What do they know of cricket who only cricket know ?

Proof if ever there was that there are some on the Left who could start a fight in a broom-cupboard: Have a look at the comments on Socialist Unity arguing over ...cricket.

Somewhere along the line the 'my dad's more working class than your's ' card is played - and now  I'm just waiting for the accusation that 20/20 cricket is a form of petit-bourgeois revisionism.

I grew up in a house where cricket was treated with almost religious reverence - interminable test matches watched on telly with the sound off and the radio on. Unsurprisingly, and notwithstanding CLR James'  inspirational marrying of cricket with libertarian-marxism - I grew up loathing the sport.

In fact I developed a rule of thumb that if it doesn't involve blood or sweat (or better still both) then it probably isn't a sport at all. So that rules out curling, darts and synchronised swimming. And before anyone jumps down my throat with a worthy exception to prove the rule I'll concede that it's just a working hypothesis. BUT STILL: I'm quite prepared to acknowledge that the generous  behaviour of the Indian team in the second test this weekend was something really rather wonderful.

Now can we just leave it ?

1945 - Labour's missed opportunity

I've got another guest slot over at 'On This Deity' today. 

Another anniversary of a great radical 'alomost might  have been' moment. And a sort of an epitaph for an increasingly extinct species.

It's the Mail wot done it

One trouble with Murdoch-gate is that it can distract us from just how fucking horrific the rest of our tabloid press is. Whether it is the opiate cocktail  of celebrities and tits - or just downright reactionary lies that fuel racial hatred and division. A special place  is held by  the small minded spitefulness of middle class middle England that is personified by the Mail

Getting wound up by that hateful rag is an exercise in futility.  So I don't usually bother. But the Mail is given out as freebie in quite  a number of places - including my gym. And sitting in the sauna I am something of a captive audience.

So on Saturday morning I sat there relaxing after my workout reading how the horrific attacks in Norway were the work of an Islamo-mentalist group called the 'Friends Of Islamic Jihad'. There were several pages of authoritative commentary from various historians and sociologists about how the overly-liberal multicultural societies of Scandinavia were doomed to tragedy as  deranged immigrants were bound to bite the hand that fed them. And this - it was implied - should serve as a warning to all of us.

Of course roughly by lunchtime it was clear that this was all complete bollocks. 

The perpetrator of this atrocity was not some swarthy incomer, but an extremely Aryan-looking conservative patriot. And a fundamentalist Christian too - who fancied linking up with our own homegrown EDL. 

So against my better judgement, the following morning  I had to look at the Mail On Sunday: I scoured it for a retraction or apology - but found none. Only that Anders Behring Breivik was being reported as a lone nutter with a background that was unfortunately 'arch-conservative'. And no mention of course that his hate-fueled agenda bore more than a passing resemblance to the kind of reactionary shit the Mail has been pumping out for years.

Print's not dead

More and more I seem to find myself an analogue Luddite in an increasingly digital world: I like old-fashioned air cooled v-twin engines - and the smell of ink on paper in the morning.

Sometime ago my alma-mater, The London College of Printing blandly re-branded itself as the London College of Communication. Now I see that one of the industry's newsletters - Design Week - has stopped publishing a print version and is only available online.

This depresses me on a number of levels. Despite wasting a lot of my time reading (and writing) stuff on screen  I really do love the tactile and sensory experience of ink on paper. I celebrate the craftsmanship of understanding the manual processes behind design - and I had some of my happiest times fiddling about with hot-metal setting at college.

But this 'digital' obsession reflects the narrow elitism of a media world that is firmly up its own arse. 98% of the UK population don't own a tablet device let alone an I-Pad, two-thirds of the country don't own a smart-phone and a quarter of households don't even have an internet connection. And that's national - if you look at statistics for impoverished areas  like the North-East you'll find that the digital stats drop alarmingly.

As a kid growing up in the 70's I remember being fed images of the year 2000 where we would all be wearing silver jump suits, commuting to work on our own personal hovercrafts and eating our meals in tablet form. Thankfully that all  proved to be bollocks  - and so I suspect is the predicted death of print. As it first was in the sixteenth century, the printed form stills represents the most universally accessible means of communication. Just ask anyone with any sort of political involvement - what's the first thing we all do  - in almost any circumstance -  produce a leaflet.

And here's another thought: As an I-Book, I-Phone user who works in a graphic studio in Soho I suppose I have to acknowledge that I could be seen as a card-carrying  'meedja-wanka'. But I can't help noticing with some ironic satisfaction that the signature object of desire for so many of my fellow meedja-wankas is that most basic of technologies - the fixed gear bicycle. They wax lyrical about the purity of its unity of form and function - I wish they'd apply the same logic to print.

Are they really all in it together ?

I'm naturally cynical about conspiracy theories. Bizarre and brutal behaviour by the ruling class can just as easily be ascribed to shared greed, mutual self-interest and a degree of bungling as it can to the global machinations of the modern Illuminati.

But ... Jesus Christ. You literally couldn't make this shit up: 

Police commissioners resigning. Newspaper executives arrested. Whistle-blowing journalists dying mysteriously. And a web of entanglements that connects big business, politicians and the forces of the state. Is fresh-faced toff David Cameron a naive victim witlessly implicated in this web of corruption and deceit ? Or is he the evil genius at the very heart of it assisted with his comedy side-kick Boris ? And of course we have the double act of damsel-in-distresss Sienna Miller and  quintessential Englishman Hugh Grant as the crusading hero of the hour to save the day. 

What are  those movie rights worth ?

Bullshit brand ethics

I have a battered old NGA 'Don't Buy The Times, Sun, News Of The World' mug on a shelf at eye level in my workshop. I'm reminded of the Wapping dispute every time I park up my bikes - and I never have brought one of Murdoch's scabby rags. 

So I want to rejoice over  the hacking-gate saga - the closure of NOW, bent coppers and now the apparent denial of Murdoch's attempt to control the airwaves too - it's the perfect shit-storm. But I'm afraid this isn't some victory of people power - it's a triumph of the bullshit of supposed 'corporate ethics'.

Some of the marketing wankers I have as clients refer without batting an eyelid to their brands' ethical capital. In their strange fucked-up world the perceived morality of their companies is an asset like any other. I'm sure business text books have been written on this but you can quickly get the idea -  fair trade organic coffee = good, oil drilling and refining = bad.  In an indirect way it acknowledges the simple fact that those of us who live under capitalism - 'consumers' - are generally not too happy about having the worst excesses of the system rubbed in our noses. So any business that  can mitigate that is on to a good thing.  And that I'm pretty sure is why Ford started the advertising boycott avalanche that led to the NOW's demise. 

With a record of union-busting, funding and co-operating with dictatorial regimes, and of course the notorious Pinto case when they decided that compensation for fatalities made better economic sense than product recalls - the Ford Motor Company has not historically been on some sort of moral crusade. 

But in positioning itself as the corporation that takes the moral high ground it effectively wrong foots all the others: Which car manufacturer wants to then be branded as the one who isn't sympathetic to the family of a murdered child ?  The positive PR is fantastic - and so much cheaper than taking out those pages of advertising space.

An inadequate obituary

After what can only be described as a horrific past three months, my mum slipped away in the small hours of Wednesday morning. Although we've had a long time to get our heads around this, and although the way she finally died was in the circumstances probably the best outcome we could have hoped for - nothing really ever prepares you for your mum dying, or in my dad's case - your partner of almost 50 years.

In the future sometime - once I've worked out what exactly they are -  I'll probably write something about my feelings. But right now the best I can do is to repeat the potted biography that I have had to write up for her funeral. Admittedly it's a pretty inadequate way of summing up someone's life - it doesn't even touch the important things that defined her as a wife, mother and grandmother - her love of life, her sense of fun and her passion for fairness and justice ... or cricket or teddy bears. 

But I still think it's worth saying anyway - the cruelest aspect of dementia is how it  robs a person of their own identity so that even their loved ones can struggle to remember the person who once occupied those same frail flesh and bones:

Jo  was born  in Surrey in 1927 to a family that joked that Thames river water not blood ran through their veins. There are records of the Browns as watermen and lightermen in Richmond-Upon-Thames dating back to the middle of the eighteenth century. By time that she was born,  the river  trade and the family boatyard were struggling so when her father  finished his apprenticeship he broke with tradition but maintained the river connection by becoming a Thames river policeman.  In her childhood Jo moved around various parts of London following her father's postings. By the outbreak of the war he was stationed at Wapping and the family lived in the East End throughout the  nightly bombing of the blitz. Jo left school at 16 and started work as a technician testing optics for the Admiralty at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.  

After the war she moved with her family to Germany.  Her father  was promoted and posted there to help re-organise the Rhineland Waterways Police as part of post-war de-nazification.  It was there that she helped out at the schools on the British bases, and so sparked her life long passion for education.

Returning to England she studied for her  teaching diploma  at Birmingham University and then went on to  take up her first position in Portsmouth at a boarding school for the children of naval personnel. Returning to London she worked  in Putney at one of the country's first  Comprehensive schools, and started to specialise in the pioneering field of special needs education - or 'remedial teaching' as it was then known.

For a while she took a break from this demanding work when  when she became one of the first woman instructors for IBM.  At around this  time she met her husband  - John. They were married in 1963 and settled in Staines, where two years later  I was born. When I  was old enough Jo returned to work and taught in a number of schools in the  area.  It was at this time that her concern for  education  led to her becoming actively involved in the National Union Of Teachers and the Labour Party. 

This activism  continued after she and John moved to Kent in 1991 following the relocation of his work there,  and Jo continued teaching well into her sixties as a supply teacher at several local primary schools.  Following her eventual retirement she continued to be very active in the community as a school governor and town councillor in Greenhithe and Swanscombe -  often working as a double act alongside John. She continued in these roles until chronic arthritis made it impossible for her to carry on. After two years of being house-bound, three months ago she suffered a very rapid mental decline - from both depression and dementia. Two weeks ago it was clear that she had literally given up the will to live and slowly slipped away from us...

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.