Good riddance to Haye

I like boxing but I'm not a boxing fan. Partly this is because I still baulk at the idea of giving any money to Rupert Murdoch so I won't ever have the facility to 'pay for view'. And  Mrs Journeyman, whilst quite happy for me to return from my own training with fat lips and black eyes, finds something ethiclly questionable about me watching other people suffering the same.

But even so I appreciate boxing and boxers. I have to admit to buying into the romantic notion of the sport as possibly the purest expression of athleticism and competition, and hanker after a (probably illusory) idea of an inherent dignity to the sport. And if anyone doubts this as pretentious twaddle, I suggest they first read 'The Sweet Science and 'The Gloves'.

I also think that all boxers - almost irrespective of their ability level - are worthy of some respect for having the guts both physical and psychological to put themselves to the test in the ring.  But my big problem with many pro's is that with with their trash-talking and arrogant self-promotion they come across as ignorant cringe-worthy knobs who bring discredit to the sport.  

And no more so than David Haye - with his  notorious gang-rape pre-fight analogy and now his pathetic post-fight broken toe excuses. Maybe he's  misled by his management and entourage, but I have to say that the right man - someone who brings some much needed dignity and intelligence  - won on Saturday night.

J30 - brief impressions

I took the opportunity to take a day's 'solidarity holiday' with the strikers. 

My day began with a visit to the teacher's picket line at my daughter's school. The  NUT / ATL had sent out a letter to parents asking for their support and it seemed only right to respond. The 'picket line' was very good-natured with only a few managers and support staff going in - the latter rather embarrassedly because of their own union's -  UNISON - cravenness in not joining the strike. They atoned with sympathy, donations to the strike fund, and tea and biscuits. I've never seen or been on a teacher's picket line before - and I was struck by how genteel this was in comparison to any others I've seen. I was also struck at how young they all seemed - maybe I'm just getting old - and how politically raw they were. Many were joking that they'd never been on a demonstration before let alone been on strike.

After a local rally at the FE College I headed into town for the main demo at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The same atmosphere prevailed - but most of all this was very much more than just the usual suspects. It certainly wasn't the Greek-style insurrection that some have been talking about - nor was it really even a one-day general strike. But  - and this isn't based on the usual rhetoric of the leaderships because I never actually got into the hall to hear it - there was a genuine sense that it was the start of something new.

On the negative side I have to say that the private/public sector divide and rule game has had an effect. My colleagues - who have never known anything other than private pension schemes - simply can’t understand why I was supporting the strike. I fear that they are representative of many in industries who have been squeezed repeatedly since the Thatcher years - and it will take a lot of explaining to counter the politics of envy arising from the race to the bottom. But this explaining has to be done: We can huff and puff about general strikes as much as we like, but at the end of the day capitalism is a cold-hearted beast that rates profit over public opinion:  Schools, colleges and job centres shutting might piss the system off - but walk-outs at commercial businesses hit it where it actually hurts.

Roots 2: Soldier of the queen - Fred & Florence

Another installment in my on-going project to  research my  family history: This is one of  my maternal Great Grandfathers - Frederick Albert.

He was born in 1871 in Richmond in Surrey - his father Albert was a former soldier and  bricklayer who died before his son's eighth birthday leaving his widow Caroline with six children. She supported the family as a needlewoman so it is fair to assume that life was pretty tough for them.  Fred worked initially as a milkman but at the age of 18 followed his father into the army. He opted to join the Royal Artillery as a driver - presumably his experience in working with  horses helped equip him to drive a gun carriage. In fact shortly afterwards he transferred to the more glamorous Royal Horse Artillery as a gunner - all artillery being horse-drawn at the time but in the horse artillery the gun crews rode into battle rather than marched. And being equipped with lighter guns they provided close fire  support to the cavalry. Like most soldiers at the time Fred signed on for twelve years - the first seven of these to be served in the regulars and a further five in the reserves subject to recall in the event of war. 

His father had served in the army in the Crimea era when soldiers were generally held in pretty low esteem as the dregs of society. By the time of Fred's service it was the golden age of Kippling's 'soldiers of the queen' and some sentimental regard had developed for the common soldier. Reforms in the army had abolished some of the abuses of an earlier age - flogging and the purchase of officers' commissions  - but life in the ranks still tended to be harsh and brutal. Four of Fred's seven years were served in India on the North West Frontier and this posting would have produced mixed feelings. Unlike home postings, there were numerous possibilities of action in policing operations even when there weren't full-on hostilities ,and there was the constant attrition of disease. On the other hand, pay went much further in India than at home,  and even the rank and file would enjoy the benefits of being part of the race that ruled the empire - with native servants and a more relaxed barrack regime than the spit and polish of Woolwich or Colchester. Fred appears to have made it unscathed through these years - although when he transferred to the reserves in 1896 it is recorded that he had severely sprained his left knee 'in action'.

Other than marrying Florence and starting a family, we don't have any record of what Fred did back in Richmond for the next three years but in 1899 with the outbreak of the war in South Africa he had the misfortune of being recalled to active service. War with the Boer settlers had broken out after a shameless adventure of land-grabbing by the British to secure the gold and diamond fields of the region. It was arguably the British army's first 'modern' war - fought against an opponent who combined guerrilla tactics with the use of European weapons and so embarrassed an army used to colonial victories against  indigenous peoples with inferior arms. As a foretaste of the First World War  the fighting  was fully in the public gaze;  the civilan population was galvanised with a call for volunteers to supplement the regular forces, and comfort parcels from home were sent to the troops.

Fred landed in South Africa in 1899 and was posted to 'G' Battery - his medal record shows that he served at the battles of Paardeburg, Dreifontein, Johannesburg, Diamond Hill and Kimberley. There's little doubt that he would have been in the thick of it - one of the frequent British tactical errors was to deploy their artilery too far forward in the open where the gun crews made an easy target for the skilled Boer marksmen. 

Happily my Great Gandfather survived all this and was finally discharged in 1902. His record shows that he was never an exemplary soldier - throughout his service he never managed to rise above the rank of Gunner and he seems to have regularly forfeited and regained his good conduct pay. On his discharge his character merited only a 'good' - but this was obvious sufficient for him to secure a saught-after position on his return to civilian life in Richmond as the town's resident fireman. In an age when the public sector was almost none existent fire brigades were generally formed of volunteer part-timers with only the resident fireman as a fulltime paid position - much like the coxswains of the RNLI today he was also the caretaker of the fire station and responsible for the maintenance of the equipment. Again his experience with horses would have stood him in good stead for this. The position would also have secured a certain status and security - reinforced when his wife Flo  became the caretaker of the new municipal public conveniences. Not too glamourous perhaps but aslo a position of trust and relative  status - and with the added scope of earning tips from the customers.  

Largely because of Fred's military service, in the course of twenty odd years he had risen  from poverty to working class respectability.  The family memories of Fred in his old age are of a fairly stern and forebooding patriach. But poignantly there is no one left to remember the impact it must have had when his own son, following the family's military tradition, was killed in action at the age of 18 in 1917.

NB: Although the photogarph above has been kept by the family we have no idea which one of the men is Fred although we can be sure that he isn't one of the NCO's. His medical record at the time of his enlistment descibes him as short and stocky with a ruddy complexion and scars to his cheek and forehead, he also had tattoos on both forearms. It looks like his genes have run strong ...

Barbarossa legacy

Today is the 70th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa - the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. One of the defining moments of the 20th century it deserves to be marked by more than just the Stalinists apologists I have seen online so far. 

In Eastern Europe it marks the start of  suffering  on a scale and level of barbarity that eclipses anything seen in the West.  But in this country the event went a long way to re-orientating  the political compass for generations - for society as a whole and spcifically for the Left. 

To mobilise the war effort Churchill and the ruling class had to evoke the idea of a 'Peoples' War' - a dangerous game for them to play as would be seen in the 1945 Labour  landslide. But in the dark days of 1941 when Britain was isolated, Hitler's attack on the USSR was a gift to rallying the working class to the cause. The cynical creation of  the character of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin as the lovable popular patriarch of Russian workers, and propaganda campaigns the stressed solidarity with beleaguered Soviet fellow-workers, were all part of a drive to increase industrial production in the cause of 'arms for Russia'. This was notoriously  assisted by the British Communist Party who had little difficulty in doing an about-face from their previous defence of the Nazi-Soviet pact and denunciation of the war effort as an 'imperialist war'.

Leaving aside the jesuitical isomersaults required of the CP to justify this - the significance of popular support for Russia was felt by a much wider layer than those sections of the industrial working class influenced by the Stalinists. If many on the Left had come to the conclusion in the 1930's that Communism and the USSR were the only bulwarks against fascism - Hitler's war against the USSR spread this thinking to a much wider audience. - From the radicalised youth of the ruling class such as the Cambridge spies  who  used their privileged positions within the establishment to assist Stalin's war effort - to a  very much wider layer of workers for whom the propaganda rubbed off: Ordinary 'non-political' people who came to see the USSR as a glimpse of a possible alternative - and better - way of organising society. Of course this was to become steadily eroded by the Cold War and the spreading realisation of the realities of Stalinism, but it was not to be altogether extinguished until the 1990's.

I was born almost 25 years after these events - but still the impact of  the post 1941 era has in a sense defined my own political identity, and many others on the Left:  The label of 'Trotskyist' is still worn in the early 21st Century, but essentially it takes its definition and reference from that time. And as I have said before, whilst it is important to understand this history - and even to  acknowledge the pull that it has a generation of CP-ers - I am not sure that it is useful to allow these things to continue to define us. I think of my daughters who now study this period as school-history.  Questioning and radicalised though they may be, the controversies - and resulting labels - are about as relevant to them as theologians discussing the schisms of the early church. Time for the Left to move on.

Cosiness isn't the alternative to sectarianism

I was at a local meeting the other night to support the action of UCU members at the local FE college. It was celebrating an all too rare but (partial) success for once. A ballot with overwhelming support for strike action had persuaded management to climb down over a vicious cuts package that targeted most of the leading union activists for redundancy. The meeting was dominated by the SWP. And I couldn't argue with that - they have a number of activists at the college and appear to have led the movement there - they also lead the local Trades Council in whose name the meeting was called. What I was surprised at was their attitude to our local Labour MP - David -'pull up the ladder behind me' - Lammy.

An invitation to attend the meeting I can understand -t's  a chance to put him on the spot  for his record whilst higher education minister in the previous government and  now as  shadow education minister. But there were no questions about whether a future Labour government would restore EMA  - a massive issue in our area - or what would be done about student fees. And this was a meeting where the forthcoming public sector strikes on the 30th June, and the events in Spain and Greece, were greeted as virtually the start of a revolutionary situation in  Europe. But Lammy wasn't even asked if he supported the strikes or if he would be coming to visit local picket lines on the day. 

In fact he was only politely thanked for lending his support to the campaign at the college: Of course in the forum of a public meeting none of these awkward questions could or should have been put in a personally aggressive or sectarian way - but they need to be asked nonetheless. If we're being doctrinaire about it (although I'd rather not)  you could say doing so is  a classic 'transitional' approach. It's fair enough to proclaim 'one solution - revolution' but it really does wear a bit thin when over-used - and it becomes a ritual if it's not linked to the day-to-day. 

Strangely the SWP  sometimes remind me of my happily brief time in the CPGB in the 1980's. Whilst feeling a smug 'more-revolutionary than thou' glow, in practical terms  the CPGB could amicably co-exist with the dreaded 'social democrats'  of the Labour Party as some sort of pressure group / custodian of the socialist conscience of the movement, and so enjoy a place in the Lefts' great and good. The political vocabulary of the SWP is obviously different -  but the similarities in the social and psychological cosiness are striking.

Entrepreneurs ?

History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce:

 On a Wednesday night I'm usually out and manage to come home just in time to catch my family watching the last ten minutes of The Apprentice. This is actually  the optimum duration to see a summary of the week's  farcical cock-ups and then witness the ritual culling of one of the disgusting talentless and avaricious moral vacuums that comprise this years' 'hopefuls'.

Lord Sugar is usually fed with some well-scripted humiliating put-downs for these wannabes - and in the process reinforces his own  brand positioning as the 'peoples' entrepreneur' - the same persona carefully nurtured  by the previous Labour government. His folksy message is an insidious one -  business people are just like the rest of  us and business is good for all of us -  'entrepreneurship' is the best hope of the common man.

But much as I detest the show it does serve some purpose  as a  metaphor for everything that is wrong with capitalism. And this week Lord Sugar came out with something that unconsciously revealed  the bankruptcy and degeneracy of our age: 'I've never met an engineer who made it as a businessman'.

Back in the day - when Marx himself grudgingly allowed capitalism the credit for having developed mankind's resources - 'entrepreneurship' did mean something: Richard Arkwright, James Watt, Richard Trevithick, Henry Bessemer, Isambard Kingdom Brunell may well all have been heartless bastards who didn't give a toss about the human suffering that was the price of progress and profit - but  they did  make their money by invention and manufacture. And in doing so undeniably transformed our material world along the way.  

They didn't do it like Lord Sugar  by  knocking out inferior copies of other people's products sourced from cheap components,  or  by property speculation, or  by making profits from supplying the needs of a starved public sector. But then you don't need to be an engineer for that -  just a parasitic modern day 'entrepreneur'.

Poll Tax - First time round

Today I've got a guest slot  over at On This Deity  - to mark the anniversary of the Peasant's Revolt of 1381: 

"When Adam delved and Eve span - Who was then the gentleman ?''

John Ball (1338-1381)   

The 'mad priest of Kent' -  itinerant Lollard preacher and possibly the first English socialist.

Out of town interlude

Feeling in need of a bit of unpolluted air for a change, I pointed my wheels East(ish) and took off for a couple of days in Cambridgeshire and the Fens:

 

First stop was the Cambridge Strawberry Fair. I hadn't been since the early 1990's when 'new age travellers' were still the folk-demons. I remembered it as a very mellow affair where dreadlocked crusties happily mingling alongside  the WI and scout groups. When I saw that the police had cancelled it last year it stirred me to visit it again. The old (and not so old) 'alternative' types were still there - along with a large showing from the very pissed-up white underclass of Middle England. As a  Londoner that's a phenomenon that we just don't see here - and certainly not the open and casual display of EDL regalia in a non-political context. As I was riding I couldn't drink more than a couple of pints, but I still had quite  a pleasant afternoon people-watching - albeit slightly unsettling and nostalgic for the old days.

I spent the night in a Travelodge: Like so many of these soul-less joints this was located next to an equally desolate Little Chef in the middle of nowhere on an A road that was once a major route but has been superseded by another motorway or by-pass. Now stranded in time and space it  has the distinct feel of the Bates Motel. However I survived the night and headed off to the depths of the Fens to visit my friends who have built a new small-holding life up there (with a bit of bike work on the side).

I then headed off to West Stow Saxon Village - but taking a couple of wrong turns  managed to take in Ely which is definitely not on the way. It bills itself as the 'oldest English village' which in a narrow sense is true in that it is possibly the oldest dated Saxon settlement - but the timber houses in the 'village' are all reconstructions. Really aside from a small museum which could do a much better job of describing who the Anglo-Saxons were and how they lived, the main purpose of the village is experimental archaeology. Being something of an amateur geek in this respect I was impressed to see how this had transformed the idea of what a Saxon house had looked like from the ski-chalet like illustrations in the text books that I grew up on to something that looked much more like a modern construction. An amateur living-history group were giving  a surprisingly good demonstration of burial rites raising more sophisticated questions than I had expected - were grave goods really deposits of valued personal possessions or could they be goods of individuals that had no heirs to bequeath them to - or were they gifts deposited by the deceased's friends and relations ? Well it kept me happy for a couple of hours anyway.

I then took a very long and rambling route to join up with the M11 for the final stretch home to London. In the course of my pottering ( and getting lost ) I had managed to take in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Despite getting so soaked in the rain at one point that I managed to ruin my phone -  I felt rejuvenated. (I'm a simple soul really).

Festival Of Britain

I went to the South Bank yesterday and grabbed a quick half an hour at the exhibition there to mark the 60th anniversary of the Festival Of Britain. As often seems to be the case these days I found myself thinking about my parents. What has happened in this country since the festival of 1951 - and to to them - seems like a melancholic metaphor for the decline and dead-end of our society.

I know Mum and Dad both visited the festival - at the time they  would have been in their early to mid twenties: Having been kids in the 1930's, teenagers in the war and then  coming of age in the glow of the 1945 Labour government - they represent precisely that  generation filled with the optimism and faith in the future that the festival was trying to capture.

The festival was a scheme of the 1945 Labour government - a project inherited by Churchill's  Tories that they couldn't cancel. It was intended to be a celebration of the 1945 vision of a post-war reconstruction - continuing the idea of a People's War into building a fairer society with opportunity for all. 

With the perspective of sixty years the faith in social democratic reform seems pretty naive and flimsy. But my parents - and many of their generation -  brought into it, and for a while at least it looked as if it was working. Their parents had known hardships before the war that they would never experience. Education, home ownership and  foreign holidays would blur the demarcation between the working and middle classes - creating a murky hinterland between the two. This was seen as 'getting on' - not just in terms of opportunist individual social mobility but collectively as a society. Aneurin Bevan - still one of my Dad's heroes - articulted this vision explicity with 'In Place Of Fear'.

It probably never occurred to them how precarious this would prove - but it is dawning on them now they are elderly and having to call upon that infrastructure of the welfare state they played their  small part in building. 

Mum is probably having to go permanently into care and Dad is reeling as social services telling him that after a lifetime of working their modest savings will have to be swallowed up before the state will help. They are not particularly well off  - but inevitably after nearly fifty years of working they have the modest assets that you would  typically expect to find amongst the skilled working or lower middle class.  And this is becoming a fairly universal predicament for their generation, most affecting that  very section of society that the brave new 1945 Labour meritocratic project - and the 1951 Festival - were built upon.

For my Dad it's not really about the money - there are many other more powerful emotional tugs in his mind at the moment, but one underlying thought - although he would never express it in these terms -  is that after a lifetime he is now left wondering 'what the fuck was it all for?'.

Legal but dishonourable

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Diane Abbot but here goes:

These days I'm a boss (kind of). I have to say that despite the stress this brings it's quite  nice being a boss. It's not really  about the money- in a business like ours there's quite a few people 'under' me who are considerably better paid than I am. In my case I simply  never really liked having anyone 'over' me so being a boss - albeit one who does his best not to act like an arsehole -  is definitely a preferable option. But one thing about being a boss is that the buck stops with you - for better or worse. 

Sometimes - despite your best efforts to be decent and honest - you soak up undeserved glory rightly accruing to people under you - and sometimes you shoulder the burden when they fuck up. Those are the breaks and if you can't hack it - don't do the job, whether it's being the managing director, the captain of the darts team - or the head of children's services at a local council earning £150k a year. 

That's a fucking lot more than I earn by the way - but if you were going to justify it at all you could say that when my team fucks up maybe a typo gets printed and we lose a client - whilst when a social services team fucks up a child dies.

I've no doubt that Sharon Shoesmith was hung out to dry and scapegoated by Haringey Council and most of all by cowardly Ed Balls in response to a lynch mob reaction to the death of Baby P. I'm also sure that the legal decision was well founded in employment law - and I hope that it ruins what little political career Ed Balls may have left. 

But on a personal ethical basis - for Sharon 'I don't do blame' Shoesmith to pocket any compensation for her dismissal is simply dishonourable (sorry I can't think of a better less old-fashioned word) - inappropriate is probably the PC jargon but that doesn't cut it.Granted she probably won't now be able to get another senior exec's job in the public sector and  she has lost a decent pension - but there's nothing to stop her just  keeping her head down and quietly earn a modest living doing some thing a bit more mundane. In the circumstances, whatever injustice she may feel she has suffered, that would seem like an honourable course of action.  

Of course if she was only seeking the courts' decision to highlight the government's and council's scapegoating - maybe now she has achieved this she could  donate the settlement to a campaign to defend public sector jobs and services - or at the very least to a kids' charity. But I wouldn't hold your breath ...

Genocide lessons for our generation

Recent posts seem to be concentrating on legal-ish issues - and here's another one: 

For someone with any sense of justice it's difficult not to suppress a sense of jubilation at the sight of  Ratko Mladic - military leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the years of civil war and ethnic cleansing - being called to account. And yet at the same time for anyone with a sense of history it is difficult not to associate  the concept of 'war crimes' with  victor's justice. But just for the moment  I'm deliberately going to set that debate aside:

In our schools the Holocaust is taught as a defining moment in our recent history - when taught well it is an opportunity to educate new generations about the fragility of 'civilisation' and 'human rights'. Rightly so - it must never be forgotten - but there are problems with using it as such a vehicle. The passage of time and the emphasis on the 'otherness' of the Nazi regime has a danger of enshrining the holocaust in a time capsule  that new generations simply can't relate to. But in the very recent history of Balkan Europe  there is a much readily understood example of what Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil'. The thoroughly modern racism of neighbour against neighbour ... to the backdrop of MTV, Sony Walkmans and Benetton adverts. So close to our daily lives - and yet it is so swept under the carpet.

If the trial of Mladic is to achieve anything it could be to show that ethnic hatred is not something far away - either in history books or 'developing' countries. And although I'm delighted to see a new generation learning about 'The Boy In Striped Payamas' - I'd  also like them to be reading Joe Sacco's 'Safe Area Gorazde'.

Super injunctions - not just about celebs

It's a very British thing:  a meeting of the obsession with 'privacy', and a  prurient fascination for other people's sex lives - all fused with the lynch-rule of a puritanical mob. Throw in a footballer or a celebrity or two and a not-really-a-celebrity photogenic gold-digger - and bingo we have the perfect storm. Then give it an added comic twist with some judges proving that they are indeed silly old farts by trying to police what is being said via social-networking on this new-fangled inter-web thingy. And let's not forget the biggest gold-digger of the lot - Max- fucking -Clifford.

It's tempting to say good riddance to the whole circus.

But then I remember that the first time I heard the expression 'super-injunction' was when Trafigura tried to hush up their dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast. 100,000 people required medical help for which  the company accepted no liability  but still  paid the government $200 million  in hush money. So footballers and gold diggers aside there's a very important issue here - free speech in this country is something of an illusion when it can be brought off by the highest bidder. 

Libel laws may once have been intended to protect the individual - although historically that seems dubious - but when it costs about 150 times as much to bring a libel suit in this country as it does in the rest of Europe, and there's no legal aid available -  it does look suspiciously like a law only for the benefit of the  rich.

Orwell anniversary

There's a piece over at Poumista today to mark the anniversary of George Orwell being shot on this day in 1937 whilst serving with the militias in the Spanish Civil War. 

I vividly remember discovering at the age of sixteen a copy of Homage To Catalonia in the most unlikely of places - the library of my Catholic school. I took it out again and again and re-read it many times over.

I'm not sure why - probably the teenage romantic notion of being a revolutionary  - but it had a profond affect on me that has stayed ever since.

However it goes no way at all to explaining why I should ever have concluded that it was a good idea to join the YCL at the age of 18. Fortunately it only took my six months to realise what a fucking dumb idea that was ...

Why double jeopardy matters

I would not have been at all troubled if  summary justice had  been meted out at the time  to this racist gang in some darkened alley in South East London. So why do I feel squeamish that in the case of one of them - Gary Dosbon - the legislation of 2003 has been used to  revoke the ancient common law principle of double jeopardy  so he can be tried again for a crime for which he was previously found not guilty ?

Some sentimental twaddle has been written about a cornerstone of 'our' justice system by those whose heart is in the right place but whose grasp of history is wanting. Freedom in this country - or any other - has not been guaranteed by legal principles. Yes - double jeopardy was meant to give the individual protection from persecution by a state that without it could manipulate evidence and juries until it  secured the desired conviction. But throughout history arbitrary imprisonment and punishment by the state has managed to go unchecked because - and no apologies for  getting a bit  doctrinaire here -  the state does not exist separate and apart from politics and class conflict.

I've even seen some things written on this case that evoke Magna Carta. A basic understanding of the thirteenth century would tell you that this much misrepresented document  was the product of the fragile balance in the struggle between the feudal class and the emerging centralised  state represented by the crown-  and nothing to do with a concept of universal human rights superimposed centuries later. In fact significantly Magna Carta only really entered the popular consciousness in the seventeenth century when it was dug out of obscurity and used to give legitimacy to another struggle against another arbitrary and repressive state - the Stuart monarchy. In otherwords it was politics - and specifically the  radical popular movements of the English Civil War -  that linked universal freedoms with legal principles.

But my squeamishness about double jeopardy isn't based on any notions of  'ancient principles' - it's very practical.

Quite simply allowing the state the possibility of a second-bite for a conviction actually facilitates and perpetuates the kind of incompetent and corrupt police investigation and prosecution seen at the time of the Stephen Lawrence murder. And anything that lowers the bar on the already plummeting standards of justice is a real threat to all of us.

The new class warriors.

So Toby-fucking-Young (as he is not so affectionately known in my house) could only summon up three hundred or so of his mates from Notting Hill for the laughable 'March against debt'. Good riddance. Although it's tempting to wish for some unattributable disaster that would not have backfired on the perpetrators  to have wiped out this bunch of wankers - a damp squib is probably their best epitaph.  

This  mob who have misappropriated the label 'libertarian'  are  the same chinless wonders of the Federation of Confederation Students in the 1980's  - only now they've grown balder, fatter and more be-mortgaged. Back then they wanted to legalise heroin and hang Nelson Mandela as a terrorist - now they say the world capitalist crisis is the result of a feckless and greedy working class grown flabby on the welfare state. They thrive on the shock value of supposedly saying the unsay able - so for once I'm inclined to agree that ignoring them is the best way of attacking them.

But - their cer-wazy ideas do actually have a little more traction amongst a constituency within the middle classes with a smug consensus that 'something needs to be done about debt' and that cuts are necessary. Until of course their children's drama group is  closed down or their parks and libraries shut and sold off. Most of all these people believe that society has become infected with the poison of debt and greed. 

However, this supposed infection only applies to the materialistic white-van-man who has a mortgage for his home on a new-build estate, or maybe a loan for a car or a holiday. And of course those unemployed and unwashed who are actually dependent upon state benefits  are even worse  and have completely lost their moral compass. It's obviously a completely different matter  if you have to borrow money to buy up and renovate  a period home in a decaying urban area that is on the up. Or  if you take out a loan to finance a sabbatical year whilst you give up work so that you can start that little  bijou-business that you wanted all along before you ever got on the corporate ladder ... Cunts.

Running on empty at the moment

Recently posts may have been a bit slow and uninspired - I’ve been fretting over posting something as personal as this. But given some of the inconsequential crap that has often been the basis for my posts, not writing something here about a subject so important seems somehow dishonest and disrespectful - apologies if it is uncomfortable to read:

My Easter bank holiday was – and I can’t think of any other way of putting this – a fucking nightmare. My mum, in her 80’s, housebound with chronic arthritis for the past 18months and cared for by my dad,  rapidly developed some mental problems over the course of a couple of weeks.  So I went over to see them  - and made a decision that my dad simply couldn’t cope anymore. We called an ambulance and she was carried out screaming  - possibly the last time she will ever leave her home. After a weekend spent in the observation ward attached to the A&E department – during which various doctors argued about whose responsibility she was – she was finally admitted to a specialist geriatric psych unit.  

That was getting on for three weeks ago and she is still there for assessment – we haven’t been told yet if it is depression, delirium or dementia or what we can expect to happen. But I have experienced an insidious shift towards acceptance of a situation that a month ago was unthinkable. Occasionally this is interrupted by hope I can ‘get her back’ - but more often by guilt that I have come to terms with the fact that I won’t.

When I see her she is by turns subdued, angry, frightened, depressed, delusional and aggressive. Whatever she is – she is not is the person that I knew:  The mother and wife. The woman with a passion for life and fun and an intense sense of justice,  - strong-willed and independent.  A career woman before her time, she left school at 16 to work as a lab technician in wartime and went on to train as a school teacher in the pioneering days of comprehensive schools and special needs (or remedial as it was then) education … and I’m already writing this as an obituary because it’s hard to believe that that person is still there.  

As an unswerving atheist I often find that the writings of Marcus Aurelius are a source of humanist comfort and wisdom. Not so when I remember how he identified the ‘self’:  ‘A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself’… and by implication when that has gone, what is left?

I just can't help hating the LibDems

I have to confess to a not-entirely-irrational hatred of Liberal Democrats. Despite boycotting the AV referendum myself I can't help but take  pleasure from the shit they undoubtedly now find themselves in. There's dangers in this of course - it's a distraction from the real bastards in the organ grinder / monkey coalition - and getting sucked into the nuances of the inner workings of that can come close to a kind of 'parliamnetary cretenism'. 

Nonetheless I'm still rejoicing at the LibDems discomfort - maybe it's a local thing. My area was one of  the very few in the country to show a majority for AV. 

There's an invisible Berlin Wall that bisects my home borough of Haringey: To the west angst-ridden middle classes and a LibDem MP  - and to the east a poverty-stricken ethnically-diverse working class seemingly stuck with a Labour MP presumably until the dwindling turnout reduces to nothing.   In reality these  chattering classes to the west have the same politics and NIMBY-ism of any old-fashioned Tory from the shires - but they read the Guardian instead of the Telegraph, and derive their over-valued incomes from the media and the arts rather than anything as vulgar as business. Maybe they were daringly left-wing in their student days - now they can salve their consciences that they haven't altogether sold out to the Right by being 'progressive and liberal'. Are they're genuine in this or is it just sanctimonious hypocrisy that stops them from being proper Tories?  Who cares? 

If they ever were 'progressive' they must be feeling pretty shitty these days in having facilitated this vicious austerity government coming to power. So now they're lobbying to save their precious arts funding or their particular local services - which apparently unlike everyone elses' are especially precious. The one lifeline of self-justification they could cling on to was that they were securing some democratic reform that might just be worth the price that the rest of us were having to pay. Now that's blown up in their face and we are facing the possible political death of the LibDems for another generation. 

Good. Wankers. Next...

King William - bloody good bloke & reactionary bastard. A prequel.

One of the more odious  aspects of the royal wedding circus was the re-cycling of the Ladybird 'king and queens of England' school of history. So much so that the BBC's Robert Preston has got in to trouble for tweeting that the collective noun for the constitutional studio pundits - including Andrew Roberts and Simon Schama - was 'a lick-spittle'.

There haven't been a lot of previous royal Williams - the first one (the 'conqueror' or the 'bastard')  was a thuggish warlord who ruthlessly introduced feudalism and imported a whole new ruling class. The second was a footnote who got himself killed in a hunting accident at an early age. And the third was the first 'constitutional' monarch whose reign marks the historical compromise between the capitalist and land-owning ruling classes that characterises the modern British state. 

The fourth one is often eclipsed by the reign of his niece Queen Victoria whose reign came to personify the high water mark of British capitalism and imperialism. But actually William IV or 'Sailor Bill' provides some interesting possible parallels with the future King Wills.

William IV came to power when the royal family were pretty low in public esteem. His elder brother - first as Prince Regent and then as George IV - had  made himself unpopular as a profligate glutton and serial-shagger at a time of growing radicalism and widespread hardship. By contrast William was a modest character. His coronation cost the state only a tenth of his brother's ten years earlier. As a younger son he had previously had  a frustrated career of sorts in the Royal Navy and enjoyed nothing more than dressing up in his admiral's uniform and messing about in boats.  In comparison to the  extravagence of his extrovert brother he lived modestly with his long term mistress and even went on incognito 'walk-abouts' around the country. From a style point of view if nothing else, he was arguably the first 'modern' monarch who derived his legitimacy from his subjects (at least the middle class ones) identifying him with their own lifestyles.

But beneath this cloak of 'bloody-good-bloke-ishness' that beat the heart of a reactionary old bastard every bit the equal  of his predecessors. As a younger son and royal duke he had sat in the house of lords and made a name for himself as a champion against the abolition of the slave trade. As king, after initially supporting the reforming Whigs, he did his best to obstruct their 1832 Reform Bill that would have enfrainchised a section of the middle class. When the reformers went to the polls to get a mandate, he ignored their victory and tried to impose a minority prime minister - the arch-reactionary Duke Of Wellington. Forced to back down from constitutional crisis and a potentially revolutionary situation, William eventually had to accept the reformers. But two years later he imposed a minority Tory government on the country despite there being a clear Whig majority in parliament.

But as Tony Benn would say, it's about politics not personalities. 

It doesn't matter if the monarch captures the popular mood with a blokey style - and 'WillsandKate' seem determined to project a more modern and accessible image than the old-fogeys of the Charles and Camila generation - the institution still serves the same purpose in class society as it has always done. A panic lever for the ruling class to pull when things get a bit sticky in the hurly-burly world of real politics.

To AV or not AV ?

I've just taken the AV quiz on the Guardian website and apparently the conclusion drawn from my answers is:

You scored 52 out of a possible 85: A tactical voter or frustrated voter perhaps? You appear to want a different electoral system, and maybe the alternative vote is the one for you.

Obviously they don't have a method for computing a more accurate analysis of my motives:

You scored 52 out of a possible 85: A socialist who thinks that elections are as much about raising political consciousness as they are about the  actual result - regardless of which, the prospects of meaningful change are limited  so long as the system remains a capitalist one.  You want a different political system but regard dicking around with how we vote as nothing more than re-positioning deck chairs on the Titanic.

'Some day our prince will come' ?

Like many other sane people I'm groaning under the weight of the media frenzy surrounding the marriage of William Windsor and Kate Middleton.

I find myself reaching for the calendar to remind myself that - yes it is really 2011 and still we are having to endure this monarchic nonsense. But on reflection there is a fairly recent new twist to this reincarnation of the people's princess: 

Previous royal-worshipping has been underpinned by deference and difference. They might display an occasional  condescending/endearing 'common touch' but ultimately the message is that the royals are simply better than the likes of you and me.  This time around though the message is that Kate is actually just like us. You know the sort of thing - her great grand-father was a miner and she's the ultimate girl next door (assuming you live in a fucking big house in Berkshire). 

Consequently her social trajectory is being portrayed as the ultimate evidence of an open society and the fulfilment of  some sort of American dream played in tweed and pearls.

In different ways the issue of social mobility has popped up in a few recent posts. In particular how  the most meaningful vehicle for social mobility - universally accessible free education to the highest level the individual is capable of attaining - is now being denied.  

In that context the whole  Middleton-phenomena is quite significant. It draws a line under the meritocratic mythology of the post-war boom - of working class boys done good through their own efforts and abilities - whether it was the grammar school technocrats of the Wilson era or  the cheeky geezers of swinging London. In it's place we have a return to the Cinderella story of the poor working  girl who becomes a princess.  

Of course having aspirational parents who own a successful business, a £1 million property in the shires, and being hockey captain at £30,000 a year Marlborogh College does give a girl a bit of a head start...

Clerkenwell crafts - nostalgia and melancholy

A really nice glimpse into a world of craftsmanship in Clerkenwell  today over at one of my favourite blogs.

My first job 'in the print' was in Clerkenwell. When I describe it to people now I am conscious that it sounds like something from the 1500's - in fact it was only the late '80s. I was  a production junior in pre press - having done a short course at the then London College of Printing - it was a backdoor route into the trade and the possession of that precious union card at a time when four year appenticeships were the norm and graduates virtually unheard of.

The first couple of years I spent in a small trade house was a fantastic education. My duties were general dogs-bodying around the studio and no small part of this was being a runner dropping off and collecting work around the small concentrated area of tenement-style buildings behind the Clerkenwell Road . These buildings were a warren of small businesses often with only half a dozen guys occupying  a single room and  engaged in  some very specific operation in the spectrum of arcane crafts that made up the 'print'. We were a lithographic planning/plate-making house - and that was all we did - so  a typical project would require me to scuttle back and forth from  the scanning house around the corner, the cromalin company next door, the wet proofers in the basement and the typesetters at the end of the street.

Thinking about it now I have no idea of how costs were recorded or even who was working for who - the client / supplier relationship would oscillate between different projects - often several times a day. It wasn't really clear either who was the management - most of the businesses were owned by one or two working managers who themselves were hands-on or 'on the bench'. Everybody seemed to have worked with - or for - everyone else at some point. And everyone of course was in 'the union'. In fact the union acted as part HR department and part recruitment agency - the officials were usually of the same generation as the working owners and they colluded in  placing their old mates in the best jobs. This was the age of the 'green list' and 'white card' when vacancies in other houses were only advertised by the union, from which you had to get a permission slip in order to go for an interview - to be presented to the Father Of Chapel before you spoke to  a prospective employer.

I'm almost getting dewy-eyed as I type all this - but of course the reality was a far cry from some sort of workers-controlled halcyon age. The system was rife was nepotism and corruption and a self-perpetuated  clique that kept out outsiders - particularly women and minorities - and a culture of bullying apprentices / juniors was almost institutionalised. But for centuries it created a layer of affluent skilled workers who took immense pride in what they did and didn't take too much shit from anyone. I feel privileged to have been a small part of that world for the last decade of its existence. By the mid '90s Thatcher, Murdoch and the Apple Mac had effectively killed it off. Some of us are still going having reinvented ourselves several times over in a digital age and shrouded ourselves in the bullshit of the 'creative industries'.

I suppose we are still a privileged little world - as working environments go it is probably better than most and a damn site better than the service industries and soulless white-collar jobs that nowadays  are the norm. But I can't helping thinking that nearly all those things that first drew me to it are now a part of history. And whilst there might be a whole lot of  renewal currently going on in  Clerkenwell, I did notice the other week  that the workshop where my first company was is now a gastro-bar packed with media-lovies...

War by other means

The anniversary of the first man in space - Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - is being celebrated not just by nostalgic  Stalinists but also in some unlikely places - with praise for Gagarin's proletarian origins or with wonder at the achievements of a 'planned ecomony'(albeit in a deformed workers' state).

But I just can't bring myself to join in this romantic view of the desire to 'boldy  go where no man has gone before'. Because you can't separate space exploration from the political context any more than you can detach adventures in the  exploration of the 'dark continet' from the brutality of the race for empire. As imperialism goes it doesn't get much more distasteful that the cold-war-by-other-means that was represented by the space race - culminating in the ultimate absurdity of sticking the stars and stripes in the moons surface and then going home again.

The thought that this represented some sort of pinnacle of  human achievement when at the same time as it was rushing to the stars, the Soviet Union was sending its own people to the gulags - or  the United States was busy  bombing an impoverished ex-colonial nation 'back into the stone age' -  is all rather obscene. 

As far as Yuri Gagarin  himself goes - by all accounts was a lovely chap from humble origins - but at the risk of repeating previous posts I'm afraid social mobility is no more evidence of social progress in space than it is here on earth.

Young bullshit detectors

Owing no doubt to the large number of evangelical churches in my neck of the woods I have come  to accept the sight of people wandering around the streets clutching bibles like security blankets. 

Stepping back for a moment this is actually quite bizarre. I mean  they can't all be on their way to and from church and I can't imagine many real life scenarios in North London which require instant access to the surreal guidance of a holy book. To be fair though may be I underestimate the practicality of some of the seemingly crazy-shit advice such as this gem from Deuteronomy: 'If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity'.

It says something about my reaction to my own religious background that -  in a house groaning under the weight of books - until last week we didn't have a copy of the bible. 

Unlike myself, my kids have been brought up as freethinkers (and I use that old-fashioned term intentionally). So when my eldest asked if she could have a bible I didn't feel too concerned or threatened - she is of that age now when some of her friends are 'finding' religion and was just intrigued to check out what the attraction was.  Ironically through her friends she was probably better informed about Islam than she was about Christianity. So last time I visited my parents I borrowed on her behalf one of their several bibles (approved Catholic versions of course). 

A week later  I'm very happy to report that her independent findings are that from a historical, logical and ethical point of view the bible is every bit as nonsensical as I concluded myself at a similar age. In fact whilst I may have attuned my expectations to my environment she is stunned and outraged that so much dangerous and reactionary rubbish is treated with so much respect.

The revelation that 'religion is nonsense' is hardly an original topic for a blog post - but these days as a parent I set great store in trying to view things through the eyes of a young mind untainted by forty years of 'experience'. Sometimes it opens your eyes and makes you question some long held assumptions  - and just occasionally it reassures you of some fundamental truths that are worth be reminded of.

Is it ironic or just taking the piss?

We already know from  his outrageous lying and betrayal of  angst-ridden liberal Middle-England fretting over tuition fees that Nick Clegg has no sense of shame. Now in taking on the role of the government's champion of social mobility he  shows he has no sense of irony either.

You have to question just what PR genius came up with the idea of putting a toff  - with a few Russian aristocrats in his family tree who got his first career break when old-man got him an internship at a merchant bank and  who got into politics via the European Commission gravy train with the help of family neighbour Lord Carrington - in charge of social mobility. Even some hard-nosed mean spirited lower-middle class  type from the provinces (remember a certain  shopkeeper's daughter ?) would have had a bit more credibility.

I've said before that social mobility isn't all it's cracked up to be. And the obsession with getting 'ordinary' kids to Oxbridge as an index of this mobility (and take this from one such kid)  is hardly representative of a fairer society. BUT a lack of this mobility , or declining mobility such as we have nowadays, is conversely a pretty good indicator of a society that is choking on privilege and inequality.

And putting the bloke who probably more than any other in the ConDems personifies the shitting on the aspirations of working class kids - with the removal of EMA and increased university fees - just looks like gloating.

In-fighting: actual & political

Like most people I live my life in neat compartments. In my case they correspond to the sub-headings of this blog. Once in a while one of these will spill into another:

My chosen martial art of Wing Chun has a pretty bad rep these days. Thirty years ago it was the bad-ass of the martial arts world. Partly this is a question of fashion - Karate exploded in the west in the sixties then in the seventies Wing Chun was the enfant terrible. The original  style of Bruce Lee  that by-passed the stylised formality and choreography  of traditional Karate and replaced it with the simple practicality of Hong Kong street fighting. Then along came along Brazilian Ju Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts - the new kids on the block that made everything that went before look staid and unrealistic. Of course none of this is, or has ever been, true or does justice to any of these arts but always  in fashion perception is everything.

And the Wing Chun world imploded. We lacked the discipline and structure of the Japanese and Korean styles, which were also reinforced by the need for governing bodies for their sporting aspects, and we turned in on ourselves. Rival schools and lineages engage in wars of words - and less frequently of fists – trying to prove they are purer/more authentic / more effective than each other.  Some of this is just simple commercial rivalry – and some of it is born of a sense of inadequacy. Go online and have a look at any Wing Chun forum - it is a depressing minefield of infantile bitching and macho posturing. 

So sadly the style that I love and have practiced now for over 20 years is in some respects now frankly something of an embarrassment in the wider martial arts community.  But that doesn’t make we want to give up or change to another style - although it does make me less mindlessly loyal to my own tribe and a bit more reflective and respectful of other lineages, styles and traditions. Funnily enough talk to most mature practitioners of any martial art and you’ll often find the same. Maybe it’s because if you’re confident in what you doing, tolerance and open-mindedness isn’t a betrayal of your tradition.

And there’s an inescapable parallel to be drawn with the politics of the Left …