Music. Martial Arts. Being renaissance men (and women)

As a parent, it’s very easy to fall into being overly protective in defense of your offspring in all the small battles that life brings. In our house one such battle has been with my eldest’s piano teacher – who feels that she isn’t showing enough commitment and has vented his frustration by telling her to find another teacher. (For fuck’s sake !) But in this case the battle points to something bigger that is a particular pet-subject for me.

She’s not one of those kids who are dragged by the ear to music lessons. She’s very into her music – of all kinds – and is constantly messing around and jamming on her own and with friends. But she is also a normal teenager with a life - and all the conflicting distractions that brings. The sort of distractions that get in the way when it comes to developing into some sort of nauseating child–prodigy. Thank fuck for that. But apparently such is the preciousness surrounding the whole piano-lessons thing that unless you are just such a one-dimensional prodigy, the view seems to be that it is not worth bothering at all.

I’ve often found exactly the same attitude in martial arts. If you are not interested in transforming yourself into the ultimate fighter or something like a secular Shaolin monk then you’re wasting your time*.

Personally I think this attitude stinks: It’s our hobbies and our interests that should define us – not our work. And having a well-rounded and broad spectrum of these interests tends to make for well-rounded individuals. There’s a myth that happiness lies in doing one thing well - that might play in a Zen fairy tale but I believe that in real life doing lots of things to varying degrees of attainment is more likely to keep you sane.

Part of the problem is that in many fields the teacher isn’t exactly a well-rounded individual themselves. If they weren’t ever a normal teenager themselves how are they now going to relate to pupils who are? Or if they don’t have to juggle work and family with their training how are they going to understand students who do?

More fundamentally, it’s a feature of our times that we are rapidly becoming spectators rather than do-ers. Once it was the norm rather than the exception to find musical instruments in the home – the rot probably started when people began to listen to the wireless. Once a man would no more leave the house without bearing some sort of weapon than he would walk around naked – that declined when we became ‘civilized’ with police forces. If you wanted to put an academic label on it you could say that it is a process of alienation.

So I'm making a plea to reverse this trend and try and get back to the idea of being renaissance men (and women). Maybe not superstars in any given field but having a go - and having fun trying. And in the meantime we’re trying to find another piano teacher.

*(As an aside the whole temple based warrior-monks thing is only one aspect of how martial arts developed. Equally important were the village schools, where a teacher, who practiced a trade to make his living, taught students in their spare time. The equivalent in the West was the yeomen longbowmen who would practice archery and other English martial arts like quarterstaff and wrestling after a day’s work. And incidentally they eventually triumphed over the full-time warriors of the knightly class).

The real 'king'

He's wasn't the messiah. He wasn't even the 'king'.

Michael Jackson was a consummate entertainer with a great commercial sense for the MTV generation. And that's it.

Despite the whole 'king' thing, and the Graceland/Neverland echoes: comparisons with Elvis are entirely false. Elvis really did create a fusion of black and white musical genres that changed a generation and everything that came after. Jackson had some catchy tunes, some slick dance moves and took advantage of being in the right time and place when the music video revolution took off.

Despite the hideous Vegas years, the faux-karate and the deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches Elvis was never as damaged or as damaging as Jacko. He just had the predictable problems of a boy who went from abject poverty to superstardom. Nothing like the elephants in Jacko's corner that nobody is mentioning today - the dysmorphia that led him to re-create himself as a badly drawn manga-caricature ... or the paedophilia (allegedly of course).

Stress relief in the garage

Things are not going well at work. From a distance you would think that climbing the greasy management pole would give you more freedom. Maybe it does if you are prepared to act like a cunt. But in my experience, if you try to approach it with a modicum of decency it just buys you entry into a world of responsibilities, worries and guilt. And then more guilt that you’re feeling that way when so many others are worse off than you.

In such circumstances, and especially with one eye on my blood pressure these days, I try to find ways of managing the stress.

Over the years my number one option for this has always been my martial arts. Not so much in the sense that it is an outlet for aggression. Because it isn’t really – anyone with the slightest knowledge will tell you that to fight angry is a fatal. My teacher used to always say when we were playing chi-sau ‘the one who gets pissed off first loses’. Martial arts works for me much the same way as sitting by a lake with a fishing rod works for some guys or building model train sets does for others – you lose yourself in something for a few hours.

Much as I love all things bike-related, previously doing any sort of work on them was more often a cause of stress than stress-relief.

I’m no more or less mechanical than the next guy but my undoing was always impatience. Made far worse by frustration that every mechanical set back was keeping me without a bike and off the road – which for me is like a junkie being denied his drug of choice. At one time I had a collection of punched-in petrol tanks, and an exhaust muffler flattened to a pancake in a Basil Fawlty moment of rage, to testify to this frustration.

Now I have two bikes all this pressure has gone.

All of which is a preamble to saying that after another shitty day at work I found myself in the garage last night actually enjoying working on the bike. I swapped the 70’s style buck-horns for a set of low bars. I re-routed the wiring and cables, and I fitted a braided brake line. All done in about an hour. I then spent another hour last night and yet another half hour this morning trying to bleed the fucking system. But that's two and a half hours absolutely business-bullshit free. And I’ve still got to pop out from work at some point to get another bottle of DOT5. Perversely for once I am actually relishing the hassle.

Race mobs in N.Ireland

The election of two BNP MEP’s created shock waves and much analysing and hand-wringing. More shocking, and may be of more significance, are the incredible scenes from Northern Ireland where 100 Romanians have been driven out of their homes by racist mobs in a series of attacks over the past week.

The two events are intrinsically linked. Not because the racist mobs included BNP members. Or loyalist paramilitaries or C18 ‘race-soldiers’. Of course they may have, but they equally may well have not. The link is a common climate of a growing nasty and vicious nationalism – a culture feeding on economic deprivation and a silence from the Left.

A return of the Far Right in this country doesn’t have to look like the 1930’s with black-shirt parades in the streets. If you want to picture a dis-utopian precedent I would suggest Vichy France and Petain’s ‘National Revolution’. Obviously set aside military defeat and the armistice of 1940, but keep the phenomenon of petty minded bigots, racists and reactionaries finding an excuse to crawl out of the woodwork. There were some Nazi sympathisers in the Vichy regime, but it didn’t need them to hand over Jews, gypsies and political undesirables for transportation to the camps at a rate that often outdid that of the Wehrmacht in the occupied zone of France. There were enough petty minded officials and individuals with grudge built up for years who were willing to denounce their neighbours .

Recorded hate crimes in Northern Ireland have more than doubled in the past four years. And the latest attacks on Romanians follow a series of others on Poles and Slovakians in recent months. There’s been some suggestions that Northern Ireland is uniquely pre-disposed to xenophobia and has a ‘tradition’ of hate violence. I don’t believe this – I suspect we may well see the same thing going on in cities on the mainland this summer.

And then we may wake up to the fact that the electoral success of the BNP and even more so the gains of a populist nationalist and anti-immigration party in the shape of UKIP, are not just a protest at mainstream MP’s sleaze. There is a very real danger from a festering reactionary nationalism which will only gain momentum if alternatives are not posed.

Roadtrip revisited.

Almost exactly to the year – I decided to take a few days off for a road trip again.

A couple of days with some friends who have abandoned life in the city for a smallholding-come-Harley-workshop in the fens. On the face of it a 250+ mile round trip is a long way to go for a bike service. But they are some of the nicest people you could wish to meet and there’s nobody else I would rather have working on my bikes.

Their lifestyle would not be for everyone – it’s not quite self-sufficiency but it’s not too far off, with a bit of barter with the neighbours thrown in, and some localized wage labour here and there too. There’s a lack of security and routine, and they’re never away from their work but - as I thought when I rode in this morning on the same route that I’ve taken for almost 20 years - there’s also no commuting and no corporate bullshit.

It’s actually a very old fashioned way of living and would be recognizable – if you substituted maybe a blacksmith’s forge for a Harley workshop – to our ancestors for many centuries.

So it was appropriate that on my very roundabout journey home I took a detour to visit Grimes Graves. The only visit-able Neolithic flint mines in Europe. Flint was as important to the stone age economy as oil is to our own. And for these early miners to sink shafts into the hillside must have been a terrifying step into the unknown – the equivalent to astronauts in modern times.

The hillside is a rabbit warren of shafts and galleries – only one of which can be visited after a 35-foot descent on a vertical ladder. From the bottom of the shaft you can peer into the radiating galleries – each about three feet high. Even with modern tungsten lighting it’s still claustrophobic and oppressive – and easy to see how our ancestors thought that caves were the gateway to another world.

Support the tube workers

By the reporting of the tube strike you would get the impression that London is a city under siege by the RMT union. Guardian journalists are twittering on their journeys to work , with minute-by-minute accounts as if they were war correspondents on the frontline. This hysteria has certainly had an effect judging by the comments at work today.

But where we work in central London is no more than thirty minutes walk from any of the main London over-ground terminus stations. This, and the over-crowding at the bus-stops means that most people will have had to start their journey to work a bit earlier. In other words, it's an inconvenience not a disaster.

And if anyone thinks it’s all too easy for me who commutes on a motorcycle each day to say this, I was inconvenienced too this morning – I had to get up at the crack of dawn to go down to the local RMT picket line at 7am to offer my support.

The media demonizing of the tube workers has undoubtedly taken an effect. Many Londoners seem to see the strike as a personal affront. Quite part from the negative press campaigns, there is an economic basis to this. There’s a huge gulf now between unionized workers in the public sector – and places like my own – with largely un-unionized workers in the private sector. Particularly in small to medium manufacturing businesses. Annual negotiated agreements are unheard of – most of the time we are just pleased to keep going for another month.

Sadly this breeds a very peculiar kind of jealousy. A jealousy that resents a station supervisor earning £38k pa and a driver £40k pa, with decent conditions and overtime – the kind of packages that were once fairly universal for skilled and responsible workers. But strangely this jealousy doesn’t extend to the senior underground management who make in excess of £100k pa along with hefty (and often dubious) ‘performance bonuses’. And this jealousy completely ignores the situation of many more low paid workers on the tube – like the cleaners who only now get £7.45 an hour after winning a dispute for a living wage last year.

It’s a twisted take on the ‘race to the bottom’ with a bizarre sense of pride in leading a race where there are no prizes for the winners.

Significantly in the present recession the seminal socialist classic ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthrophists' has re-entered the best selling lists. With the massive knocks that the labour movement has taken we are almost back to a similar era in which the novel is set, when the basic ideas of class solidarity have to be patiently explained. To get to a point where, when one group - be it tube workers, oil refinery workers or car workers - does manage to secure a better deal than most they are not resented but actually applauded and aspired to.

Fascism In Europe Again

Personally I wasn’t offended when the queen wasn’t invited to the D-Day anniversary functions in Normandy. Why a hereditary tax-dodger should carry any more gravitas than a elected representative escapes me. Even if the elected representative is Gordon-fucking-Brown. And I wasn’t overly offended by Sarkosy’s silly comment that the anniversary was ‘largely a Franco-American’ affair. Politicians are notoriously ignorant and/or manipulative of history. Like Obama’s comment that his uncle was one of the liberators of Auschwitz – highly unlikely unless his uncle was serving in the Red Army at the time.

But I am offended that the anniversary of the start of the liberation of Europe from Fascism should be marked by a 6.6% vote for the BNP and the election for the first time of two MEP’s. Including Andrew Bronn who started his career with the National Socialist Movement (maybe a clue in the name there). And more significantly a 17.5% for UKIP – a Little Englander party with a clear anti-immigration platform.

I know that not all those votes represents a move towards fascism. I know that they are symptomatic of a political and economic crisis, and of a vacuum on the Left. But all that sober reflection and analysis is for another time. Right now I’m just angry with that 6.6%.

Grasshoper

Next to Bruce Lee, he was responsible for bringing Eastern martial arts to a Western audience: And as a kid in the 70’s, watching David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu”, may well have subliminally started off my own journey in the martial arts.

Kids in those days kids were used to their TV action heroes being blue-eyed cowboys and cops, so creating the character of a Buddhist monk who played the flute and tried to avoid violence (but always spectacularly kicked ass) was a breakthrough.

Ironically Bruce Lee was considered and rejected for the part, and a Westerner with no background in the martial arts was cast. Only after the series was made did David Carradine develop a genuine interest in kung fu, although as the owner of one of his laughable instructional tapes I am not sure that he attained any great standard. After Death Race 2000, I then lost track of his career for many years, but he was fantastic when he reappeared in Tarantino's Kill Bill films.

It’s a sad footnote that he should have been found dead in bizarre circumstances ‘a la Michael Hutchence’. Each to their own of course, but I never could understand that particular taste for ‘auto-erotic asphyxiation'. Apart from anything else does it not occur that if it goes wrong you’re going to be stuck with a pretty embarrassing obituary for your grandchildren to read?

And whatever would Master Po have said ?

Election Day

I love elections. I realize that a sober Marxist analysis shows that they are not the be all and end all of democracy. Not even close. But I can’t help myself pouring over polls, looking at little coloured maps, and staying up late for the results with Jon Snow and the swing-ometer.

As a kid I remember being taken by my parents to the polling station at the community centre and waiting whilst they did something incredibly important and grown up. And the thrill of voting for the first time in the disastrous 1983 ‘Falklands’ election. When there was still a proper Labour Party I was an assistant agent for some local council elections and got involved with the archaic business of tellers taking polling numbers, crossing off names on ‘Mikado pads’, knocking up voters and going to the count. And of course canvassing – strangely I enjoyed canvassing. Particularly campaigns when the candidate actually stood for something. Johnny Bryan in Bermondsey – Lesley Mahmood in Liverpool Walton. Dave Nellist in Coventry South East. I got around a bit.

In the (New) Labour stronghold where I now live there is precious little evidence of an election. at the moment. Despite the recession and the current political crisis there has been no canvassing or even leafleting – except for my own rather pathetic contribution to the No2EU campaign. In fact depressingly the most visible evidence of the election is the number of prominent posters for the “Christian Party’.

I voted early today; and at 7.15am the polling station was pretty busy – hopefully that’s a sign of something.

There are no prizes for predicting that there will be a significant protest vote today. Scanning the ridiculously long scroll of a ballot paper I couldn’t help reflecting, again, that No2EU is not a good name. Given that research shows that a disturbing number of protest voters will make their decision on the spot in the voting booth, I worry that a lot of genuine people will end up wasting their votes on the Socialist Labour Party (Scargill egoist-fan club) or the Socialist Party of Great Britain (simply bonkers). So if anyone is reading this and is still in any doubt, go and have a look at No2EU now …

Goodbye to ER

After 15 years, watching the last episode of ER was a must last night. I’m sure I don’t have much to add to the volumes that will doubtlessly be written about the series, but I can’t let its passing go unmentioned.

In the pre-Sopranos era it shocked the complacency of us Brits who felt that our TV was inherently better than anything that came out of the US. Of course since the flood of HBO imports the superiority of these US shows is pretty much undeniable: The Brits may still excel when it comes to comfort viewing – talking bonnets in yet another Jane Austin adaptation - or soporific Middle England coziness like Heartbeat, but just compare ER with the interminable Casualty or Holby City.

ER gave us proper grown-up drama that managed to make something that was intelligent and moving, without being sentimental, out of that most tired of formulas the medical drama. I’m not by nature given to emotional outpourings, but the portrayal of Dr Greene’s drawn out death was one of the most genuinely poignant things I’ve seen on TV and I’m not ashamed to confess to being a little choked even when seeing it again in the retrospective last night.

The Corner

Just finished reading ‘The Corner’. The 600-odd page documentary of a year in the life of a neighborhood in West Baltimore that was the inspiration for ‘The Wire’ is not a light read.

But it should be compulsory reading for anyone who has a say in public policy on drugs. Including the new generation of “I didn’t inhale’ politicians. It paints a picture of a broken society. Not the kind that Cameron and the Tories talk about when they mean the decline of rural post offices, the vandalisation of bus stops or a general lack of respect for our elders and betters. This is really broken – as in completely fucking grim and (almost) entirely hopeless with the whole social and economic structure collapsed.

There’s no equivalent to it here in the UK – even where I live in the inner city. There maybe the odd street (in fact there is - just a couple of blocks from my house) that at certain times of night has aspects of it. In other places there may be certain estates that come close. But despite having one of the highest rates of unemployment – and crime - in the country, in general we are not there. Yet.

But there are some familiar echoes:

In particular, The Corner identifies the plight of the working poor – those people who desperately manage to keep from drowning in West Baltimore - a small and fragile minority who uneasily co-exist with the dope-fiends, the slingers, the dealers and the stick-up artists.

The other day I went to the local health centre for a blood test and witnessed a small taste of this phenomenon:

Needless to say the health centre is over-subscribed and under-resourced. At 8:30am, before it opens there are over 60 people in the waiting area – we take tickets from a machine to give us a number. There's a fair cross section of every social (and medical) problem imaginable gathered together in one room. In the background, staff are continually yelling at patients. And patients yelling at staff: The records have been lost. They have brought the wrong form. The nurse is not in today. They need to go back to another clinic to get a referral. They don’t have proof of residence. And always the same outcome – come back another day – make another appointment – or wait here but we can’t tell you when you’ll be seen.

In response, the anger is ritualized. Most people protest then stoically accept what they are told and settle down to wait. They seem used to it – it may not be fair or logical but they know that's just how it works - and time takes on a different meaning when you're up tp your neck in the system. But the ones who suffer most are those that are not in the system.

Like the bloke waiting next to me; He was there for tests, but there was some mix up and then they couldn’t tell him when he would be seen. From the phone-calls that I overheard, he was some sort of maintenance man for a small firm. His boss was calling him every ten minutes to check up on him – when could he get back to work ? – why wasn’t he able to say? – how was he going to make up his lost time ? what was really the matter with him ? was he going to be signed-off sick ? By the time it was my turn it was pretty clear that the guy was well down the road to being sacked.

A small undramatic episode but it shows the fragility of the narrow gap between being in work and being another welfare statistic, with everything that goes with it.

No need to be polite - child abuse in the church

Yet another shocking – but tellingly not surprising story about child abuse in the Catholic church; this time in Irish children’s homes. Not the behavior of individual wayward priests, but systematic institutional abuses covered up for generations.

These scandals seem to be approached as if they were management issues; as happened when Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor was criticized for covering up abusive priests in his former diocese. As if they are on a par with the directors sweeping a misappropriation of funds under the carpet. Or when a government department hushes up negligence and incompetence. As a result, simply saying sorry and then doing a bit of an organizational review and maybe some remedial PR is seen as making it good.

But what we are talking about in the Catholic church is something much worse than either of those examples; and not just in the nature of the scandals, or in their scale. The uncomfortable truth is that there is causal link between the abuses and the underlying belief system itself. This is not often said, because of the ‘politeness’ that apparently surrounds religious belief. As an ex-catholic Atheist I have no such squeamishness – so here goes:

1.Original sin and guilt:
The idea that everyone, even the unborn child bears an inherited burden of guilt because they are the product of sexual intercourse, itself emblematic of man’s fall from God’s grace in the garden of Eden. That’s going to give you some pretty distorted views about sex, and about the upbringing of children. In any other circumstances, a psychiatrist would have a field day with anyone holding such views.

2. The notion of a priesthood:
The idea that there is a body of people who have been chosen by God and consequently have some sort of special authority. That’s a pretty special kind of power; in other circumstances - the theocracies of Ancient Egypt or the Aztecs, or in the modern-day, the Taliban of Afghanistan or the Branch-Davidians of Waco - we would talk smugly about wacky cults beyond the comprehension of civilized rational minds.

3. The concept of noble suffering:
The idea that bearing earthy suffering is a source of God’s grace that will somehow earn credit in an afterlife. Apart from many other types of weirdness, this gives us some pretty disturbing sado-masochistic imagery: like a lot of medieval art or Mel Gibson’s Passion Of The Christ. If secular equivalents of these had been found in the basement of a suspected serial killer they would doubtless be used as evidence of a deeply disturbed mind.

4. Priestly celibacy:
Perhaps not a fundamental belief but a practice shaped by the above beliefs. Throw in vows of obedience and again we are back to the psychiatrist’s chair again – a whole special kind of submission /repression/ power complex that flies in the face of the most basic biological imperatives.

This is not supposed to be an anti-Catholic rant – so I should qualify it by saying that growing up I knew many decent, sincere and well-intentioned Catholics (blah blah blah). My point however is that child abuse in the church is not an aberration, it is intrinsically linked with Catholic belief, and politeness should not inhibit is from telling it how it is:

To paraphrase Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up; your God and church
They may not mean to, but they do.

The Levellers & corrupt MP's

The MP’s expenses scandal takes a new turn as it focuses on the difficultly of removing the Speaker Of The House of Commons. It seems we now have something of a mini-constitutional crisis along with a general loss of confidence in parliament. In such circumstances I always find that the 17th Century is a good starting point for guidance.

Curiously despite being usually painted as a tyrant and villain, Oliver Cromwell has recently been rehabilitated in the media. Although the context has largely been forgotten, his words on forcibly dissolving the Rump Parliament have lately been much quoted; “You are no longer a parliament …you have sat too long for any good you have done lately … In the name of God - Go !”

By 1653 the moderates who dominated the Rump parliament were badly out of touch with the country as a whole and especially the radicalized New Model Army. Some of the members had even been there since before the civil war when Charles 1st had summoned the ‘Long Parliament’ in 1640. Since then the world had been turned upside down. Supporters of the Presbyterian party had been expelled in Pride’s Purge of 1648 as potential (and indeed actual) royalist sympathizers. The MP's left to form the Rump Parliament were largely those who had been willing to countenance the execution of the king and the establishment of a republic but were also being overtaken by the radicalised sections of the army and the lower classes . Significantly it was these people that Cromwell and the army leaders lent on for their power-base, although ultimately they would abandon them.

Interestingly what made the MPs of The Rump most unpopular was that fact that many of them had not taken an active taken part in the fighting but were now getting rich on the confiscated assets of royalists. Also a great many MP's were also lawyers and their self-interest propelled them to resist legal reforms that would have given common people access to the system. It was this general disaffection with the parliament that gave a popular basis for Cromwell’s forcible dissolution – the now famous dismissal of the mace of office as “a fool’s bauble” and the resonant spectacle of Colonel Harrison dragging the speaker from his chair.

But with regard to the present crisis of confidence in the parliamentary system – we would do better to draw inspiration not from Cromwell but from the Levellers:

Just two of the demands from their ‘Agreement Of The People’ – annual parliaments and the right to recall members for re-election – would go quite a long way to restoring credibility. Add on a thorough-going modernization of the legislature, including an end to late night sittings and the ridiculously long summer recess, along of course with MP’s being paid only the national average wage – and we might get something like a representative parliament.

Just a footnote to all this; I see that in yesterday’s Mail On Sunday it is reported that the queen is appalled at the greedy behavior of MPs. From someone who has lived all their lives at the public expense along with her extended family and hangers on, is exempt from most forms of taxation, and has immunity from public scrutiny or criminal prosecution, that’s pretty ironic.

The journey not the destination.

By rights I should be massively pissed off:

I had a meeting with a client this morning - followed by lunch - who is about fifty miles away. Unfortunately that's fifty miles the other side of London which means either riding around the M25 or battling my way across the capital in the rush hour. Either way it's a pig of a journey. I left early to avoid the traffic - made good time and pulled over for a leisurely coffee once I was almost there. Only then did I turn on my Blackberry - I always turn it off when I'm riding.

So I got the message from work that the client had cancelled - apparently she was 'too busy'. She hadn't even tried to phone me on the mobile - or bothered to reply to the email I sent yesterday trying to get her to confirm. Instead she'd phoned work my work at 8am that morning because obviously she thinks I actually live at the studio. Stupid bitch. And typical of a week of similar petty frustrations with arrogant corporate knobs who think that because you are a supplier they have a license to treat you like shit.

I want to be pissed off about this. But the trouble is that riding back into work in the not-quite-sunny weather I can't keep myself from grinning stupidly . The thing is, riding a bike for a few hours , even in the most pointless of circumstances, is still just about a million times better than anything else I could be doing in working hours ...

MP's money

Difficult to believe in the current climate, but the idea that MP's should be paid a wage was once a progressive one. It enabled ordinary working people, like Keir Hardie, to enter parliament and so broke the monopoly of the political class, landowners and business men, whose 'private incomes' freed them for the need to earn a living.

Although under the current Tory set up, the toffs in the form of Cameron and Boris, are making something of a comeback, the new version of the political class is nowadays that of careerist apparatchiks - as equally divorced from the vast majority of the people they represent as their nineteenth century predecessors.

Whereas there used to be talk of a class that was 'born to govern' (and it wasn't said in a sense of irony) there is now talk of having to attract 'the best and most talented'. This reasoning is behind the argument that MP's must not be underpaid - with the implication that if they are then potential politicians will be tempted away to other fields, or at the very least tempted to top up their salaries by making dodgy expenses claims.

The concept of 'underpaid' is very odd - and one that I have not heard seriously challenged. Underpaid in relation to who ? Certainly not the majority of the electorate, not the average elector and not even public sector middle managers. The benchmark appears to be the most senior professionals in private practice and top management in large corporations. Implicit in this is a naive assumption that the job market is some sort of meritocracy where the most talented are the best paid.

A quick look at the real world would disprove this: At my workplace the highest paid group are not skilled craftsman, nor senior mangers with responsibilities, but salesmen whose skill set is primarily schmoozing, brown-nosing and bullshitting. I am sure that anybody could find similar examples in their own lives - and I haven't even mentioned teachers or nurses.

So why do so many people accept that MP's should be amongst the highly paid ? In all the talk of MP's salaries and their abuse of expenses hardly anyone seems to be arguing that it is a privilege to be a representative of the people and - dare I say it - an element of sacrifice is to be expected. And even fewer have made the glaringly obvious suggestion that MP's should take only the average wage of the people they represent so as to stay in touch with them and so prevent the growth of that new 'political class'.

And finally - back to those salesmen at work: it is 'within the rules' for them to put in expenses claims for pencil sharpeners and erasers. But at the same time it is generally accepted that for a highly paid individual to make such petty claims is a bit demeaning and marks them out as a bit of an arsehole - so they don't do it. It comes to something when salespeople have more sense of shame than our elected representatives.

Life's A Riot (still)

On a whim I've just stuck on Billy Bragg's "Life's A Riot" on the i-tunes at work.

Great lyrics - crap voice. So crap it's actually good. If I ever sang in the bath it would sound just about identical.

Those lyrics are filled with 80's references. Just listening to it is a nostalgia rush - until his aberrational flirting with the Kinnock-ite Red Wedge movement - Billy Bragg was the epitome of the young radical of the era. Down to his Doc Martin shoes, black 501s with turn ups and flat-top. (I was never one of those people by the way - too much of a headbanger back then - but I loved the lyrics and the fact that someone could sing like that and get away with it - proper modern folk music)

I don't think anyone who was involved at that time can now hear 'Whose Side Are You On?' ; 'Between The Wars'; 'It Says Here' or 'World Turned Upside' without the hairs on the back of their neck standing up. The sad thing is 25 years on and in these times it all seems so relevant again...

The end at Visteon ?

It's no longer news that the former Visteon / Ford workers at Enfield and Basildon have voted to accept an offer that goes most of the way to matching the Ford contracts they had been promised all along (with reservations about pensions and shift allowances). In other words; a victory. Like the Lindsey Oil Refinery strikers they have proved that in spite of the recession, in spite of anti-union laws and in spite of docile union leaderships, victories are possible if you're prepared to fight for them.

Having been involved on the sidelines of many disputes over the years - from the big ones like the miners strike and the Wapping dispute, to the small ones like the Addenbrookes cleaners or JJ Fast Foods - I know that we need victories more than we need noble defeats. So I'm not one of those (and there will inevitably be some on the Left) who will deny ourselves a moment of celebration.But having gone up to visit the pickets on Saturday it came home to me that the celebration is tempered by the sadness that goes with any factory closure.

Sitting outside the gates in Enfield , it is striking that the factory there is surrounded by derelict and empty sites that once were a thriving industrial belt in North London along the A10 corridor. Now it is becoming an industrial graveyard.

Because the Visteon plant was highly unionised, it was also unusual nowadays in maintaining the kinds of pay and conditions that generations of workers in the manufacturing sector once took for granted. And in its sense of community: Many of the workers have spent twenty years or more there, there are families working alongside each other - I even met several retired workers who came back to join the picket line. That has all gone now.

Although the workers will continue their pickets until the redundancy payments have actually been paid, there is also a sense of sadness as the ex-Visteon workers disperse. Inevitably the solidarity and camaraderie that has grown out of the dispute will also disperse with them .

However like in so many other disputes before, one thing that repeatedly comes up when talking with the workers is how much they have changed: In their views of the world , of politics and of activists of all hues who they previously regarded as an alien species. I've also heard the workers say a number of times how shocked they are that people they don't know have gone out of their way to support them. And how in spite of what is said, people aren't just out for themselves but are prepared to stick up for each other.

It's a simple message but a pretty fucking inspiring one - and one that will outlast the closure of the factory.

Visteon. Struggle. Solidarity.

Socialist Party. Socialist Workers' Party. Socialist Labour Party. Socialist Alliance. "Why can't you all just work together and have one 'proper' party?". I've heard it from my daughter, thinking about politics for the first time, and I've heard it on the picket line at Visteon. It's a very familiar question to anybody on the Left ... and still a very fair one.

If ever there was an instance when different groups could and should suspend their differences and rivalries it is their support for workers in struggle. But still inevitably there are points of departure between the various groups that actually speak volumes about their differences. And these are important, far more so than sterile debates about whose forebears had the 'correct' position over Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in 1936. Or something.

This has certainly been what I have seen in the Visteon dispute at Enfield.

Take the SWP: At the start of the dispute they turned up in very large numbers - now, from what I've seen on the picket line, they seem to have evaporated. Why? I suspect because they thought there were no quick wins for them to make. On the other hand now that the conveners at Visteon in both Enfield and Basildon have joined the Socialist Party and are standing as N2EU candidates in the Euro elections they are condemning the platform as chauvinistic and nationalist. Just as they did with the Lindsey Oil Refinery dispute, they have put themselves outside one of the most significant developments in the labour movement. N2EU is not ideologically 'pure' and is quite possibly not the best tag for a new Left movement - but it is happening right now and it is real. Strange that the SWP were a lot less fussy about far more 'incorrect' Islamo-nuts in the Stop War The Movement. But then again of course that was their own 'thing' that they could pretty much control.

Or take the anarchists. Actually I have a lot more time for them. They don't parachute in and out of the picket line, in fact they work pretty tirelessly in their support. Occasionally they can seem like they inhabit a different planet from ordinary workers with cars, mortgages and the other conventional trappings of modern life. But more seriously, they are so suspicious of anything 'official' or that smacks of the organised Left that whenever there is talk of spreading the dispute - of approaching other union branches or stewards, or lobbying this or that union official, they have very little to say. Tellingly their main focus has been on being support from the general public rather than within the labour movement.

Supporting a struggle is not about simply cheer-leading. If you genuinely think that you or your organisation has something to offer to help build success then you have not only a right but also a duty to share it. Not in a sectarian way and not by lecturing or maneuvering. And if you believe that there is also a bigger picture, that disputes should be linked up and movements built it is perfectly legitimate again to try and get people to join your organisation. And most importantly if you don't convince them you go ahead with the practical support work anyway and don't sulk in the corner. I'd like to think that this approach is why a number of the Visteon workers, including two of the conveners have agreed to join the Socialist Party.

All of which is a preamble to talking about Rob Williams. He is the Unite convener at Linmar in Swansea, formerly a part of Visteon before it was re-badged in previously shenanigans to outsource the manufacture of auto components. It is Rob who has played a major role in taking the cause of the Visteon dispute to various parts of the Ford empire and around the movement generally. I have no doubt that he is the major reason that Visteon workers have turned to the Socialist Party.

Yesterday Rob was dismissed from his job at the Linmar plant. In support the other workers there walked off the line and joined him in an occupation of the union office on the site whilst the police were called to try and evict them. To give Rob your support - send messages to robbo@redwills.freeserve.co.uk

Feelgood weekend

It's come a bit late this year but it was the first Spring-like weekend of the year. (Or at least the first one when I had a bike on the road which is the only sort that really counts).

Each year the first feel good factor of a bit of sun in your face is a reminder of our primeval and pagan instincts. And this weekend just about every aspect of my usual pastimes was improved by the sun:

Saturday morning - I visited the Visteon picket line. The mood of the workers was good and optimistic with progress made in involving other Ford sites, and the various supporters actually seem to be working (more or less) together for once.

Saturday afternoon - I picked up my 883R/1200 from the workshop after its chain conversion and took it for a run up to the High Beach tea hut. It was about closing time but I got into chewing the fat for half an hour with a couple of guys from the Rider's club who were up there.

Sunday morning - I got to messing about in the garden doing some forms for the benefit of my kids. I did the long pole form (Luk Dim Boon Gwan) for once - I don't often get to do that during weekday training as it takes up too much space so I was happy to find that I could still do it.

Sunday afternoon - into town to the Globe Theatre for a performance of Romeo & Juliet. First we got in a tour of the nearby excavation of the Rose Theatre. I love the idea of that part of Southwark as the sleaze centre of Elizabethan London. Bear-baiting, brothels, violent ale houses and the stench of open sewers running through the street - it's a nice contrast to the sensibilities of today's' 'theatre-going public'. And walking over the Millennium foot bridge to St Paul's for the tube home - the same route that Christopher Wren would have taken every day in a ferry boat possibly steered by one of my ancestors - there is a sense of continuity (both good and bad) with what it has always meant to be a Londoner.

Laptops. Kuniyoshi. Graphic craftsmanship.

My laptop died at work. Pathetically I felt completely impotent for a day, not sure what could be salvaged or whether to restart on-going projects.

So whilst the IT boys here worked their magic to rebuild the laptop, I sneaked off for a couple of hours to the Kuniyoshi exhibition at the Royal Academy.

The demographics of the visitors were a pretty good guide to the appeal of the exhibition. It was a quiet mid-morning but there was a mixture of the usual chattering classes - 'friends of the RA' types - Japanese tourists (unsurprisingly) - students - and some tattoo 'alternative' types. The latter because of course both the style and subject matter are very similar to the Japanese school of tattooing.

I was struck mainly by how very modern the prints looked. The craft of making the prints from wood-cuts makes them look like tattoos - or comic books - like both these processes a black outline is filled with colour. And the colours:the reds ,blues and greens are much more vivid than you would find in western prints of the same era.

There was one glass case explaining the print-making purpose I was struck by the interplay between the art and the craft.This is a subject close to my heart - at work we occupy the space where in graphic terms art and craft meet, and it's a pet subject of mine that the creative disciplines can only be as good as their less glamorous artisan poor relations. It's why I struggle with 'conceptual art'.

I've just read a book - Colour by Victoria Finlay - which pretty much says the same thing: We only view art through the lens of the practical crafts that execute it. So for example; our modern view of Turner is defined by the fact that he didn't seem to give a toss about the quality of the paint he used. Consequently the crappy colours have degraded over the years and given a much softer and subdued effect than he ever intended.

... Meanwhile my laptop has now been restored to its former glory. Nothing 'business critical' has gone but I'm extremely pissed off to have lost five years worth of my i-tunes library.