody would choose to handle a crisis - to echo my rhetorical question at the start of this post, does anyone believe that George Osborne is one of the top ten (hundred, thousand, ten thousand) economics brains in the country? These are the last dregs of neoliberal politics, the crew left behind to go down with the ship. The struggle will continue after they’re gone - capitalism will remain, just forced to drop its latest human mask and reveal itself. If the response to crisis across the board is to take certain measures out of the remit of democracy, it’s not so implausible that we could shift gears into some kind of authoritarian, oligarch-friendly hypercapitalism - perhaps conducted under the auspices of democracy, perhaps not. As Peston himself so delicately puts it on his BBC minisite: <span style="font-style: italic;">“Reconciling our political traditions with the imperative of making safe the globalised world will be a challenge, to put it mildly.”</span> If we can’t articulate a more appealing future than <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span>, we might as well pack up the tents.<br /><br /><ol><li><span style="font-size:85%;">In fact it feels like Peston tried to redirect the book halfway through, when events caught up with him - from a fairly standard investigative journalist piece about hedge funds and high earners to a blame-throwing Cassandra act. Publishing gold! </span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Even set at the meek, cheese-paring rate of 0.005%, Tobin would bring in 2-3bn <span style="font-style: italic;">per year</span>, and has the added advantage of removing the incentive for some of the riskier speculative transactions. It is so unrevolutionary that Nicolas Sarkozy is an enthusiastic fan.</span></li></ol>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-78301563132849161512011-02-08T01:12:00.001-08:002011-03-07T10:19:17.822-08:00Various forms of passionMost Britons are good, conscientious people - content to live together in peace and the pursuit of happiness. But there are groups living among us who don't share those values. They make no contribution and play no part in wider society. They speak their own languages, live in sealed communities - hothouses for extremist thought - and wall themselves off from contact from outsiders. They declare themselves hostile to the majority of people in this country, and openly call for violence against their enemies. Most shockingly of all, in the name of 'liberalism'(!) , they look for ways to twist the legal system in their favour, and scheme to inflict their warped values on the rest of us. While tolerance is an admirable quality, we must surely accept that it has limits, and that any sensible country would have rooted these people out long ago.<br /><br />I refer, of course, to think tanks.<br /><br />Paul Mason's sharp, much-linked <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html">piece</a> on the Newsnight website considered one reason for the wave of dissent to be the complete language and values disconnect between ordinary people and the Westminster Village -<span style="font-style: italic;"> "I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously."</span> Disjunctions between politics and wider reality aren't a new phenomenon, but a Government like ours (hardly of-the-people), and its attendant policy shops, seem to revel in the division, positively gleeful that they don't share the same empirical reality as the rest of us.<br /><br />Tory think tanks - driven by a characteristic combination of cloistered ignorance and batshit ideological fervour - have always been the experts at considering the unspeakable and presenting it as common sense.<a href="http://bit.ly/eS6dCN"> Here</a> you can find the ever-popular Policy Exchange conduct a rational, calm, and proportionate discussion in which they compare anti-cuts protesters to the IRA, and conclude that the <a href="http://www.thecurmudgeonly.blogspot.com/">Met Firearms and Headbangers Club</a> have been far too tolerant and need to take a considerably more physical line against street protests.<br /><br />Assorted Tory figures have taken the same tack - endorsing water cannons because the protesters "need a good wash" (total projection, as Dom Fox observes), cheering the use of CS spray* on people pushing leaflets through doors, and so on. The police have contributed their tuppenceworth too - from Hugh Orde's comments about those pesky trespassers who go into Boots without intending to buy anything, to Paul Stephenson's completely feasible and not-at-all panicked threat back in December to ban protest marches entirely.<br /><br />Among the recommendations of the PE is that kettling <span style="font-style: italic;">'be retained at all costs'</span>. Ah, kettling. The <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/19/police-kettle-risk-crush-hillsborough">Spectre of Hillsborough</a> itself. For anyone watching the government and senior police going into full-blown frothing authoritarian heat, it's a flashback to the football crowd control policies in the 1980s. You've got the casual dehumanisation of those in the crowd. The sense of collective responsibility (one person throws a missile, you can all expect a baton charge). For the BBC's 'tough' attempt to exculpate the authorities of any responsibility for Jody McIntyre's treatment (<span style="font-style: italic;">"were you wheeling yourself toward the police?"</span> - one of the most contemptible and pathetic things I have ever heard on television), read the questions asked of bereaved relatives among the cooling bodies of the dead in Sheffield (<span style="font-style: italic;">"so, your husband... he liked a drink, didn't he?</span>). The CPE's considered reponse to the McIntyre incident was to declare that he should have stayed away from the protest altogether. The message is that if you go to one of these demonstrations, you're fair game, and anything that happens is on your head. And for the proposal to ban protest demonstrations entirely, we have an analogue in the final, draconian scheme to introduce ID cards, which would by implication have criminalised all football supporters, as well as killing off casual attendance at a stroke and smothering football's revival before it had even started.<br /><br />Football survived - just a few years after Hillsborough, MPs who had seen football as a 'law and order issue' were seen fishing for votes by ostentatiously attending games (in suspiciously pristine-looking scarves). I think that whatever strongarm measures are wheeled out against us, and whichever Tory blowhards denounce us over the airwaves, we have real cause for optimism. Just like football, the anti-cuts movement is profoundly popular (even polls in Tory tabloids reveal that the majority have sympathy), and the harder the authorities crack down on it, the worse they will look in the long run. Does anyone really believe that our movement isn't going to outlast this Coalition? The only question is how many of us are going to be injured or imprisoned before then.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Much as we're all enjoying this new wave of unrest, and looking forward to the start of the <a href="http://anarchish.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-win-at-kettling-guide-for-non.html">kettling season</a> and the chance to quote some Lacan with our fellow hipsters, we must remember that the bread-and-butter work of the left goes on. Uncannily enough, the very morning that the world heard David Cameron loudly denounce the 'failed experiment of multiculturalism', the English Defence League were staging a rally in Luton.<br /><br />More careful analysis of Cameron's speech can be found <a href="http://blackfeminists.blogspot.com/2011/02/let-us-talk-about-racism-when.html">elsewhere</a>. The first thing that struck me is that, if moderate Muslims (as suggested) must take responsibility for policing their own communities, it follows that if any terrorist attacks do take place, <span style="font-style: italic;">all Muslims bear some of the blame. </span>For the PM to make a statement along these lines on the day of an anti-Muslim march** (sample chant: 'burn down mosques' - also on Youtube, if you're not squeamish) is astonishing. The League predictably leapt on the publicity, declaring that the government had 'come round to their way of thinking'. This kind of political maneouvring is normally referred to as 'dogwhistling'. Can it still be called that if it's brazenly apparent to <span style="font-style: italic;">everyone's</span> ears? The speech had no other substantive content (as far as I am aware, the previous government offered no special suicide-bomber grants).<br /><br />Most of the speakers at the Luton UAF counter-demo eschewed peace-and-harmony platitudes for a more militant tone. The union reps in particular took pains to link this blatant attempt to create divisions among ordinary people with the wider programme of cuts - much better to draw attention to the brown people taking your jobs and/or benefits than for anyone to address the real causes of our recession. Gathering in one place to be kettled by a (proportionally) heavier police presence than the League felt as futile as ever, but at least the sentiments were right.<br /><br />I'm sure Cameron's speech was very carefully vetted by Party apparatchiks - I'm sure it has tactical value and will win a few votes among closet racists and the they've-banned-Christmas crowd. Nowadays, though, even the Government's friends in the media can't offer them unqualified support. Even the Mail condemned the forestry sell-off, and even the likes of the Spectator expressed their 'concern' over the economic contraction (the US economy managed to grow despite much of the country enjoying the worst winter in living memory).<br /><br />As Armando Iannucci quipped, they're dogmatists disguised as pragmatists<br />- except the disguise is increasingly frayed, and the dogma is one supported by blind faith alone. Tch, eh?<br /><br />Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAqyf7a4xFM&feature=youtube_gdata_player">here's</a> Michael Gove falling over.<br /><br /><br /></div></div><ol><li><span style="font-size:85%;">The fact that the officer concerned managed to catch himself in the blast is one of those lovely cosmic twists that give atheists momentary pause. The family of officer CW2440 are presumably very grateful he wasn't in Armed Response.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">Originally the League were only opposed to <span style="font-style: italic;">extremist</span> Islam, but that distinction seems to have gotten lost behind the proverbial sofa cushions. Frankly I doubt that the average League member could tell a fundamentalist from a normal Muslim, or even from a Hindu or Sikh, without the aid of a map - and probably wouldn't even want to know.</span></li><li><span style="font-size:85%;">UPDATE. The highly instructive guide, 'How To Win At Kettling', appears to have been taken down, but can still be found in google's cache.</span></li></ol>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-87944750799174018072011-01-17T08:27:00.000-08:002011-01-17T08:46:23.914-08:00I specialise in revenge<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihDUMKXEhDdxcciExELfJLkm7uTLBxqhymsOnb7sf-ynE8NJ3an6k1MBUJFapO5JXQrfpa7dQuN7SLvHg-zOS8J02t1Vb_mqSMoKcKBV5alM203y-PrW-igaD7qNace7SV7EJeETm4rJo/s1600/post2.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihDUMKXEhDdxcciExELfJLkm7uTLBxqhymsOnb7sf-ynE8NJ3an6k1MBUJFapO5JXQrfpa7dQuN7SLvHg-zOS8J02t1Vb_mqSMoKcKBV5alM203y-PrW-igaD7qNace7SV7EJeETm4rJo/s320/post2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563192494025300130" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhaeoqAnj-k2SjHBu1kopzyTKpJWplGiECXMzB5v8FxltHAtbA-8n9hgFytGW7c74COagh-KkrNLWYkQck7XeQQ2DsxKfT-kzhhAgMdzjfgL-srYdhwfp9aF2ewnGBKnBeSQ9n3cF6zpE/s1600/post6.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhaeoqAnj-k2SjHBu1kopzyTKpJWplGiECXMzB5v8FxltHAtbA-8n9hgFytGW7c74COagh-KkrNLWYkQck7XeQQ2DsxKfT-kzhhAgMdzjfgL-srYdhwfp9aF2ewnGBKnBeSQ9n3cF6zpE/s320/post6.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563192491931379282" border="0" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGullOT4mLoNYbsVZOLTpu4YVu-62CfvxLmy72gb1n9qEDTn9w2IXbmuLMk4fgt09F0tsWTDypBXNeSAgg0nLBxqz_YksgQAur3gBLJWGFmWFoNE-untwRJ600uk8kCdCgEBbOZb2YKk/s1600/0.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbGullOT4mLoNYbsVZOLTpu4YVu-62CfvxLmy72gb1n9qEDTn9w2IXbmuLMk4fgt09F0tsWTDypBXNeSAgg0nLBxqz_YksgQAur3gBLJWGFmWFoNE-untwRJ600uk8kCdCgEBbOZb2YKk/s320/0.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5563192501851361922" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">I will blow your paradise away...</span><br /></div>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-88792222029410155132010-11-27T10:36:00.000-08:002010-11-27T12:30:49.081-08:00#solidarityThe protests seem to be going well.<br /><br />There’s still a dimwitted lack of understanding of the nature of these actions - too many television and newspaper reporters seem to be operating under the assumption that those of the protesters who are currently students are only attempting to get their own fees waived. A moment’s consideration would of course reveal that these people will all be working and paying back their loans by the time the Browne proposals are in full effect. The inability to comprehend the idea that people can have motivations other than self-interest reveals far more about the Burleyesque sections of the media than it does about the marchers. The archetype of the spoiled, selfish student living it up on taxpayer money, never particularly fair, is now positively antiquated. <span style="font-style: italic;">Viz</span> - often a reliable social barometer - dropped its 'Student Grant' character years ago, but it's being dug up and spat back at us in 2010. Desperate stuff.<br /><br />To dismiss the students (as as every organ in the land seemed to do) as wanting ‘something for nothing’ or ‘everything handed to them on a plate’ is to completely, wilfully misunderstand the situation. The immediate demand of the protesters was for a proposed fee increase to be scrapped. In other words, for the <span style="font-style: italic;">maintenance</span> of a situation in which students work jobs in term-time, live in cheaply built (but tastefully coloured!) PFI rabbit hutches, study hard, and three years later, accept a debt measured in the tens of thousands that will hang over them for most of their adult lives. Compassion for these students might be dulled by the thought that they will eventually be earning high salaries - the risible Gove defended the Browne Report with the uncannily bad argument<span style="font-style: italic;"> “why should a postman subsidise someone who will go on to become a millionaire?”</span> - but in times like these, how many students (even those in vocational subjects) do we really believe will be prospering after they graduate? It should be obvious that what these students want is <span style="font-style: italic;">something for something</span> - the prospect of some kind of reward for all of the hard work and financial risk they‘ve undertaken. If anything, it’s a display of the kind of ‘prudent household management’ that the Coalition seem so keen on with the delightful homespun analogies they’re happy to trot out in other contexts.<br /><br />It all reminded me of the more incoherent-of-Tunbridge-Wells letters to the Metro in the wake of the anti-bailout march two years ago - one correspondent implausibly claimed that the young scruffniks were only out to <span style="font-style: italic;">"jump on the free money bandwagon"</span>.<br /><br />The Labour party hasn’t covered itself in glory on this issue, but no matter - oppositional arguments and ‘Punch and Judy politics’ may soon become a thing of the past. One effect of the Browne measures is that it will become all the more difficult for working-class kids to study Politics (along with History, International Relations, PPE and related subjects) - come 2030, we could yet see an all-Bullingdon House of Commons…<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Entitlement</span> seems to be the topic of the day. Who has a right to what? Does anyone have a right to anything they don’t work for? We could at this point talk about the arbitrary and essentially non-productive nature of most (paid) jobs, but let’s leave that thread unpulled. If the consensus at present is that nobody has a right to anything much, it hasn’t always been so - there have been plenty of counter-arguments. Thomas Paine wrote about how every man has a right to share in the common wealth (even in these post-crash times, even with a growing population, an equitable distribution of UK property assets would come to £110k per adult). Crass made the point more bluntly -<span style="font-style: italic;"> "do they owe us a living? ‘course they fucking do!"</span><br /><br />Apparently the outstanding problem with the welfare state is ‘benefit dependency’ - one of those neologisms that may spin your brain into non-Euclidean shapes, suggesting as it does that it would be okay for an independently wealthy person to claim benefits, because they wouldn’t be <span style="font-style: italic;">dependent</span> on the benefits, and could come off any time they wanted. Every article on the subject, even those in the right-wing press, praise the welfare state as a <span style="font-style: italic;">noble idea</span>, but not something that can ever be used by real people - suddenly the Borstal officer from Brass Eye looms in front of us - ‘yes, we have a welfare state, but <span style="font-weight: bold;">DON’T ACTUALLY USE IT! WHERE’S YOUR SELF RE-COCKING-SPECT?</span>’<br /><br />Right now anything that doesn’t cover itself financially is in the Coalition’s gunsights. Education shouldn’t be subsidised (in the zeitgeist-capturing language of the Browne Report, <span style="font-style: italic;">“Institutions do not compete for this funding – they get it automatically. Our proposals will shift toward a more dynamic system of funding”</span>) and students should have to pay for themselves. Dolescum shouldn’t be subsidised - they should have to <a href="http://don-paskini.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-workfare-wont-work.html">work</a> for their dole, and be bloody grateful they get anything at all (previewed in <a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/01/nil-desperandum.html">this</a> miserable case - <span style="font-style: italic;">“nobody owes you a living, not even your employer.”</span>). And while modern Britain's Three Faces of Evil (students, dolies, public sector workers) are the subject of most attention, the principles are being applied to a much wider spread of targets.<br /><br />New Labour introduced us to the concept of ‘efficiency savings’ - local authority department budgets being trimmed by 3%, year on year, regardless of need or circumstances. In most circumstances there would have been fat to be trimmed, and efficiencies were duly made, but the sheer block-headed crudity of the measure is what stands out. Assuming for the sake of argument that a council had made all possible cuts, and couldn’t trim any further without adversely effecting services, there was no mechanism for appeal or waiver - they simply had to go ahead and find another 3%. This approach has been enthusiastically adopted by the Coalition and applied to the entire budget. One particularly obtuse display came via the Ministry of Justice, who <a href="http://is.gd/h1WBY">announced</a> a major reduction of funding for Legal Aid, meaning that <span style="font-style: italic;">“[Aid] for civil cases will all but disappear”</span>. The measure was justified as a way of addressing <span style="font-style: italic;">“the great challenge of tackling the ballooning legal aid bill“</span>. Never mind why the Legal Aid bill was so high, or why Legal Aid was introduced in the first place, or whether widespread access to justice is an important social good. The issue of whether particular spending is <span style="font-style: italic;">justified</span> has apparently become specious and academic. Turn big numbers into small numbers, and screw the context.<br /><br />The economic argument (and the alibi given by the Liberal Democrats to explain their about-face on the fees issue) is that we, as a nation, <span style="font-style: italic;">don’t have the money for things anymore</span>. We certainly can't afford to pay tuition fees, and give grants rather than loans. We managed both of those things for several decades up to 1997, without the economy collapsing around our ears and people pushing wheelbarrows of money through the streets and/or queueing for bread and salt, but never mind.<br /><br />The vision of the world being presented to us by the powers that be, and cheerfully swallowed by the readers of the Daily Mail <span style="font-style: italic;">et al</span>, is one in which it is simply not possible to provide a decent home, lifestyle, and education for all - there is not enough to go around. This idea is another one that’s only attained currency relatively recently - up until the 1970s, eminent polymaths like Buckminster Fuller were setting out their realistically-costed visions of a better future which everyone in the world could hope to share. But at around the same time that modernist architecture fell out of vogue, so did modernist political planning - now the ethos of the day is Hobbesian self-reliance. It appeals to a certain kind of macho mindset, and enables the powerful to do little while feeling better about themselves, so it endures.<br /><br />Presented with this story, there are two possible responses for the ruled. First, the mindset of the gangster and the kapo - responding to communal desperation by shoring up their own positions at the expense of others’ - accepting (and reinforcing) the grammar of the official narrative on working class prospects while pleading a partial exception in their own cases. So we have to endure the self-justifying cries of ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game,’ from people who have done well enough out of the game and will continue to do so.<br /><br />The second is to organise, co-operate, and resist.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />What’s perhaps worse is that this programme of cuts isn't just a crude application of every-man-for-himself individualism. It’s even more cynical than that. Certain areas of society that demonstrably don’t pay for themselves (the aristocracy, the City, and that’s without getting into debates about the actual value of management consultancy and the like) are being spared, even rewarded, while those areas of the arts and education that have attempted to adjust to business ontology, and become profit-making enterprises, are being attacked all the same.<br /><br />We’re going to see a lot more of this selective poverty-pleading over the next four years, always directed at the usual Conservative targets. As long as we’re being told all of the things we can’t afford, it may be productive to talk about the things we apparently can afford - the £50bn being chucked in the direction of one-time economic policy exemplar Ireland, for one. There’s already talk of another, larger, British bailout in the wind, which has an uncomfortable ring of plausibility about it. If not a bailout, then we'll perhaps enjoy some zany scheme to 'stimulate private sector growth' - because if the history of PFI has taught us one thing, it's that our dynamic private sector won't get out of bed without cast-iron guarantees against financial loss. What’s mildly ironic is that, as financial manoeuvres go, this transfer of public wealth is just as dicey and unreliable an investment as a bundle of rotten mortgages, and won't necessarily lead to any increase in liquidity. But that’s for the economists to debate - for the rest of us, it’s going to mean an even larger program of ‘necessary’ cuts that will doubtless also be blamed on the unemployed and the public sector, assuming any of either remain by that time.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">(Big Cuts Posts were all the rage a few weeks ago - I’d single <a href="http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/2010/10/motherfuckers-gotta-learn.html">out</a> <a href="http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.com/2010/10/whose-side-are-you-on.html">these</a> <a href="http://http//k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011707.html">three</a> in particular.)</span><a href="http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2010/11/work-slash-life.html"><br /></a><a href="http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2010/11/work-slash-life.html"> </a>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-55169028191405632772010-09-25T10:02:00.000-07:002010-10-26T10:37:25.725-07:00Man has kids, can't pay for same.<a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/09/25/keith-macdonald-is-a-symbol-of-all-that-went-wrong-with-the-welfare-state-115875-22585456/">Tony Parsons on scintillating form.</a><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">'Go on my son, you get stuck in to the next fat bird you meet at the bus stop. The benefit cheque is in the post.'</span><br /><br />I admit I haven't followed the background details of the Keith MacDonald story particularly closely. Are all eight of his conquests noticeably larger than the average woman? Is it a matter of public record that he spends most of his time playing on his XBox? Does he really put lager on his cornflakes every morning? I hope that all of these things are really true, otherwise TP has spent the entire article fighting himself - landing vicious, bruising blows on a product of his imagination.<br /><br />Yes, you've got the casually contemptuous language - 'fat birds' three times, 'fat ladies,' 'obese women,' and 'porky harem' once each in what is a very short article, not to mention 'rat faced sperm' and 'a bunch of beady-eyed spongers' - and the whole Theresa May breadknife castration thing. The implication <span style="font-style: italic;">there</span> seems to be that we ought to castrate deadbeat dads with rusty kitchen implements, but that those namby-pamby Liberal Democrats wouldn't be man enough to do it. Never mind, though, I'm pretty sure TP's tongue was firmly in his cheek the whole time<br /><br />And, of course, there's the small point that Keith MacDonald hasn't made a penny from fathering all of these children - in fact, money will be<span style="font-style: italic;"> deducted</span> from his 'benefit cheque in the post' - a point well made at Liberal Conspiracy (who <a href="http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/09/22/he-must-be-the-worlds-worst-benefits-scrounger/">called</a> him 'the world's worst benefits scrounger') among other places. Still, eh? Why let facts get in the way of some good old-fashioned resentment?<br /><br />Putting aaallllll of the above aside, the actual argument of the piece runs thus: the welfare state was a noble idea, but now it's being abused by Keith MacDonald and his ilk, and we can't afford to subsidise them, so we ought to do something (TP remains heroically vague about exactly what).<br />He calls the welfare state 'the noblest idea in the history of this country', which is nice, but even at that stage you can sense an almighty iceberg-like 'BUT' about to loom out of the fog.<br /><br />What the piece amounts to is a piece of drab austerity-realism, a fillip for the right ("Oh, the welfare state was such a nice idea, but we can't afford it anymore, let's be realistic"). Naturally, TP takes pains to maintain his credibility as a liberal by putting in a jab at the Tories (not unlike the times Littlejohn breaks off from a stream of xenophobic abuse to say 'the BNP are loonies,' then switches seamlessly back). He says that the MacDonald case can't be put down to some Tory idea of Broken Britain, because KM grew up in a loving family, with a hardworking binman Dad and siblings who all turned out okay. Again, I don't know the details of KM's history. Are his siblings all okay, or are they only 'okay' in that they haven't fathered a load of children? Was his family really loving? Are the kids of binmen generally known for their education, social mobility, and lifestyles?<br /><br />So go on, Tony, if we can't put it down to his upbringing (and predictably there's no thought of social factors beyond the immediate family), why is KM like this? Well, obviously, because of the welfare state. Having the safety net in place makes people dependent on it - the mothers were <span style="font-style: italic;">'too certain that the taxpayer will play Big Daddy when Keith goes to play on his Xbox'</span>. We're all growing up weak, unlike the working class in the good old days. <span style="font-style: italic;">'All the virtues of the old working class - pride, dignity, self reliance, work ethic, knowing enough to never mix your cornflakes with your lager - are inverted by KM and all those pregnant fat birds holding out their hands for more of our money'.</span><br /><br />It's a popular idea these days - Ian Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling certainly see 'benefit dependency' (rather than, say, poverty, or limited opportunities) as the greatest scourge of the working classes today. The way to combat benefit dependency is (apparently) to stop paying benefits. This will discourage the next generation from leaning on benefits and make them more self-reliant. The logical conclusion of this argument is that it would be a good thing to stop benefits completely, indefinitely - after the unemployed, the fatherless kids, the various other ne'er-do-wells have all died off (which would naturally happen completely peacefully and without incident, like the characters quietly accepting their fate in 'On The Beach'), Britain would be able to restabilise with a manageable, morally superior population.<br /><br />A caricature? Well, how else is the disincentive supposed to work? Hand out benefits on a lottery basis, perhaps, so only 50% of applicants get money (Chris Grayling could flip the official coin), and repeat every year so that nobody will be able to take their benefits for granted?<br />Getting benefits is already a tedious, drawn-out, humiliating process and benefit-based lifestyles are already shite. Granted, we haven't pushed this as far as is humanly possible. Nobody has yet implemented Digby Jones' ace idea of putting the long term unemployed in hostel rooms on starvation rations, for example. But being on the dole isn't fun. We'll know when the cushy benefit lifestyle has become a 'disincentive to succeed' when we see hedge fund managers jacking it all in to go and sign on at their local Jobcentre. I daresay that the lack of leisure options (possible Xbox notwithstanding), the narrow horizons, are among the causes of the whole sorry MacDonald saga.<br /><br />What's interesting is that TP very nearly stumbles across this idea himself. He affects (then shamefacedly apologises for) an iota of pity for the <span style="font-style: italic;">"lost girls" </span>and mentions that they are <span style="font-style: italic;">"too uneducated, too devoid of hope" </span>- you think, just for a moment, that he might go on to say something relevant or incisive about Britain's underclass - but no, he makes a sharp u-turn and goes back to making fat jokes. Again, he comes within a heartbeat of insight on the issue of benefit cuts - <span style="font-style: italic;">"when those in genuine need see their benefits slashed, we simply can't afford to keep Keith and his army of fatherless brats on the payroll"</span> - he <span style="font-style: italic;">almost</span> realises that the whole reason people in genuine need are facing benefit cuts is because of the moral panic about benefit spongers, and that his own article will doubtless (in the long run) make the situation worse for people in real need. But he can't quite make the connection.<br /><br />More to the point, is 'benefit dependency' really making us morally weak? I once read a couple of comments from an American concern troll on an article about our welfare state. He wanted to express his sympathy for what his poor gullible cousins in the UK had done to themselves. He went into some length unveiling a theory that all of Europe's strong, self-reliant gene stock had been spent on the battlefields of two world wars, and that the only Europeans left are the descendents of mewling runts, hence the weak-willed welfare state dependency and racial mixing that's taken place ever since. Other forms of this 'bloodline theory' (which always puts me in mind of something from Lord of the Rings - "Arnor is not the kingdom it once was, their blood has been much mixed since their glory days" etc) can be found across the internet. Needless to say, it's not only racist lunacy, but also based on a cringe-inducingly poor understanding of science, so it's surprising to see a variant on the theme rolled out in a progressive newspaper.<br /><br />If nothing else, the timing of this purported moral shift doesn't fit. The welfare state as we understand it was cooked up in the 1930s and unveiled in the 1940s and 1950s. The great moral decline of Britain, the reduction of us all to deadbeat fathers and pram-pushing teenage mothers at bus stops, didn't become a ubiquitous right-wing talking point until the 1980s. Why assume that one was a product of the other? The very last people who worked in a country without a welfare state are in their eighties now, and people who grew up with this morally corrosive safety net in place are now retiring after long and fruitful careers. Even if we accept the line that there has been a sea change in the character of the working class, we're going to have to search a little harder to find the cause. In terms of chronology, it would coincide not with the <span style="font-style: italic;">establishment </span>of the welfare state, but with the the neoliberal assault on the same (beginning at the end of the seventies...)<br /><br />Which is, of course, the answer. There has been no moral decline. The spread of the myth of one is a product of the perpetual war on welfare that's been fought by both parties over the last thirty years. Today's underclass <span style="font-style: italic;">are</span> the old working class. The majority of the population haven't suddenly developed defective moralities <span style="font-style: italic;">en masse</span> and lost their once-unassailable work ethic. They're the same people, just living in a very different society. The endlessly-praised hard-working parents and grandparents (case in point <a href="http://ridingthirdclass.blogspot.com/2010/07/fairy-jobmother-deconstructed.html">here</a>) had the good fortune to grow up in a time when employment was higher, when industry was still the country's largest employer, and even people with little or nothing in the way of education could reasonably expect to find work for life. It was regimented, dull, badly-regulated work with precious little chance of advancement, true, but it was there.<br /><br />In today's environment, the work ethic has been elevated to a virtue standing above all others. Taken literally - ie, as the powerful desire to contribute labour regardless of need or circumstances - it could equally easily be construed as a waste, or even a pathology. Owen spent some time on the subject <a href="http://themeasurestaken.blogspot.com/2008/06/work-and-non-work.html">here</a>. The work ethic is in vogue because it's a handy (and very difficult to disprove) criticism to throw at the unemployed, at a time when more of them than ever are essentially blameless. Structural unemployment is with us to stay, and as the processes of mechanisation and outsourcing continue, the number of jobs in this country is going to continue to decrease. The blame for this situation is being privatised, dumped on the shoulders of the individual. Out of work? Your fault. You're not trying hard enough. You've applied for twenty jobs this week? Well, why not twenty-one, eh? You're worthless. You're capable of anything, but you're too lazy to do it. You beady-eyed sponger. For my part, I'd say that large-scale unemployment isn't going anywhere, and will probably get worse in the decades to come (it'll affect millions more people, regardless of their individual merit), so we might as well treat the unemployed halfway humanely, and let them live something aproaching normal lives. Perhaps we should even let them breed?<br /><br />(The objection here is that it would all have to be funded with taxpayer money. The correct response is that if you baulk at contributing a few pennies in the pound to help other people raise their kids, you would probably make an even worse parent than Keith MacDonald).<br /><br />Finally, I'm not entirely sure that putting lager on cornflakes (mentioned by TP three times) quite amounts to the ultimate symbol of the decline of western society. It seems more like the kind of hi-<span style="font-style: italic;">lar</span>-ious jape students would get up to inbetween running off with shopping trolleys. I've never tried it myself, but it sounds... okay. I think I can recall a character doing it in an episode of 'MASH', so, y'know. Nothing new under the sun. I don't think a questionnaire along the lines of 'would you pour beer on your cereal?' is the best way to sort out the deserving poor from the undeserving.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-60619771099198171072010-09-13T15:25:00.000-07:002010-09-14T13:47:13.998-07:00Gormlessness.<a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://zonestyxtravelcard.blogspot.com/">Zone Styx</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> suggested that it was time for someone to write a series of posts demolishing the old canard that the private sector does things more efficiently. This would normally be a daunting prospect requiring weeks of painstaking work, but if we limit the discussion to the privatised welfare sector, hey, the piece practically writes itself.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br />Today's news: the Public Accounts Committee have delivered their report on four years of the Pathways to Work programme for people on ESA/IB. It’s, to say the least, damning. You can read the text <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmpubacc/404/40402.htm">here</a>, but the sentence most indicative of the whole is:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“Private providers have seriously underperformed against their contracts and their success rates worse than Jobcentre Plus even though private contractors work in easier areas with fewer incapacity claimants and higher demand for labour.” </span><br /><br />Yes - even when carefully assigned the lowest hanging fruit, they couldn't get much picking done. The data of the report shows that the two providers involved with the scheme around the country managed to achieve between a third and a half of their target outcomes. As some 70% of their payments are determined by results, the poor dears have been struggling to get by financially. Still, five years on, with the benefit of good ol’ 20.20 hindsight, the powers that be have managed to identify the crux of the problem:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“Providers started from a low knowledge base with little direct experience of working with incapacity benefits claimants.”</span><br /><br />Well, fuck, who could have guessed that that might turn out to be an issue? Could it be that maybe, just maybe, carrying out public sector services is a little more difficult than it looked when you were slagging off the public sector for not delivering them cheaply enough? Could it be that getting results in this area requires people with actual skills, and not the bunch of desperate, untrained, badly paid, couldn’t-get-jobs-as-recruitment-consultants chancers that comprise your staff at the moment?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“In 2008-09, £94 million (38% of Pathways expenditure) was spent on employment support that did not deliver additional jobs.”</span><br /><br /><span>Yeah</span><span>,</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> no fucking shit.</span><br /><br />This shocking realisation that <span style="font-style: italic;">difficult jobs are difficult</span> is obviously having repercussions up and down the country. CDG and A4e, two of the largest providers, find themselves in a bind - as long as they get paid by results, they won’t make profits, and so won’t be able to hire decent staff. They’ve attempted to square the circle by advertising for <span style="font-style: italic;">highly skilled volunteers</span>. Perhaps you’re wondering why highly skilled people would volunteer for companies like this when they could, eg, earn a wage. Well - there are going to be a whole lot of DWP and local authority employees heading for the dole queue soon, with a whole wealth of knowledge and experience to share, and nobody left in the country (private or public sector) who’s able or willing to pay for it…<br /><br />One press release (<a href="http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com/">hat tip</a>) begins:<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">“Ensuring Britain continues to be a civilised and harmonious society means attracting 50,000 expert volunteers to sign up to the fight in supporting the unemployed back into work, according to the charity Careers Development Group’s (CDG) position paper launched today.”</span><br /><br />See? This is about <span style="font-style: italic;">the future of the civilised world</span>. Not about a bunch of mean, thieving bastards realising that the pie has almost run out and guarding their remaining slices with murderously paranoid zeal. No sir. Anyone thinking that they could have saved time by writing a press release along the lines of <span style="font-style: italic;">‘Darling Dave, we really love the Big Society idea, <span style="font-weight: bold;">please</span> renew our contracts, luv CDG xxx’ </span>had best keep their dangerous Bolshevik ideas to themselves.<br /><br />If you’re having trouble following all of this, it’s really quite simple. We can’t afford to pay teachers, carers, mentors, and social workers to do their jobs anymore. Instead, they’re going to do their jobs for free, and pass everything they know onto the next generation while scraping by on the dole. Half of Britain as unpaid tutors for the other half. Once the lucky young ‘uns have drunk deep of the well of knowledge, they’ll be more employable, and employers will suddenly have enough money to hire them after all, and will naturally choose the less experienced people with no work history over the people who have a lifetime's experience doing real work, and have recently been busy volunteering (which always looks good on a CV).<br /><br />Meanwhile, there aren't going to be any substantial consequences for the providers' failures - for fans of throwing good money after bad, Ian Duncan Smith is<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/10/iain-duncan-smith-unemployed-families"> all over</a> a European A4e scheme for ‘strengthening families’. He’s <span style="font-style: italic;">‘examining a German approach where long-term unemployed families have been encouraged to create a "household culture" with trips to the cinema and evening classes.’</span><br /><br />In other words, IDS spends time sitting at his desk, chewing on his pencil, wondering <span style="font-style: italic;">‘Why don’t these workless households ever take trips together? Why don’t they go to the cinema? Why don’t they go to Center Parcs? Or Umbria? Don’t they realise they could have valuable family bonding experiences that way?,’</span> before clapping his hands together in a businesslike manner and forging ahead with plans to cut benefits.<br /><br />He's certainly the finest mind in the Department since we all enjoyed the paradigm-altering thought of <a href="http://www.chickyog.net/2008/10/18/hard-headed-realism-from-james-purnell/">James Purnell</a>. Is it something particular about DWP that attracts people of this calibre? I can’t think of a word that fits better than <span style="font-weight: bold;">gormlessness</span>.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-6405525552073810162010-08-11T16:23:00.000-07:002010-08-11T16:51:46.343-07:00Paradise - if you can earn it.<span style="font-style: italic;">Further discussion of work, unwork, and lying on CVs.</span><br /><br />The official documentation of job hunting - the Jobcentre advice, the ‘pious self-help books’ - says one thing (dedication, hard work, and above all, honesty always pay off in the end) - but the rules of the real job hunting world are the opposite (with the right mixture of entitlement and bullish confidence, you can blag your way into anything.) I’m sure an analogy can be drawn with modern aspiration and social conditions in general - of course you’ll be rewarded if you stick to the rules and keep plugging away - never mind that most of the people with money, fame, and influence have done nothing of the sort (Russell -<span style="font-style: italic;"> “those who preach the dignity of hard labour take care themselves to remain undignified in this respect.”</span>). Today’s government ministers, plutocrats, and celebrities are not individuals who have benefited from meritocratic career advancement.<br /><br />Mark’s correspondent Phil suggests Piers Morgan as the spirit of the age, and I think that’s an excellent observation. Sure, he was born into wealth and parachuted into responsible jobs early, but that’s not the secret of his success. He’s a hustler - pushing boundaries all the time, without worrying about integrity, law, or any higher editorial ambition. He virtually invented the invasive prurience of the modern celebrity gossip page, cheerfully used his position as a finance journalist to increase the value of his own holdings, and pandered to the lowest common denominator as an editor. The ability to have this kind of career requires a certain unassailable confidence, but doesn’t necessarily require any particular skills, bar combativeness and self-promotion. His ubiquity irritates people (there’s always another radio or TV appearance, always another cash-in celeb biography, and when all else fails, another memoir) but this really goes to illustrate how little he has to contribute in any particular field. He’s made a successful and lucrative broadcast and print career out of a few saloon bar opinions and a string of celebrity anecdotes. Morgan hasn’t led a charmed life, even by his own standards - his assorted ventures and vehicles fail surprisingly often - but he never lets it get to him. He’s unshakeable. His life is a triumph of self-selling - if Morgan didn’t have all of those commitments already occupying his time, he would be the perfect jobseeker.<br /><br />Piers Morgan, in fact, has succeeded where a favourite blogger of mine has never quite made the leap. <a href="http://dickonedwards.co.uk/">Dickon Edwards</a> has always maintained that he deserves a modest living just for Being Dickon Edwards, but is hopelessly uncomfortable with promoting himself and putting himself forward for things. Dickon has achievements on his CV too - a fleeting, half-successful pop career, various bits and pieces of excellent writing, a new venture as a club impresario - but his failures have had far more of an effect on him than his successes. Unable (possibly unwilling, but the distinction is blurred - ’incapacity as refusal,’ as <a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011648.html">Mark</a> says) to attract steady work, he subsists on benefits, and wrestles with feelings of inadequacy while successive generations of friends grow up and acquire the trappings of adult life around him. In a cosmically farcical turn of events, he was recently convicted of benefit fraud and electronically tagged (presumably for doing a little freelance writing on the side, although he doesn’t specify). A diary entry of a few years ago, written backstage at a festival, is revealing - Dickon hears two music biz clipboards trying to remember the name of the band who released a particular single. Slightly aghast at their lack of pop knowledge, he feels compelled to contribute, but receives only puzzled looks. <span style="font-style: italic;">’Surely,’</span> he writes later, <span style="font-style: italic;">’there must be some way for me to make a living by knowing these things?’ </span>Of course, he’s on a hiding to nothing. Knowledge isn’t power. In this day and age, painstakingly acquiring knowledge of something is a shirking of one’s social responsibilities to sell, sell, sell - merely creating is of no use, unless you can persuade people to buy.<br /><br />Self-doubt, self-analysis (at least for those whose analysis actually bites and isn’t just a vacant exercise in ‘finding yourself’) and a realistic assessment of one’s capabilities are also liabilities. In an age when speculative, <span style="font-style: italic;">hopefully</span> self-fulfilling overstatements are not only ubiquitous but necessary, absolutely fundamental to the global economic system, cold-headed realism (perhaps reason itself?) has no worth. What can you do except apply for every single job, tell the interviewers that you could do it with your eyes closed and just hope that things work out? Anything else practically amounts to self-sabotage. There may be some residual fear of being ‘found out’, but in an age when relatively few jobs have specialised/learned skills attached, when communication and emotional labour rule, being able to ‘sell yourself‘ into the job also proves your ability to do the job. Neither of my parents ever had to write CVs or go through formal selection processes until their plant closed down in 2001- the interviews before then essentially amounted to ‘so, do you know how to run one of these? Great. Canteen’s over there.’ Now even applicants for manufacturing jobs need to know the language. In his upcoming book, Ivor Southwood talks about this essential quality, once limited only to sales or theatrical work, now compulsory across the board, as ‘stagecraft’.<br /><br />I’ve always loitered on the edge of the realisation that it’s all bullshit and I’m tormenting myself for no reason - as Phil says, the years of wasteful self-doubt - but actually making the step over, treating it as a game, has so far been beyond me. I feel it’s a little too glib just to say <span style="font-style: italic;">‘don’t take things so seriously, it’s just a performance, learn to play the game’.</span> To play the game is to accept its terms. We exist in a system in which one type of personality, one set of skills, has been inflated to hold influence beyond all reasonable proportion, and tough luck for those who are any different. What with the mildly terrifying A4E ‘Wellness Centres‘ on the horizon (who will be able to refer you to treatment for conditions like depression against your will, on pain of cutting your benefits) - we talk a lot about ‘compulsory positivity‘, because positivity is a near-indispensable quality nowadays, but it could soon become<span style="font-style: italic;"> literally</span> compulsory. I have the feeling that CBT-based treatments are going to be a key part of the attack on ‘malingering‘. The slanted working/jobseeking environment we live in has other real personal consequences - earlier this year we had the story of Vicky Harrison, a young jobseeker (with an unfortunately resonant name - what would Emma have made of her?) who gave up and committed suicide after her 200th rejection letter. That something like this can happen at the same time as government and media vilification of ‘benefit scroungers’ is the sickest of jokes. When you genuinely believe that there is a direct correlation between hard work and success - and after untold efforts, you <span style="font-style: italic;">still</span> don’t achieve success - you turn blame on yourself. There are real, pressing reasons for the mythology around unemployment to be overturned, for the truth (that it’s about the aforementioned hustle, local economic circumstances, and sheer blind chance) to be exposed - not in an unspoken ‘everyone knows’ sense, but in the sense of being dragged out in the open light of day, waved in front of the Big Other’s eyes, and dumped in front of anyone who finds it politically useful to propagate the myths over the reality.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-28166607327218124052010-08-06T06:29:00.000-07:002010-08-06T07:13:28.714-07:00Writing FictionI<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">‘Redevelop the product, redesign the package, you still refuse to reach in your pocket…’</span><br /><br />My perennial underemployment is probably one of the first qualities people associate with me, so I’m used to getting well-meaning advice on the matter (usually on about the same level as Hayley Taylor’s ‘always brush your teeth before an interview’, but never mind). Last week, a second-hand acquaintance of mine (who works as a recruitment consultant) suggested a reason why my CV might not be getting me interviews - because it contains gaps, and you can’t have unexplained time on a CV, so I should lie and make up jobs to fill them.<br /><br />Like most CV writers, I do a little stretching and warping to suit my purposes - small gaps of a month or two can be covered by pulling the dates of the surrounding jobs together, while intermittent work with an employer over a period of time can be quickly and harmlessly made solid. One of my workplaces has closed down and left no forwarding address (I went through agonies trying to track down somebody there to act as a referee), so I can blithely alter my length of service there. But these techniques are of no help for a work history that contains gaps of six months plus - to cover those, I’d have to completely fabricate periods of work with an employer. That’s the kind of heavy production work that I’m really not used to.<br /><br />I’ve had similar advice before, from a tutor on a government jobseeker training scheme - she even offered to give me a false reference for the two years I was going to have worked as her personal administrative assistant in London. I did send out a few of these fictional CVs, but reverted to the old version as soon as was decently possible - I felt it would have been difficult to explain in interviews why, as someone who’d been earning 18k in a steady job for the last two years, I was applying for minimum wage retail jobs…<br /><br />Because plausibility is the problem here. If I’ve been in continuous employment from the age of twelve, as my newly manicured CV will suggest, why haven’t I had promotions, got my feet securely onto some kind of career ladder? Whatever series of jobs I put down, I’ll come across as,<span style="font-style: italic;"> at best</span>, chronically indecisive and completely lacking in ambition. But if the lies aren’t plausible, neither is the truth. To borrow Ivor Southwood’s lovely phrase, my real-life work history has left me with a <span style="font-style: italic;">‘botched CV which tails off like the limp narrative of an unrealistic novel’</span>. With such an unconvincing script, there’s no way for me to construct a plausible story about myself.<br /><br />Interviews are the same - even when I’m telling the truth, I habitually adopt the body language of the liar (covering my face, crossing my arms, averting my eyes). Even when answering the questions about my hobbies and interests (supposedly the easy/relaxing part of the interview) I feel like I’m wasting the interviewer’s time.<span style="font-style: italic;"> ‘Let me see - I’ve been living hand-to-mouth, on and off the dole for years and haven’t had real disposable income since 2007 - what do you think my life outside work is like? Right now, my idea of a having a good time is catching the bus into town and getting out a few library books. Can’t do it too often, obviously (those fares soon mount up), but it’s a nice treat…’</span><br /><br />My academic qualifications, which I’m sincerely proud of, have become a double-edged sword. Basic McJob-type employers don’t want to know about which Philosophy modules I studied, so I currently have two separate CV templates (I think of them as the white- and blue-collar versions), one with the academic section stripped down to basics. For ‘serious’ jobs, my education isn’t a liability, but my lack of subsequent work in my field (my failure to even enter any serious field) is the problem.<br /><br />The irony of my difficulty in this area is that, though sheer repetition, I’ve actually become very good at composing CVs - I still write them for friends, and used to write them for clients at one of my voluntary jobs. I’m fluent in the language of employers. (In some parallel universe I’m working for A4E, being invited to ‘Tea with Emma’ and beaming the pride at the thought of the all the good I’m responsible for.) It’s just that the raw materials of my own CV are too far gone to make anything of - beyond the point of polishing or rearrangement. Bombed-out shops don’t need visual merchandisers.<br /><br />II<br /><br />In a job interview, no negativity is allowed to enter the discourse. Boundless enthusiasm must be maintained for even the most uninspiring work. I need to have a positive answer ready for every conceivable question and situation. I have to - somehow - turn unemployment and stagnation into tales of triumph, like Soviet propagandists explaining how agricultural quotas were over-fulfilled by several hundred per cent, for the twentieth successive year. Yet, for a situation where modesty, self-deprecation, and ruefulness are instantly fatal, where nothing but positive communication is permitted, it seems openly sadistic that the interviewers deliberately place you in a situation where nothing but a negative response is possible - the ‘greatest weakness’ question.<br /><br />For the interviewers, it’s doubtless a chance to see whether the candidate can think on his or her feet, and cope with the unexpected (even though it‘s such an obvious and ubiquitous question). For the despairing jobseeker, it just adds to the bewilderment and frustration of the process. In an interview last week, I did as the self-help books suggest, and answered the question with a carefully rehearsed improvement story: <span style="font-style: italic;">‘well, I used to have a problem with x, but over the course of my recent work, I’ve made great strides in that area’</span>. My interviewer nodded slowly and repeated the question - <span style="font-style: italic;">‘but what would you say is your greatest <span style="font-weight: bold;">current</span> weakness?’ </span>The process of symbolic self-denigration cannot be escaped! I corpsed.<br /><br />In this and in other ways the whole routine is experienced as a headache-inducing perceptual dissonance. On the one hand, the bar for every job seems to be set impossibly high - to have lived a flawless career, blessedly free of interruptions or difficulties, with no weak spots or gaps for interviewers to seize upon. But then we look across the desk and see the mediocre individuals opposite us, and think of our friends and relatives who have managed to establish themselves on the ladder without possessing this seraphic perfection. For my entire life I’ve been asking myself: <span style="font-style: italic;">Why can everyone else do it and not me?</span><br /><br />I think that what I lack, as compared to the employed people in my life, is <span style="font-style: italic;">hustle</span>. If I had that unreflecting ability to cheerfully, believingly, pass off shit as shinola, in such a convincing way that the buyer wouldn’t bother inspecting the product before reaching for his pocket, I wouldn’t be in this situation. The latest advice - to lie, lie, and lie again, contradicting the pious self-help book advice that one should never so much as embellish the truth on a CV - is just another variation on this theme.<br /><br />I can’t quite make up my mind whether this missing quality is a ruling-class privilege (for which see the discussions collected <a href="http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/009585.html">here</a> a few years back), or more of a stereotypical working class thing - hustle, <span style="font-style: italic;">graft</span>, with its suggestions of not-entirely-legitimate activity. Perhaps it’s something possessed by people at both ends, but lost by those inbetween? Rather like the ridiculous etiquette books of early Victorian times - real aristocrats didn’t worry about that type of thing, they just did what the hell they pleased (knowing that they were immovably established and that being seen using the wrong kind of spoon wasn‘t going to affect them at all). Only the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie cooked up these arcane rules and customs to try and monopolise the road up and discreetly kick the bulk of the population off the ladder.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-77364718174784577092010-07-24T05:05:00.000-07:002010-10-02T12:18:21.072-07:00Fairy Jobmother deconstructed.‘Fairy Jobmother’ may be a reality show, but we can nonetheless categorise it as fiction. These aren’t real people - they’re grotesque stereotypes who are broadcast solely to reassure the public that their prejudices are correct. The show is a useful pantomime that reinforces received wisdom. The official line on the unemployed is that they are entirely to blame for their own plight as a result of being lazy, feckless, stupid, or badly brought up (by people who were lazy, feckless, stupid…) This is what we see in the programme. We don’t see Hayley Taylor being sent to live with families who are killing themselves jobseeking, beating their heads against the same brick wall day after day with no hope in sight - because it wouldn’t be a good story. Each episode has a safe and familiar routine - Guru lives with family, Guru diagnoses family, Guru inspires family to solve problems, group hug-and-cry session (along the lines of Adam Curtis’ writing about emotion-driven television).<br /><br />The key this week was apparently the long-dead family patriarch, praised as a man with a great work ethic (in other words, he grew up in a time when work was more easily available), whose stern Fatherly influence the family was clearly missing. The shabby surroundings, the family’s lack of drive and poor physical condition were all too easy to diagnose with a little amateur psychology on Taylor’s part. She encouraged the family to ‘move on’ from their loss and take responsibility for themselves.<br /><br />Taylor helps the mother get over her grief at the loss of her husband by first expressing sympathy (an overfamiliar arm around the shoulder and group cry at the cemetery) then by making her face some ‘harsh truths‘ - harsh medicine, of course, being the favoured kind in neo-Thatcherite times. The two children lack self-esteem, so the son is sent to learn boxing in a gym, while the daughter gets a makeover in preparation for an interview with an electrics store. She gets the job. More group crying, only this time with happiness. Simple. Perhaps we can all be ‘solved’ in this way, by people who possess no relevant qualifications on the matter - but then qualifications aren’t important, are they? It’s just a matter of <span style="font-style: italic;">common sense</span>.<br /><br />In fact the programme’s title is misleading - finding work is only a minor feature of this family drama. Taylor organises the climactic job interview herself (the daughter never actually applies for the job) and we never see any of the family doing any other jobhunting. Taylor obviously believes that there are deeper problems to fix before she can think about sending the family to work. While this is a refreshing change to the attitude held by successive governments (blindly prescribing work itself as a cure for all personal or psychic ills), it's more sinister than it seems. Bear in mind that Taylor’s former employers, A4E, are keen to extend their influence into all areas of their clients’ lives - not just work and training, but financial advice, legal advice (to the point of driving a CAB out of business in Hull) and now even medicine. Their latest scheme (described in a recent entry at <a href="http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com/">http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com</a>) is <span style="font-style: italic;">‘offering their expertise in reducing long term sickness related absence from work</span>’ - in other words, using their own medical personnel to declare employees fit to return to work as soon as possible and taking the decisions out of the hands of GPs. Perhaps I’m an alarmist, but I can’t help thinking of the early twentieth century and the era of the Company Store, when the firm you worked for owned and controlled every aspect of your life, and there was next to no idea of a private existence beyond the reach of your employers.<br /><br />The Fairy Jobmother, for all its disposability, feels like a step in the same direction. If factors in our lives are making it more difficult for us to find work (that is, make employers less likely to be impressed by us), we can expect to be hassled and bullied into changing our lives to remove the obstacles. We cannot, of course, expect any <span style="font-style: italic;">material</span> help along these lines - it’s just a matter of threats and motivation. If you have the temerity to be out of work, your personal life is not a private matter. The DWP and shady organisations like a4e have every right to examine your circumstances, deem them unsuitable, and, on pain of starvation and homelessness, mould you into a better person - that is, one more amenable to employers*. And this process will be cheered from the sidelines by those who rail at the ‘nanny state’ and become puce with rage at the thought of local authorities telling them what to put in their wheelie bins.<br /><br />This no small matter. What‘s at stake here is the principle that a human life has value beyond the use that can be extracted from it in the meat grinder of Capital - and it’s an argument that the other side is winning.<br /><br />On another note, it’s revealing that Taylor’s partially-successful methods required the production company to shell out on bereavement counselling sessions, gym membership, new clothes and an expensive makeover before even one of the family could enter work. The average jobseeker could not afford any of these things. The family could barely afford to keep food in the house (many commenters have drawn attention to the mother ‘wasting’ her money on cigarettes, as if those weren’t famous for being addictive and very difficult to give up. But the idea that benefit claimants would have loads of money if they didn’t waste it all on beer and fags is just another keystone of the mythography of the undeserving scrounger). The obvious point to conclude from this is that the family were <span style="font-style: italic;">too poor to find work</span>. Without some source of disposable cash, they were incapable (even if they were willing) of improving themselves to the standard required.<br /><br />Looking at this another way - the family’s position improved when they were made artificially less poor (or at least made to appear that way). The estate-dwelling ‘underclass’ are unemployable -<span style="font-style: italic;"> intrinsically unattractive</span> to employers - and the only way for them to escape their situation is to remodel themselves as respectable middle-class (or, at the minimum, respectable upper-working class) citizens. Even if they are struggling to buy food and pay the rent, they must present a professional appearance, learn the language of the professional workplace (the interview talk of ‘flexible team players’ and ‘highly motivated self-starters’). The moment when Taylor revealed the post-makeover daughter (made-up, coiffured, and dressed exactly like a miniature Hayley, scarf and all - now<span style="font-style: italic;"> that‘s</span> one for the amateur psychologists out there) pulled aside the veil. What the working class unemployed are being asked to do is to <span style="font-style: italic;">become middle class</span>. Being a member of the Morlock underclass is a failing in itself, making you fully deserving of the starvation and homelessness that will follow if you can‘t adapt.<br /><br />This is the crass, condescending, point-missing message of all the ‘problem-solving guru’ shows - <span style="font-style: italic;">“Why can’t the bovine masses solve their problems in the way that’s so obvious to us? Why can’t they be more like us? </span>We’re<span style="font-style: italic;"> psychologically well-adjusted, well-dressed, fit from morning gym sessions - what‘s holding</span> them<span style="font-style: italic;"> back?”</span><br /><br />The show’s very title gives us an idea of what kind of strictly limited conclusions will be drawn at the end. Taylor’s steps did improve the family’s situation, but it was made clear that these ‘fairy godmother wishes’ were miraculous and unexpected, a break from the normal order of things. The idea that they be distributed on a wider basis, or even structuralized as part of the benefits system, is never on the table. The majority of the working class unemployed are expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps - become mini-Hayleys and fully valid humans without any outside help. So what exactly <span style="font-style: italic;">was </span>the moral of the show? That finding work is easier when you have a well-known, well-connected recruitment specialist in your corner? Shocking. And even then - if Taylor fails to find work for the family next week, we can expect blame to be diverted to them. There is no systemic analysis. Blame falls solely upon the individuals (and, yes, their families.)<br /><br />Again, it’s in keeping with the official narrative of unemployment in this country: work is available to those who want it, the unemployed have themselves to blame, and the only problem they face is <span style="font-style: italic;">not wanting it enough</span>. As the events of the last few years have shown, this is unchallengeable by any amount of empirical evidence. Trawling the comments and discussion threads of the internet, you can see that there’s been only a slight adaptation of the common wisdom as the number of unemployed has reached its highest level in decades -<span style="font-style: italic;"> ‘granted, there are a few genuine unemployed, people being made redundant from skilled and professional jobs, and those people deserve our support, but for the most part they’re still lazy scroungers and a drain on the economy.’</span> One commenter on a thread about Fairy Jobmother rather plaintively suggested:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Maybe there should a government agency that detects those who don't/won't work and their benefits should be stopped. Those who are carers of children, eldery or disabled NEED greater financial support to enable them to work. Those are the people I have empathy for, not the scroungers. </span><br /><br />And that’s the question, isn’t it? How do we tell the deserving poor from the undeserving? Make no mistake, we’re in the realm of simple ontological categories. We are Good People - the state should be punished, stripped of its powers for even having the temerity to bother us. They are Bad People - the state should intervene to make them Good (more charitable types may avow that this is for their own health). The Good Jobseekers need to be helped. The Bad Scroungers should be hassled and starved into submission.<br /><br />Given that the entire bureaucracy of the DWP can’t reliably make this distinction (every long-term jobseeker has tales of undeserved, apparently random benefit stoppages, usually contrasted with some other lazier jobseeker who went unchallenged for years), it’s not exactly clear how a new ‘government agency’ will do it - will it employ half the population to follow the other half 24/7 to make sure that they’re really putting the effort in for their benefits? Is there any way of making progress on this front that doesn’t involve the complete abolition of individual privacy (for the unemployed only, naturally)? And is there any way to conduct this debate without clinging stubbornly to the resentful fantasy of millions of life-of-Riley spongers living it up at ‘our’ expense?<br /><br />These sneering-at-proles programmes aren’t just harmless, cheap-to-produce trash - they’re actively setting back the political dialogue in this country. Thanks for contributing, Channel 4.<br /><br /><br />*Anyone getting advice on a CV can expect to be told which extracurricular hobbies and activities will look good, and which ones are best left off - in other words, employers already get to pass judgement on the way we choose to spend our time<span style="font-style: italic;"> outside</span> work...digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-82766489636004750592010-07-18T09:53:00.000-07:002010-07-18T10:01:58.919-07:00They're Watching WatchingA4EHeh. http://watchinga4e.blogspot.com/<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />'I'm genuinely amazed. I didn't realize unemployment was the result of people not being able to sell themselves to an employer effectively. For years I have laboured under the misapprehension that unemployment was the result of technological advances in machine production rendering the need for the application of large masses of human labour power increasingly redundant, when all we really needed to do was polish up our CVs, slap on a smile and think positive. Genius! This woman needs to go global with this. I know, let's send her to China.'<br /><br /></span>Look at the recent comments: the site is being invaded by PositivityBots - <span style="font-style: italic;">'At least she's trying to do SOMETHING, what are you doing to help the unemployed?'</span>...<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-37790050746680812052010-07-14T09:30:00.001-07:002010-07-14T14:49:40.077-07:00England's Number One<span style="font-style: italic;">50% off-topic, so, on second thoughts, not suitable for Minus.</span><br /><br />A scene from Armando Ianucci’s satirical comedy The Thick Of It keeps drifting into my mind. Hapless minister Hugh Abbott is being accused of hypocrisy for owning a second home in London while championing a bill to free up homes in the capital for key workers. Spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, needing to disassociate the party from the press outcry, leans on him to resign and walk away with some dignity. Abbott is at a loss to comprehend why this is happening to him – <span style="font-style: italic;">‘It’s a </span><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">flat</span><span style="font-style: italic;">! I haven’t raped someone!’</span> - and rails<span style="font-style: italic;"> ‘Ministers should be cloned aged 45, with no genitals, no past, no </span><span style="font-style: italic;">flats</span><span style="font-style: italic;">…’</span><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvUOb21Pz8SPNA9SfBZiVgt2KIka_mJcjvpyDehphTd3d1aJoUl3HORY1t-gVpSbmiej1eGXgH_Oow-ziHKIb2_xZdc3AgUd6lmTkYrM-HjW3OSkGTSmwI2hCnrVsPBVXojI1FQrFgLE/s1600/thick460.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 209px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvUOb21Pz8SPNA9SfBZiVgt2KIka_mJcjvpyDehphTd3d1aJoUl3HORY1t-gVpSbmiej1eGXgH_Oow-ziHKIb2_xZdc3AgUd6lmTkYrM-HjW3OSkGTSmwI2hCnrVsPBVXojI1FQrFgLE/s320/thick460.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493795763623022546" border="0" /></a><br />Was someone in the party listening? The Labour leadership contest is being contested between four test-tube babies – interchangeable, forty-ish, bland-looking men with no track records. Well – strictly speaking they do have track records, and were involved in many of the unpopular activities of the last Government, but they aren’t keen for punters to make this association. One of the most depressing sights at the recent candidate hustings was a squirming Ed Balls insisting that he had tried very hard to reverse Ministry policy with regard to the detention of child asylum seekers, but had <span style="font-style: italic;">‘lost the argument’</span>. Nobody believes that this happened, not even Balls himself, but it is revealing that he apparently sees pleading impotence as his strongest play at this point in time. The others are equally keen to distance themselves from the administration that they were raised in. Blogger <a href="http://madammiaow.blogspot.com/2010/07/labour-leadership-hustings-suits-in.html">Madam Miaow</a> drily described them as <span style="font-style: italic;">‘four amnesiacs in suits’. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMbxgjZbSu6TzhTS7862vJS_alrrAslkNC6yvxrwW95JjRZUQEYTIremx-pAl6SmqPUW633wZX8C2hnCLkMsInI8nAaKdQQqwD-_wgMHnxIVLN99mCADuQxc9o5uXDLm-6UGY-mlVLODs/s1600/here.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 130px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMbxgjZbSu6TzhTS7862vJS_alrrAslkNC6yvxrwW95JjRZUQEYTIremx-pAl6SmqPUW633wZX8C2hnCLkMsInI8nAaKdQQqwD-_wgMHnxIVLN99mCADuQxc9o5uXDLm-6UGY-mlVLODs/s320/here.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493796598186737458" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Miliband senior seems to have been heir apparent for so long solely because he appears young, fresh-faced, and isn’t too closely associated with the New Labour project. Tony Parsons <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/2008/08/02/labour-must-stick-with-gordon-brown-not-turn-to-david-miliband-115875-20680962/">wrote</a> in a Mirror editorial in 2008 <span style="font-style: italic;">‘I like David Milliband. He seems very smart and he looks very clean’,</span> which is the kind of incisive commentary you’d expect from someone’s grandmother, but may have stumbled across the truth all the same. Trying to assess David Miliband’s political character is impossible - his public statements are strings of carefully modified Olestra, without enough substance,<span style="font-style: italic;"> texture</span>, to even disagree with. Even if he did say anything of substance, he has the schizophrenic’s ability to distance himself from his own past words. His entire persona is frictionless - nothing (scandal, praise, criticism, accomplishments) clings to him. About all you can say about him is that… well… he looks clean. Clean as in hygienic, and clean as in <span style="font-style: italic;">untainted</span>.<br /><br />So here we are - left with the four most senior figures in the Labour Party who can plausibly disassociate themselves from the Party’s past actions (even if nobody but the Big Other believes them). Between them they have shown no steady political principles bar the ability to align themselves with power, and their most impressive skill is the basic self-preservation to avoid getting too publicly involved in either a coup or a scandal. They are the four improbable candidates left standing after all of the impossible ones have been ruled out.<br /><br />…which, in turn, put me in mind of Joe Hart.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nU7VQKIeyjGUgafRUvwzbu2SZ2cKLjRpe7n9pRPNUwc5hNCqw7ICqPcqmpQXOESvdIanHZVEKFtbo_uoZm6qosqt9X9u8tkkeLJoJIzEB9Yl374jV9LNVNMBfIFYE26D9CFILK3Ao1g/s1600/JoeHart1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5nU7VQKIeyjGUgafRUvwzbu2SZ2cKLjRpe7n9pRPNUwc5hNCqw7ICqPcqmpQXOESvdIanHZVEKFtbo_uoZm6qosqt9X9u8tkkeLJoJIzEB9Yl374jV9LNVNMBfIFYE26D9CFILK3Ao1g/s320/JoeHart1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493797834578153874" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Hart has played eighty-six top-level matches in his club career, plus a total of 133 minutes in an England jersey, none of which was competitive play. How has he moved up through the ranks so quickly, so effortlessly, to become England’s number-one-in-waiting?<br /><br />English goalkeepers once had a reputation for being rock solid, the kind of big implacable men who‘d occupy the heavy jersey from one decade to the next without changing their expression, much less their hairstyle. Nowadays it’s a job with the life expectancy of a green recruit in a special-missions squad from a war comic - the kind of unit where the sheer level of attrition means you become a Sergeant overnight and a Captain by the end of the week, if only you can avoid getting picked off by the enemy.<br /><br />Robert Green misjudged the spin of a fast-moving ball and is now unlikely to be picked for England again. Scott Carson did more or less the same thing, and was never picked again. Paul Robinson misjudged Gary Neville’s backpass - surprisingly he was picked again, a few times, but was dumped at the end of the unsuccessful campaign. David Seaman misjudged the loft on Ronaldinho’s chip and, after over eight years as England’s first choice, knew that it was time to step down. (<span style="font-style: italic;">Misjudgement</span>- that telling phrase, so often used by scandal-hit politicians…)<br /><br />At a time when English goalkeeping talent is apparently at a premium, it is strange that we seem so keen to abandon young goalkeepers after one brief audition. Adopted-and-discarded players like Paul Robinson and Chris Kirkland (who was only picked once - it feels like he was around the squad for years) are in excellent form for their clubs, but know that it’s virtually impossible for them to earn a recall to the England squad. The same will doubtless be true of Robert Green, another not-quite to add to our growing list. To think of these players as <span style="font-style: italic;">washed up</span> is bizarre - our outgoing ‘keeper, David James, wasn’t capped until he was 27, and didn’t become number one for another five years after that.<br /><br />We weren’t always so harsh. Alan Rough’s few televised errors gave him (and any Scottish candidate for decades to come) the label of <span style="font-style: italic;">dodgy keeper</span>, but he still got to enjoy a long and generally successful career. Peter Shilton let in a soft goal against Poland in 1973, and bore some of the blame for England’s failure to qualify for Germany, but wasn’t immediately dropped in favour of Ray Clemence. Shilton played for England for another seventeen years, outlasting three managers along the way. Where is the patience now?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1WfmgaxOhXRRbP2ZbTBLhF3BqWhg-aD84laFiEiCpn4TGWi0qVkrqhuw1wIiV2OU-vXmkQk_-Un3kz6lp4HVhcACf3HFLZ8iBvu3zMa7vnXy0TnfWWjOja0FqEKXl-G6q9S1dqsxF6Vo/s1600/01_300x225.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 225px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1WfmgaxOhXRRbP2ZbTBLhF3BqWhg-aD84laFiEiCpn4TGWi0qVkrqhuw1wIiV2OU-vXmkQk_-Un3kz6lp4HVhcACf3HFLZ8iBvu3zMa7vnXy0TnfWWjOja0FqEKXl-G6q9S1dqsxF6Vo/s320/01_300x225.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493798617066193794" border="0" /></a><br />Is the difference that today we live our lives in the television studio, where mistakes are almost certain to be caught on the Sky cameras, and the BBC show us endless repeats of the slip from all angles while Alan Hansen groans ‘<span style="font-style: italic;">he’s got to do better there</span>’ ? Is it that these players really, genuinely lose confidence in the England jersey and, if we were to recall Paul Robinson, he’d spend the whole game trapped in a horrifying flashback, seeing a slow-motion vision of Gary Neville bearing down while the goals rained in behind him? I think it’s related to the lazily selective memory that had pundits dismissing Forlan’s talent and accomplishments based on one poor season he’d endured ten years ago - a reductive kind of stupidity that has us remember a person by the single most resounding association, whether or not that happens to be a good representation of a whole career.<span style="font-style: italic;"> Brown? Bigotgate. Useless. Green? USA. Useless.</span><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQpTtwuIzQo6o8OJWebF1AqIqfARXAvvUdHbfDLZcGFpzEz4ct-v9C2QYwu9Uvgk0Y0DSoQXUNqjEOW0bPkg-nTR9lifVG9fDc9PI7psbcz4kzYY-HldX0kg1VJCqzA-iEpv51at3Zjow/s1600/greenget_1677078c.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQpTtwuIzQo6o8OJWebF1AqIqfARXAvvUdHbfDLZcGFpzEz4ct-v9C2QYwu9Uvgk0Y0DSoQXUNqjEOW0bPkg-nTR9lifVG9fDc9PI7psbcz4kzYY-HldX0kg1VJCqzA-iEpv51at3Zjow/s320/greenget_1677078c.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493798108443889506" border="0" /></a><br />We praise our fresh-faced, spotless young goalkeepers until they’re foolish enough to make a mistake, at which point we dump them and go looking for someone even younger still. Hart is about to become our number one because he is the last candidate untainted by a public failure.<br /><br />Perhaps all of this is unfair on Hart - but I can’t help wondering whether, by the time 2014 comes around, we’ll have a goalkeeper plucked from the U16 squad, because he’ll the most experienced keeper who hasn’t (yet) made a major televised howler. It’s not really so much more implausible than Ed Miliband being in charge of the country.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-84390439356580626432010-07-13T13:56:00.001-07:002010-07-13T15:23:43.844-07:00Unhomage to Catalonia<span style="font-style: italic;">Not on Minus because we're all sick of it.</span><br /><br />During Minus' own Spanish Civil War (no exaggeration, that, but rather an imaginative simile), Zone Styx retweeted someone's post along the lines of <span style="font-style: italic;">'Spain are like a 9 year old PhD student that people can't stop demanding even more from.'</span><br /><br />The lopsided fetishisation of technique above all else does, in fact, bring to mind some autistic-pattern preteen maths prodigy...<br /><br />The determined persistence with the containment-passing game is supposed to be read as idealistic - perhaps that was true two years ago when they played it in the face of tired critical opinion that the Barcelona model could not be transferred to the international stage. The 2010 version, though, looks more like miserable pragmatism.<br /><br />It may be that this Spanish team is past its peak and not capable of the things it used to do. Not entirely convinced, as most of them are still under thirty, but maybe this relentless pass/receive game requires especially young legs.<br /><br />On the whole, though, I think it looks more like a conscious decision. Spain decided that they were going to do what was necessary to bury the past and win a World Cup, even if it didn't please all the neutrals. If they had to eliminate (almost) all risk from their style and smoothly massage the possibilities out of each game, they were okay with that.<br /><br />Mark came up with the analogy of Spain being the equivalent of prog rock, desperately needing to be toppled by some footballpunk or postpunk. What could this be? Of course punk was far more than cartoon 'attitude' and aggression, so Holland's semi-effective physical harassment strategy doesn't fit the description - they'd surely be the equivalent of seventies pub rock...<br /><br />But perhaps we can look at this the other way round. If punk represented an opening up of possibility (the rejection of the tyranny of technique), that quickly closed and became locked into reductive parody. Postpunk took us past this by being genuinely open to possibilities - it's hardly a sonic genre at all, more an ideological one. So with football - Spain represented a principled break with conventional wisdom (that wiry lads of 5'7" will never make it at the top level) - but it's a break that solidified and became the new orthodoxy.<br /><br />(And just as watching some lumpen idea-less two-chord nightmare of a band made you reflect that, perhaps, being able to play your instrument wasn't so bad after all, so watching Spain makes you unexpectedly nostalgic for some lower division kick and rush...)<br /><br />Postpunk bands used a variety of musical principles, but avoided becoming trapped in their codes and definitions (while also<span style="font-style: italic;"></span> avoiding becoming mere magpie pick-and-choose pastiche). This was because most of those involved followed some 'higher', <span style="font-style: italic;">non-musical</span> purpose in forming a band - what did the means matter?<br /><br />What would a <span style="font-style: italic;">non-football </span>(or, rather, supra-football)<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>football team look like? Would that be a rejection of the importance of results (emphasis on style alone - Wenger deciding to abandon defence entirely and field eleven slight right-wingers), or would that be the <span style="font-style: italic;">embrace</span> of results - pure pragmatism at the expense of any one particular style? Or is this just where we start to bump up against the useful limits of analogy?<br /><br />There is in fact a magazine - aimed at the GQ market - called Football Punk. I'd call it a 'glossy' except they seem to have gone for an artfully matte effect (and a b/w photo of Peter Crouch's face on the cover). I'm tempted to buy a copy for grist-mill purposes.digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1492788564295832141.post-58032249119286664342010-07-13T02:46:00.000-07:002010-07-13T02:48:08.059-07:00Cliffhanger<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLsrl1GynOywQby88G137oOwt7DoGvJpevTnGYJDbJlCgqiwK5sN2i3RSnk3jh5yqcO1m_GaxZIM_Ohl4ezDrMYvQ-ROSI1OUpd5lkFfNdfBAEyqRGrCDttmH_5imdc27SU9sbcGAYCsQ/s1600/cripes.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 273px; height: 203px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLsrl1GynOywQby88G137oOwt7DoGvJpevTnGYJDbJlCgqiwK5sN2i3RSnk3jh5yqcO1m_GaxZIM_Ohl4ezDrMYvQ-ROSI1OUpd5lkFfNdfBAEyqRGrCDttmH_5imdc27SU9sbcGAYCsQ/s320/cripes.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493325001798450178" border="0" /></a><br />You can't leave us hanging like that! What happened <span style="font-style: italic;">next?</span>digitalbenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02897778109902659594noreply@blogger.com0