Systematically distorted communication

Systematically distorted communication, originally uploaded by dick_pountain.

To celebrate our forthcoming election fun

Election 2010

My initial enthusiasm for New Labour after they drubbed the Tories in 1997 didn't last very long: it suffered a deep wound over the Bernie Ecclestone affair and then a took a fatal head shot from Blair's promotion of the Iraq invasion (I don't take the attitude that he was Bush's poodle: he pushed rather than followed Bush). Since then I've remained in a state of quiet fury as the party proved entirely incapable or unwilling to throw off the ideological mantle of Thatcherism that it donned in order to be returned to power.

Again, I don't take the orthodox Left line that New Labour entirely wasted its term in office. As I ride the 29 bus, free thanks to my Freedom Pass, past the eye-catching green tower of the new University College Hospital it would be deeply dishonest to claim that New Labour wasted all my tax pounds. No, what has infuriated me for the last 10 years is that while spending on worthwhile projects like these, the party has absolutely refused to properly explain its belief in the positive power of the state, to promote social democratic values, and exploit such projects to extend and entrench its support in the country. New Labour still suffers from an almost psychotic dread of the social democrat label, at a time when those free market nutters who deploy the label as a term of abuse are themselves utterly discredited, having in effect looted and crippled the world economy.

I'm a radical social democrat, pretty much along Scandinavian lines: I believe in a mixed economy in which those things most efficiently delivered by the state (medicine, heavy infrastructure etc) are left to the state, everything else is left to private enterprise, but  regulation is applied to mitigate the most unfair outcomes and to maintain public safety. Free marketeers are right, by and large, about the unintended and undesirable effects of intervening in markets - ergo, if some good like medical care (or even housing) is too important to leave to market forces then it must be removed in part or whole from the market.  

I also believe in shrinking the influence of finance capital with a Tobin Tax along with many equally draconian measures. I've read all the free marketeers' arguments about why social democracy is no longer affordable and I don't accept any of them. Social democracy is the only form of social organisation that might just get us through terrible times ahead, and we must make it affordable.

Big business and conservative politicians gave up the practice of free markets years ago in favour of looting and pillaging ("bonuses" being the respectable term) but they still find the rhetoric politically useful. Barely a year after the world narrowly escaped total financial meltdown (dead ATM machines, empty supermarket shelves, fighting in the streets over dead cat carcasses) these morons are already attacking the Keynesian rescue measures that Alistair Darling - one of the less hapless New Labour figures - applied to save it, and it would be a disaster were their allies to be returned to power. None of the three main parties at this election is standing on a social democratic platform but what I do know is that for all its face-lifts the Conservative Party remains the sworn enemy of social democracy. I'll be voting Labour without enthusiasm as I live in a safe Labour seat, and I urge everyone to vote for the party - Labour, Lib Dem, Plaid or whoever - that stands most chance of stopping Cameron in their seat.

Cox on the Box

I'm feeling an addict's first twinges of withdrawal now that Brian Cox's excellent BBC 2 science series Wonders of the Solar System has finished. I'll admit that I didn't warm to the series as soon as I should have, put off by press descriptions of Cox as the "Rock-Star Professor". His Jamie-Oliver-like elfin cuteness put my back up at first sight too, portending a torrent of Disney-fied gush and wonder, and I expected that the content would be a rehash of every other astronomy series of the past 20 years. I couldn't have been more wrong. 

Slowly but surely throughout the series Cox used the existence of the other bodies in our solar system as a framework on which to integrate all the latest findings in terrestrial geology, geography and biology, but in such a subtle fashion that you hardly noticed him doing it. He did plenty of whizzing around the world in helicopters, jet fighters and submarines to keep the Top Gear crowd watching, but never for the thrills alone, always to show us how thin the blue layer of our atmosphere is, the enormous gap ripped by a post-Ice Age flood into the Scablands of Washington State, or the sulphur-eating inhabitants of a deep ocean smoker. Cox had sufficient taste to let magnificent film of the real planet do the talking instead of indulging the now-obligatory expensive CGI effects. 


Gradually two themes emerged: first of all a tutorial in energetics, and depending upon that a tutorial in the conditions that support life. Physics tells us that nothing  can happen without a source of energy to drive it, how to identify and measure such sources of energy, and once one has grasped its principles energetic analysis wonderfully clarifies judgment about the real world - you can accept or dismiss all kinds of stories about phenomena on energetic grounds alone. It's an aspect of science that's poorly taught in schools and of which most lay people (including politicians) are almost entirely ignorant, with disastrous consequences for the quality of debate about, for example, climate change and transport policy. 


Cox has a natural gift for making energetics sound so easy that it didn't even feel like a lesson, as he enthused over the sulphur volcanoes of Io, the ice-geysers of Enceladus and the way that Mars is now dead because, in effect, its battery ran out. In the last episode of the series it all came together in the most satisfying way as Cox inquired into the probability of life in other parts of the solar system, deploying a variety of extreme environments on Earth - from deep ocean to glacier to Atacama Desert - as clues. All a long way from the slightly creepy search for intelligent life performed by SETI, this was, er, down to earth biology concerning the possibility of slime bacteria living in caves under the Martian surface. 


Cox showed us the way life evolved on our planet and might be doing so on others in a fully cosmic context, with no agonising about whether evolution is a fact: he took that for granted, as intelligent lifeforms were able to do back in the 1960s before evangelical cretinism threw sand in the works. In the last minutes of the program he gave the most unaffected and touching defence of a higher humanism that I've heard for years: we're likely to be the most complex lifeform that has so far emerged and that now makes us responsible toward other life-forms rather than in dominion over them as believers in Divine Providence would have it. Fitting compensation for all the dumbed-down Horizons we've suffered recently, and well worth the licence fee.  

In Memoriam: Charlie Gillett

 

Charlie Gillett, a great musicologist, DJ and evangelist for grown-up popular music has died at the age of 68 of a rare auto-immune disorder. I knew Charlie briefly in the early 1970s when we both wrote for Bob Houston's short-lived but excellent music magazine Cream - we shared a taste for obscure rockabilly, free jazz and US soul music of the "golden age" (before the accursed Philly Sound).  His book on rhythm and blues, The Sound of The City is still the definitive explanation of the roots of the post-war revolution in popular music. 
But Charlie meant more still to me for his radio show "Honky Tonk" which ran every Sunday from 1972 through 1978 on  BBC Radio London. I looked forward to that show throughout the week, and the sheer quality and originality of his choices helped to keep me sane during the depressing and disillusioned days of the early '70s. I first heard Elvis Costello and Ian Dury thanks to Charlie, whose role as a pre-punk prophet has yet to be fully acknowledged. As we plunge into another of those cyclic infantilisations of the popular music scene, his absence will be hard to bear. Even in these days of instant access to all the music through Spotify or iTunes, we still need people of taste to dig up the gems, and Charlie was one of the best.

Photo Shopping

By chance I caught a BBC Radio 4 programme that I'd never heard of called "You and Yours" yesterday (listen here) and it covered the most extraordinary story. The seaside town of Whitley Bay, Northumbria, has a blighted town-centre typical of the area in which 49 shops are currently derelict. However an enterprising estate agent there had the brilliant idea of pasting a life-sized photograph of a luxury delicatessen over one of the shop windows, and it's been so well received that others will soon follow. People say it makes the place less depressing, and it may even slow the crumbling of property prices.

You could hardly make this story up - the "Society of the Spectacle" reveals its actuality, and completely without embarassment. Perhaps we should carry on further down this road, pasting photographs of palaces and hospitals onto derelict warehouse, and all of us going around in smiling Johnny Depp masks. Modern digital photo technologies should keep such a scheme within even the tight public expenditure budgets hinted at by Cameron and Osborne.

Facing Up to the Falklands

In today's Observer Nick Cohen offers a lucid and dignified confession (here) that most of the British Left, himself included, were wrong in 1982 to oppose Thatcher's military expedition to liberate the Falkland Islands from Argentine invasion. He goes on to discuss the US neocons' support for Argentina in that conflict, and explains clearly how the Left bamboozled itself with an anti-imperialist rhetoric that had more to do with visceral hatred of Thatcher than with common sense (what was the Argentine junta doing if not imperialism?) The Left has never recovered from the political damage it suffered then.

The main point of his article is that the current spat over Falklands oil is unlikely to lead to war, but that if it does the Left should support Britain, and that he believes that this time the Obama administration would too. I applaud this display of realism but must confess to one nagging suspicion. His entirely-correct line of reasoning vis a vis the Falklands campaign could by extension be brought to bear to justify support for the Iraq War, which Cohen has never renounced. It's at this point one needs to bring up the vital distinction between idealism and pragmatism. The same moral argument does indeed apply to removing Saddam Hussein as did to removing Galtieri's troops from the Falklands. However the pragmatic realities on the ground were entirely different, namely:

1) The level of military force involved was orders of magnitude less: Britain could and did achieve a rapid victory on its own using a small taskforce (which is not to diminish the courage and effort of those who had to fight there). 

2) The territory was tiny, homogeneously British, there were no adversary national groups present who needed to be kept apart, and no new nation needed to be constructed after victory.

3)  They didn't completely demolish the infrastructure of the Falklands during the fighting because there barely was any in that thinly-populated, bleak moorland sheep-rearing community. 

4) It wasn't necessary to lie to Parliament or to the British public to justify launching the Falklands campaign because they both supported it already.

In fact this comparison might make an excellent textbook example of the limits of idealism in real politics.

Predator: the Next Installment

In a previous post here I expressed my admiration for James K Galbraith's 2008 book "The Predator State", in which the US economist describes the way a cabal of politicians, bankers, businessmen, bent union officials and downright gangsters hijacked the social democratic state institutions created in the aftermath of World War II. The levers that Roosevelt's New Deal invented with which to regulate the economy, in these corrupt hands became shovels with with to loot the public purse.


When I reviewed this book for Political Quarterly (Volume 80 Issue 3, pp443-5, July 2009), for an instant I wondered whether its argument represents some sort of paranoid conspiracy theory, perhaps because I'd just been reading James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy. However Galbraith's sober and lucid arguments, illustrated with impeccably sourced statistics, soon convinced me otherwise. Events since then (only a year ago) have further reinforced that conviction, that Galbraith is the only commentator who comes close to grasping what is actually going.


First we had our own little scandal here in the UK - over MPs fiddling their expenses - which as I opined in that same earlier post is pretty small beer as these affairs go. Then this January came the "devastating" ruling of the US Supreme Court which threw out all limits on corporate and union political spending, enabling those with unlimited funds to buy political influence with impunity (see Ronald Dworkin's summary of this affair in the New York Review).


In the aftermath of the bank collapses, credit crunch and recession that many sensible people believed must lead to more regulation and responsible government, it's becoming clear that nothing of the sort is going to happen: the predators are still firmly entrenched, still cocky, still confident that nothing that Obama (still less New Labour) is going to do will hurt them.


In the latest London Review of Books there's a thought-provoking review by Peter Mair of Martin Bell's book on the MPs expenses scandal, "A Very British Revolution". Mair uses Bell's book as a launching pad for an extended essay on the moral degeneration of the political classes, a topic which he's well placed to observe living as he does in Berlusconi's Italy and being of Irish descent. He quotes plenty of examples of outright corruption from around the world, with figures, to which public opinion has become more or less blind - he deploys the corruption rankings compiled by Transparency International to amusing effect throughout (New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore are the least corrupt, the UK squats at number 17, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are the bottom-feeders at 71). Charles Haughey's Fianna Fail rule in Ireland was in effect the rule of the Irish building industry; Gerhard Schröder passed straight from Germany's chancellor to the board of a Gazprom subsidiary, three months after signing a deal with Putin for a gas pipeline; the whole Russian Gazprom/Yukos business might provide a juicy future plot for Ellroy, were he not so provincially American.  


Mair draws attention to some of the more familiar factors - the steep decline in prestige of the political profession in recent decades, and the *relative* underpayment of MPs, not relative to the rest of us but to the super-rich financiers and businessmen with whom they eat, drink and negotiate every day. He points up the growth of populist parties throughout Europe, as citizens recoil from the political process altogether. But he is more interested in structural factors, like the cost of running a political party which is no longer a mass party, and hence no longer commands an army of unpaid canvassers and organizers. All those pollsters, marketing gurus and consultants charge predatory fees for their advice, and the advice typically costs millions more to implement (eg. TV advert time).


He claims that wealthy individuals and corporations have tired of corrupting existing political parties and seek to "cut out the middle-man" by setting up parties of their own. Berlusconi is the paradigm case: he set up Forza Italia as an extension of his media empire having tired of suborning Craxi's socialist party throughout the 1980s. Organised crime sponsors political parties throughout the former-soviet republics and, particularly the cocaine syndicates, in Latin America.


The lesson to be learned from all this is that our political classes have almost seceded from society at large to become a parasitic caste, but the solution is not to be found in preaching anarchism or anti-state libertarianism. Technology makes modern industrial economies extremely productive but also extremely fragile: we constantly live barely 72 hours away from the chaos of a Haiti, should our electricity, water and food distribution systems be disrupted in any significant way (we saw an inkling of this during the tanker driver's strike, when submerged panic was visible in Tony Blair's eyes on the evening news). Not only can we not do without the state, but the state is the only institution that can defend us against unfettered predation by the hard men - assuming, that is, we can wake up and wrest it back from the predators who are eating it from within.


The fact that Gordon Brown has recently started to remember some of the vocabulary of social democracy forces me to say, against all previous experience and my better judgment, that the next election matters a lot and that a Labour/Lib Dem coalition might be the least disastrous result... In the meantime, please, please read "The Predator State".