On 23 June 2016 the United Kingdom voted in a referendum, 52 to 48 percent, to leave the European Union.
Brexit is a political, economic, and cultural disaster for Britain. The right-wing politicians who spearheaded the Leave campaign were the xenophobe, Nigel Farage (UKIP leader) and the Tory opportunist and showman Boris Johnson (former mayor of London), a man who aspired to replace Cameron as Prime Minister, but was stopped in his tracks by the Tory establishment.
The success of the Leave campaign was due to their hammering a single point: if Britain left the EU the number non-British workers and immigrants in the country could be reduced. Their campaign was openly xenophobic and sometimes racist. Yet the fact that this xenophobia bore fruit in Labour-voting heartlands outside the multi-cultural metropolitan areas was that it tapped into a well of anomic anger arising from the pains inflicted on working people by unbridled market fundamentalism (under both Tory and New Labour) since the 1980s.
Enhanced in English politics today, as a result of the Leave campaign, are two unpleasant right-wing forces. The first is the strengthening of illiberal, xenophobic and nationalistic ideologies, promoted by UKIP and right-wing elements in the Tory Party. This has already led to a string of street attacks on people judged “non-British.” The second force is an accelerated neo-economic liberalism advocating a bonfire of worker and consumer protections along with welfare rights and benefits. These two, xenophobic nationalists and free-market fantasists, may at times collide, but their dialectical dance on the political right will probably drown out the voices of the metropolitan liberal left, social democracy and wider progressive left.
The ramifications for British politics resulting from Brexit are huge, especially for Scotland which voted heavily to remain in the EU, and for Northern Ireland where some sort of re-imposed border with the Republic seems almost inevitable. Exactly when, or at what speed, Brexit will occur remains to be seen. But the threat and reality of a Britain excluded from the single market promises economic pain, which will in turn exacerbate the political tensions.
31 July 2016
31 May 2016
Friends Reunited has closed its doors
In February 2016 the first mainstream social networking site in the UK, Friends Reunited, closed down.
In the spring of 2003, while on a walking trip in Slovakia, a friend told me about the website Friends Reunited, and so, like thousands of other people, I thought it would be interesting to see what had happened to my classmates from school. Before the arrival of internet social networks, the lives and fates of old schoolmates, and others with whom you had lost contact, were unknown; and that was particularly true if you had moved away from your home area. So the opportunities provided by Friends Reunited were new and exciting.
The site offered a choice of institutions (schools, colleges, universities) to which people could add their name and details. But there was no doubt that the main institution attracting nostalgic curiosity was secondary school, with a special attachment to the leaving year, the time in your life, when you moved from childhood to adulthood, fell in love and deepened your friendships. I felt a need to connect to my former fellow pupils, who had accompanied me in my journey from child to adolescent, all of whom I had unintentionally lost contact with when I was sixteen in 1978. So then, aged forty, a new window was opening in cyberspace, which would satisfy my voyeuristic curiosity and would provide me a psychological bridge back to a formative period of my life.
Of course, I knew that Friends Reunited was not there primarily to reunite friends, but to make money. You had to negotiate your way through the flashing banners for dating agencies and get blocked whenever you want to say something that fell outside their template for nostalgia. In the early years of the site you were forbidden, unless you paid, to send your email address to anyone, or to write anything more than the most anodyne notes to others.
In 2003 there were themed notice boards on which you were invited to post your memories about your former school. On each one I decided to take up the theme and compose a written memory sketch, so the topics of my contributions were decided by Friends Reunited, not by me. No sooner had I finished than the notice boards were reserved for subscribing members (£5 and later £7.50 p.a). I never paid Friends Reunited anything, and nor would it seem did many other ex-students, so my posts for a long time retained their first place position on most of the boards.
At the end of decade the experiment which was Friends Reunited had been overtaken by other social networking sites such as Facebook. Friends Reunited abandoned its attempt to charge fees for ordinary members, made its service free and attempted to expand its social networking functions. By this time, however, most people, particularly the young, had lost interest in the site and new postings became fewer. And in January 2016 the site close down for good.
I abandoned Friends Reunited in the mid 2000s as a tool of communication, but occasionally used it thereafter as a source of reference. Yet there two things about Friends Reunited that could never be picked up on or improved by the newer social networks. One was the honesty of contributors. In the early days of social networking, people were far less internet savvy. They did not fear using their own names, or worry about what they said hanging around on the Internet for eternity. The other was textual completeness: they wrote a reasonably full exposition of what they wanted to say, not short comments to ongoing ephemeral debates, as with Twitter or Facebook messaging. All that, plus the fact that people were commenting on a single subject, namely their school years, gave much of the material at Friends Reunited an ongoing relevance and interest.
But most of all the closure removed access for ever to a mass of material, photos, chat and reminiscences, and did so far more effectively than water or fire could ever destroy paper records. Many think that the Internet serves to retain information for eternity, making no comment ever ephemeral, and indeed that is often true. But it is also true that millions of pages of information can be taken down, removed from servers and denied to future historians and memoirists. To be fair, Friends Reunited has provided (but for how long?) a facility for users to retrieve their own digital photos, but this does little to address the problem of the long-term loss of millions of reminiscences and other comments from public record.
We should not forget, however, that Friends Reunited from start to finish was primarily a business which acted to maximise profits, not to maintain public records. And although the commercialisation of private nostalgia is in many ways an ugly thing, Friends Reunited nevertheless provided a service which was of value to many.
In the spring of 2003, while on a walking trip in Slovakia, a friend told me about the website Friends Reunited, and so, like thousands of other people, I thought it would be interesting to see what had happened to my classmates from school. Before the arrival of internet social networks, the lives and fates of old schoolmates, and others with whom you had lost contact, were unknown; and that was particularly true if you had moved away from your home area. So the opportunities provided by Friends Reunited were new and exciting.
The site offered a choice of institutions (schools, colleges, universities) to which people could add their name and details. But there was no doubt that the main institution attracting nostalgic curiosity was secondary school, with a special attachment to the leaving year, the time in your life, when you moved from childhood to adulthood, fell in love and deepened your friendships. I felt a need to connect to my former fellow pupils, who had accompanied me in my journey from child to adolescent, all of whom I had unintentionally lost contact with when I was sixteen in 1978. So then, aged forty, a new window was opening in cyberspace, which would satisfy my voyeuristic curiosity and would provide me a psychological bridge back to a formative period of my life.
Of course, I knew that Friends Reunited was not there primarily to reunite friends, but to make money. You had to negotiate your way through the flashing banners for dating agencies and get blocked whenever you want to say something that fell outside their template for nostalgia. In the early years of the site you were forbidden, unless you paid, to send your email address to anyone, or to write anything more than the most anodyne notes to others.
In 2003 there were themed notice boards on which you were invited to post your memories about your former school. On each one I decided to take up the theme and compose a written memory sketch, so the topics of my contributions were decided by Friends Reunited, not by me. No sooner had I finished than the notice boards were reserved for subscribing members (£5 and later £7.50 p.a). I never paid Friends Reunited anything, and nor would it seem did many other ex-students, so my posts for a long time retained their first place position on most of the boards.
At the end of decade the experiment which was Friends Reunited had been overtaken by other social networking sites such as Facebook. Friends Reunited abandoned its attempt to charge fees for ordinary members, made its service free and attempted to expand its social networking functions. By this time, however, most people, particularly the young, had lost interest in the site and new postings became fewer. And in January 2016 the site close down for good.
I abandoned Friends Reunited in the mid 2000s as a tool of communication, but occasionally used it thereafter as a source of reference. Yet there two things about Friends Reunited that could never be picked up on or improved by the newer social networks. One was the honesty of contributors. In the early days of social networking, people were far less internet savvy. They did not fear using their own names, or worry about what they said hanging around on the Internet for eternity. The other was textual completeness: they wrote a reasonably full exposition of what they wanted to say, not short comments to ongoing ephemeral debates, as with Twitter or Facebook messaging. All that, plus the fact that people were commenting on a single subject, namely their school years, gave much of the material at Friends Reunited an ongoing relevance and interest.
But most of all the closure removed access for ever to a mass of material, photos, chat and reminiscences, and did so far more effectively than water or fire could ever destroy paper records. Many think that the Internet serves to retain information for eternity, making no comment ever ephemeral, and indeed that is often true. But it is also true that millions of pages of information can be taken down, removed from servers and denied to future historians and memoirists. To be fair, Friends Reunited has provided (but for how long?) a facility for users to retrieve their own digital photos, but this does little to address the problem of the long-term loss of millions of reminiscences and other comments from public record.
We should not forget, however, that Friends Reunited from start to finish was primarily a business which acted to maximise profits, not to maintain public records. And although the commercialisation of private nostalgia is in many ways an ugly thing, Friends Reunited nevertheless provided a service which was of value to many.
24 May 2016
England and Wales become more secular
Religious adherence in England and Wales continues to decline
A British Social Attitudes Survey published in May 2016 shows that the proportion of the population declaring themselves as adherents to a religion in England and Wales is continuing to decline. Nearly half of the population say they have no religion. The percentages are:
A British Social Attitudes Survey published in May 2016 shows that the proportion of the population declaring themselves as adherents to a religion in England and Wales is continuing to decline. Nearly half of the population say they have no religion. The percentages are:
Anglican
|
19,8
|
Other Protestant
|
15,7
|
Catholic
|
8,3
|
Non-Christian religion
|
7,7
|
No Religion
|
48,5
|
5 May 2016
Taking our cash away: the removal of high denomination notes
In May 2016 the European Central Bank announced that it would stop issuing EUR 500 notes in 2018.
The reason given for the abolition is that the high value note is used mainly for criminal and “grey” payments, so doing away with it will lessen tax evasion and more serious crime. Evidence for all this is a little thin, and my guess is that abolition will at best slightly hinder such payments.
Criminals use cars, but that it not a sufficient argument for their abolition. Ordinary people need cars, too. Likewise high denomination notes are mainly used by ordinary people for several purposes: to store their savings, to easily transport their money, to make instant payments, to avoid bank fees, and, of course, to make anonymous payments. The right to privacy in, say, buying a medical product does not signal any kind of criminality.
What the ECB is doing is quite simply diminishing, albeit slightly, people’s freedom, and handing power to fee-sucking banks and to the surveillance state.
Of course the situation is much better in the Eurozone than it is in Britain, where the highest denomination note is GBP 50, around 63 Euros at the time of writing. British shopkeepers often gasp in horror whenever a “fifty” is tendered. And today in Britain even the GBP 50 note is under threat of abolition to make cash retention, transfer and payment more difficult.
The right to hold one’s money in cash is a fundamental. Phasing out the EUR 500, but retaining the EUR 200 and EUR 100, both greater in value than the British GBP 50, is no huge deal. But going any further down this road is.
The reason given for the abolition is that the high value note is used mainly for criminal and “grey” payments, so doing away with it will lessen tax evasion and more serious crime. Evidence for all this is a little thin, and my guess is that abolition will at best slightly hinder such payments.
Criminals use cars, but that it not a sufficient argument for their abolition. Ordinary people need cars, too. Likewise high denomination notes are mainly used by ordinary people for several purposes: to store their savings, to easily transport their money, to make instant payments, to avoid bank fees, and, of course, to make anonymous payments. The right to privacy in, say, buying a medical product does not signal any kind of criminality.
What the ECB is doing is quite simply diminishing, albeit slightly, people’s freedom, and handing power to fee-sucking banks and to the surveillance state.
Of course the situation is much better in the Eurozone than it is in Britain, where the highest denomination note is GBP 50, around 63 Euros at the time of writing. British shopkeepers often gasp in horror whenever a “fifty” is tendered. And today in Britain even the GBP 50 note is under threat of abolition to make cash retention, transfer and payment more difficult.
The right to hold one’s money in cash is a fundamental. Phasing out the EUR 500, but retaining the EUR 200 and EUR 100, both greater in value than the British GBP 50, is no huge deal. But going any further down this road is.
4 May 2016
Antisemitism: the denunciation campaign
False claims of antisemitism are deployed to discredit the political left
The spring of 2016 has seen a bombardment of charges of antisemitism aimed at left-wing members of the Labour Party. The denunciation campaign, fuelled by the Tory Party, the Labour Right and reinforced by the press, with the liberal Guardian bating the pack, has led to the suspension of numerous members, including Labour’s former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone.
No-one but a fool would believe that that the denunciation campaign results from the sudden discovery that the Labour Party is constituted by ranks of Jew-hating Holocaust deniers, particularly as several of the people suspended are Jewish themselves. Indeed, the Labour Party is one of the places in British society where one is least likely to encounter antisemitism, or racism of any kind. The reasons for the denunciations are much more cynical. They serves two separate but related purposes: first, a drive to undermine the Corbyn leadership by smearing his supporters; and second an attempt to de-legitimise criticism of Israel by claiming such criticism is antisemitism.
It is worthwhile stating clearly what antisemitism is, and what it is not. Verbal and written antisemitism includes calling for discriminatory action to be taken against Jewish people, insulting them, or identifying people only because of of their ethnic origin. Antisemitism is about the attachment of negative characteristics, physical or cultural, to Jewish people solely on account of their ethnicity. It is about the peddling of myths, the purpose of which is to cast Jews in a bad light. Statements which are true are not antisemitic unless the purpose in uttering them is to fuel antisemitism.
The spring of 2016 has seen a bombardment of charges of antisemitism aimed at left-wing members of the Labour Party. The denunciation campaign, fuelled by the Tory Party, the Labour Right and reinforced by the press, with the liberal Guardian bating the pack, has led to the suspension of numerous members, including Labour’s former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone.
No-one but a fool would believe that that the denunciation campaign results from the sudden discovery that the Labour Party is constituted by ranks of Jew-hating Holocaust deniers, particularly as several of the people suspended are Jewish themselves. Indeed, the Labour Party is one of the places in British society where one is least likely to encounter antisemitism, or racism of any kind. The reasons for the denunciations are much more cynical. They serves two separate but related purposes: first, a drive to undermine the Corbyn leadership by smearing his supporters; and second an attempt to de-legitimise criticism of Israel by claiming such criticism is antisemitism.
It is worthwhile stating clearly what antisemitism is, and what it is not. Verbal and written antisemitism includes calling for discriminatory action to be taken against Jewish people, insulting them, or identifying people only because of of their ethnic origin. Antisemitism is about the attachment of negative characteristics, physical or cultural, to Jewish people solely on account of their ethnicity. It is about the peddling of myths, the purpose of which is to cast Jews in a bad light. Statements which are true are not antisemitic unless the purpose in uttering them is to fuel antisemitism.
1 April 2016
Sentence Elements
Dividing simple sentences into their elements is the first step in grammatical analysis.
Every sentence can be divided into its elements. An element is made up of one or more words which together comprise the element. Sentence elements constitute the ‘building units’ of a well-formed sentence
There are five types of sentence element:
1 subject
2 verb
3 object
4 predicative (aka complement)
5 adverbial (aka adjunct)
A sentence element approach to grammar assumes a top-down methodology: it starts with the sentence as a whole and then divides it into its functional components.
In the sentence below every type of sentence element is present and is represented in this example by a single word.
They elected him president yesterday.
They (=subject), elected (=verb), him (=object), president (=predicative), yesterday (=adverbial)
Subject and predicate
In English every sentence has a subject. The subject is the grammatical topic of the sentence and the predicate (consisting of the remaining elements of the sentence) is the comment on the subject. Look at the example below.
Mr Jones planted cabbages in the garden.
In this example Mr Jones is the subject, and planted cabbages in the garden is the predicate. Mr Jones is the grammatical topic; and the comment is that he planted cabbages in the garden.
The subject is necessarily a nominal (e.g. noun, pronoun, noun phrase or clause).
The verb governs the predicate and determines whether objects, predicatives and adverbials are required, permitted or proscribed. Look at the example below:
My older brother gave Lorna a book yesterday in the garden.
In this example the verb to give requires two objects (direct: a book, indirect Lorna) and permits temporal and locative adverbials (yesterday and in the garden)
28 March 2016
Adam Johnson: Punophilia and Sex Crime in Britain
In March 2016, professional footballer, Adam Johnson, was sentenced to six years incarceration for sex-texting, snogging and touching up a fifteen year old girl.
I care nothing for football, nor for men like Adam Johnson. The core facts of his case are clear: a fifteen year old girl showed herself sexually interested in the professional footballer, and, rather than turning away, Johnson sex-texted her, snogged her and touched her up in his car. The age of sexual consent in Britain, not unreasonably, is sixteen, so what Johnson did was rightly a crime.
The issue in this article is not his guilt but his punishment. Sentencing Johnson to six years inside - a sentence normally awarded to robbers and rapists - reflects moral outrage, not justice or sense.
I have no desire to see the girl punished in any way, but the issue remains: if what happened is so serious, why is Johnson the only one responsible? Had the girl, instead, gone shoplifting - or committed any other crime - she was well within the age of criminal responsibility. Yet, in her illegal relations with Johnson, she is automatically constructed as a victim, a mere passive agent without responsibility.
Much of the establishment hullabaloo around the case is formulaic. For instance, reports were submitted to the court about the psychological harm that Johnson had done to the girl. Johnson may indeed have caused the described harm, but we cannot know for sure because it is unimaginable that a social service report would ever have concluded that no damage resulted from the affair. I suspect the psychological impact on her was little different from what she would have felt had she been some months older and over the age of consent. But the greatest psychological harm - we can be sure - resulted from the case being heard in open court: her anonymity was breached and she became (quite wrongly) an object of abuse from some quarters.
Why is the case interpreted and framed in these terms? Where does the moral panic demanding draconian punishment come from?
The leading reason is obviously the horrors of the sexual crimes committed by Jimmy Savile. Savile is dead and cannot be held to account, but prosecutors and courts can find male celebrities today who have had sexual relations with fifteen year old girls and punish them severely. That urge to punish is further driven by some feminists, aware of the cruel “career-or-start-a-family” dilemma, whose anger focuses, not on the structures of capitalism that throw up that problem, but on the ability of adult men to cheat on their partners in favour of younger women.
Nothing written here is intended to exonerate Johnson. But as this case came to trial, it is a pity that it couldn’t be dealt with privately, something both Johnson and the girl would have benefited from. A fine, community work and attendance on a sexual offences awareness course would have been suitable for Johnson. Six years of incarceration, the probable ban from professional football and the near total destruction of his life would not have been called for.
Sexual offences should not be brushed under the carpet. But the Johnson case did not involve a major crime, if only because, had the girl been some months older, no crime would have been committed - whatever one thinks of the morality of the man's behaviour. His excessive punishment - the mob's punophilia, the love of punishment - merely shows that Britain is in the grip of a moral panic regarding under-age sex crime.
I care nothing for football, nor for men like Adam Johnson. The core facts of his case are clear: a fifteen year old girl showed herself sexually interested in the professional footballer, and, rather than turning away, Johnson sex-texted her, snogged her and touched her up in his car. The age of sexual consent in Britain, not unreasonably, is sixteen, so what Johnson did was rightly a crime.
The issue in this article is not his guilt but his punishment. Sentencing Johnson to six years inside - a sentence normally awarded to robbers and rapists - reflects moral outrage, not justice or sense.
I have no desire to see the girl punished in any way, but the issue remains: if what happened is so serious, why is Johnson the only one responsible? Had the girl, instead, gone shoplifting - or committed any other crime - she was well within the age of criminal responsibility. Yet, in her illegal relations with Johnson, she is automatically constructed as a victim, a mere passive agent without responsibility.
Much of the establishment hullabaloo around the case is formulaic. For instance, reports were submitted to the court about the psychological harm that Johnson had done to the girl. Johnson may indeed have caused the described harm, but we cannot know for sure because it is unimaginable that a social service report would ever have concluded that no damage resulted from the affair. I suspect the psychological impact on her was little different from what she would have felt had she been some months older and over the age of consent. But the greatest psychological harm - we can be sure - resulted from the case being heard in open court: her anonymity was breached and she became (quite wrongly) an object of abuse from some quarters.
Why is the case interpreted and framed in these terms? Where does the moral panic demanding draconian punishment come from?
The leading reason is obviously the horrors of the sexual crimes committed by Jimmy Savile. Savile is dead and cannot be held to account, but prosecutors and courts can find male celebrities today who have had sexual relations with fifteen year old girls and punish them severely. That urge to punish is further driven by some feminists, aware of the cruel “career-or-start-a-family” dilemma, whose anger focuses, not on the structures of capitalism that throw up that problem, but on the ability of adult men to cheat on their partners in favour of younger women.
Nothing written here is intended to exonerate Johnson. But as this case came to trial, it is a pity that it couldn’t be dealt with privately, something both Johnson and the girl would have benefited from. A fine, community work and attendance on a sexual offences awareness course would have been suitable for Johnson. Six years of incarceration, the probable ban from professional football and the near total destruction of his life would not have been called for.
Sexual offences should not be brushed under the carpet. But the Johnson case did not involve a major crime, if only because, had the girl been some months older, no crime would have been committed - whatever one thinks of the morality of the man's behaviour. His excessive punishment - the mob's punophilia, the love of punishment - merely shows that Britain is in the grip of a moral panic regarding under-age sex crime.
23 March 2016
Facebook: posting links is no substitute for analysis
Facebook does provide a channel for political communication, but those who merely post links to online material are not providing the necessary analysis.
From the 1980s I recall an elderly left-wing gentleman, who raged against all forms of social injustice, with a particular emphasis on the betrayal of socialism by the right-wing leaders of the Labour Party. To make his case, he pushed his bicycle around the town, cloth carrier-bags dangling from the handlebars, shoving annotated newspaper cuttings though the letterboxes of those left-wing activists who might read them.
If you met him you would certainly get an earful, but if you didn’t you had to piece together his views from reading other people’s. Were he alive today, I am sure he would be on Facebook, writing little, but posting links to articles. And sadly, that is the communicative capacity limit for many of my Facebook “friends,'” just a stream of posts consisting of links to other material. They don’t write much themselves, so all I know about their political views is garnered from the links to articles which they suggest that I should read.
Well, what’s wrong with just posting links? True, good material on the net needs to be passed around. But anybody who thinks that he or she is enhancing his or her political analysis by this method is as deluded as a carpenter who thinks he is developing his chair-making skills by sitting on them and recommending them to others. It’s only when you pick up your pen – or today, open a Word document – that you develop the range and consistency of your own thinking.
The best way to learn is to get things wrong unintentionally. Make a slip and a friend will correct you in polemic; post a link to an article written by a professional journalist for another audience and most likely there will be no response. Just by re-posting other people's writing and by "liking," the gaps in your own thinking remain and the ability to articulate an idea or point never develops.
Even on the net people need to make themselves known as political personalities worthy of being listened to. A political activist needs a field of activity and interest; the information in the articles of professional journalists and academics needs to be digested, re-interpreted and re-focused according to local political need, not just re-posted.
1 March 2016
The End of Politics in Britain
It is always interesting to look back into the past and see how one predicted the future wrongly. This short comment was published in March 2008. In it I rightly sketched the meaninglessness for working people of the then New Labour administration, though I underestimated the extent to which Cameron in government from 2010, with the Liberal Democrats in tow (2010-2015), would further slash the remains of the welfare state in the midst of the 2008-1013 recession, the longest in the post-war period. And I utterly failed to foresee the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.
Social inequality is sharpening, while political parties are converging.
This week has seen the opinion polls giving the Conservatives a sufficient lead over Labour for an overall majority in the 2010 general election. Across ‘Middle England’ - for whose supposed benefit New Labour was designed - Cameron’s freshness, rather than any great policy issue, seems to be the driving force behind the Tory surge. Little now divides Britain’s two leading parties: both want to commercialise everything, both are middle-class oriented and led, both are devoutly Atlantist. Over the next couple of years the cautious Brown, who for ever will be Blair’s grey deputy, will try to emulate Cameron, flog the New Labour agenda to death, and will probably fail in everything.
The last termination of a Labour administration was in 1979. That defeat gave rise to two voices. One was fundamentalist: "let’s make a socialist Labour Party worth fighting for;" the other was to urge ‘moderation and unity’ in the hope that the Tories would trip up and the pendulum would swing. But nobody would have said then that a change of government hardly mattered. What might follow Brown’s 2010 poll defeat?
The Labour left, of course, no longer exists. Labour’s formulaic denunciation of the new Tory government’s further assault on the less well-off will ring hollow after a decade and half of New Labourism. Unless new political lifeblood flows from somewhere, (e.g. Scottish independence and a new politics there?) then in Britain we are looking to a new political age characterised by a collapse of party politics in full-blown American style.
Social inequality is sharpening, while political parties are converging.
This week has seen the opinion polls giving the Conservatives a sufficient lead over Labour for an overall majority in the 2010 general election. Across ‘Middle England’ - for whose supposed benefit New Labour was designed - Cameron’s freshness, rather than any great policy issue, seems to be the driving force behind the Tory surge. Little now divides Britain’s two leading parties: both want to commercialise everything, both are middle-class oriented and led, both are devoutly Atlantist. Over the next couple of years the cautious Brown, who for ever will be Blair’s grey deputy, will try to emulate Cameron, flog the New Labour agenda to death, and will probably fail in everything.
The last termination of a Labour administration was in 1979. That defeat gave rise to two voices. One was fundamentalist: "let’s make a socialist Labour Party worth fighting for;" the other was to urge ‘moderation and unity’ in the hope that the Tories would trip up and the pendulum would swing. But nobody would have said then that a change of government hardly mattered. What might follow Brown’s 2010 poll defeat?
The Labour left, of course, no longer exists. Labour’s formulaic denunciation of the new Tory government’s further assault on the less well-off will ring hollow after a decade and half of New Labourism. Unless new political lifeblood flows from somewhere, (e.g. Scottish independence and a new politics there?) then in Britain we are looking to a new political age characterised by a collapse of party politics in full-blown American style.
2 January 2016
Ageing
The price of life is the inevitability of getting old
In an intellectual sense one accepts that one is growing older, but days and months pass without any real appreciation of the fact, and then all of a sudden one is visited by a gamut of reminders. The last couple of weeks have added up to such a reminder.
I noticed in the last few months that I was moving towards the light to decipher small print and increasingly removing my glasses to read at my desk at home. Though I remain short sighted, my optimal focal point is just too far now to read comfortably with my distance glasses, so off I went to the optician in search of reading glasses.
Then last Monday my tooth started to ache. Toothache was nothing new, but it was a tooth on which I’d had a root canal operation several years ago, so it had to come out. The next step, my dentist tells me, is that I need to start with implant treatment in January to replace the teeth on my right side.
Fiddling with my glasses and nursing my aching tooth, I sat down the other evening to take my pills – against the pain, against high blood pressure and another to ease urination. To that I must add my vitamin supplements, of course.
When I get up from my desk in a minute I know I will have to stretch my legs, if I want to walk rather than hobble. So this weekend I am determined to do some exercise to slow down this inevitable process.
In an intellectual sense one accepts that one is growing older, but days and months pass without any real appreciation of the fact, and then all of a sudden one is visited by a gamut of reminders. The last couple of weeks have added up to such a reminder.
I noticed in the last few months that I was moving towards the light to decipher small print and increasingly removing my glasses to read at my desk at home. Though I remain short sighted, my optimal focal point is just too far now to read comfortably with my distance glasses, so off I went to the optician in search of reading glasses.
Then last Monday my tooth started to ache. Toothache was nothing new, but it was a tooth on which I’d had a root canal operation several years ago, so it had to come out. The next step, my dentist tells me, is that I need to start with implant treatment in January to replace the teeth on my right side.
Fiddling with my glasses and nursing my aching tooth, I sat down the other evening to take my pills – against the pain, against high blood pressure and another to ease urination. To that I must add my vitamin supplements, of course.
When I get up from my desk in a minute I know I will have to stretch my legs, if I want to walk rather than hobble. So this weekend I am determined to do some exercise to slow down this inevitable process.
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