June 29, 2009
From Standpoint
By the summer of 2007, Kirstie Allsopp’s future seemed pre-ordained. She would be loathed, then ridiculed, then forgotten. Years afterwards, people would shake themselves when they discovered in a newspaper a “where are they now” feature that she was still alive, much as we shake ourselves when we discover that the Turner Prize or Jeffrey Archer did not disappear in the Nineties but continue to this day.
The business cycle demanded the destruction of her reputation. The equally capricious wheel of fortune, which raises then dashes the careers of celebrities, was turning against her. Allsopp presented Location, Location, Location, Channel 4’s contribution to the property bubble. Technically, she co-presented the programme with Phil Spencer. Alas, although he knew the estate agency business and was a more than competent broadcaster, he was, like Denis Thatcher with Margaret or Charles with Diana, a second-string player always in the shade of the star. Viewers could not take their eyes off Allsopp, or to be correct, the Honourable Kirstie Allsopp, daughter of Charles Henry Allsopp, 6th Baron Hindlip. She demanded attention. Bertie Wooster might have been speaking of her when he described “one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge”.
Read the whole thing
June 28, 2009
If it had the integrity to follow through the logic of its position, the government would make membership of the British National party a criminal offence. Ministers would be behaving illiberally – dangerously so, for reasons I will get to – but at least they would be demonstrating a consistency in their dealings with fascistic forces that has so far evaded them.
Instead of being honest, the political left is slowly turning Britain into a country where the state can blacklist members of a foul but legal political party. To date, it has only given itself the power to sack police and prison officers for membership of the BNP. Elsewhere, soldiers cannot take part in political activity and doctors, nurses, civil servants and teachers must not allow their beliefs to compromise their professional conduct, but they can keep their allegiances to themselves.
More at the Observer here
June 26, 2009
Writing about the English character seems a fool’s game. For every generalisation you offer, the opposite is also true. The English are a peaceful people who leave the violent overthrow of governments to the French and other excitable foreigners. So it appears, until you remember that French students and workers failed to overthrow Charles de Gaulle in the May 1968 évènements, while the 1970-74 Heath government was destroyed by striking miners, the 1974-79 Labour government by striking public-sector workers and that the proximate cause for Margaret Thatcher’s ejection from power was the 1990 poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square.
What about the agreement of foreign and native observers that English reserve remains a solid national trait? At first glance, the urge for privacy and the importance attached to not opening yourself to ridicule by revealing your true feelings does indeed seem a constant. “Ideally, the English male would rather not issue any definite invitation at all, sexual or social, preferring to achieve his goal though a series of subtle hints and oblique manoeuvres, often so understated as to be almost undetectable,” sighed the anthropologist Kate Fox in her Watching the English. Her foreign female friends told her they could not tell if Englishmen were politely flirting or seriously interested, and constantly complained about “protean behaviour they attribute to shyness, arrogance or repressed homosexuality depending on their degree of exasperation”. All true, as equally frustrated Englishwomen will confirm.
Yet those same foreign friends must have noticed the garish mourning for dead celebrities and princesses, the licentiousness of the Saturday night drinking crowds, the self-exposure of the working-class guests on daytime television and the gushing exhibitionism of the upper-middle-class actors on the evening chat shows.
One trait remains permanent, however: an unyielding suspicion of unwarranted power. No other culture has so many expressions to cut the grandiose down to size. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” “I’m not your servant.” “Who does he think he is?” “She’s no better than she ought to be.” “He thinks he’s above the law.” “She thinks there’s one rule for her and one for the rest of us.” “He’s trying it on.” “She’s taking a liberty/taking advantage/taking the mickey/taking the piss.” And although it is dying out with the passing of the old class system, you still hear sneering voices saying, “He’s got ideas above his station”.
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June 15, 2009
From the Observer
In his brutality and his obsessions, James W von Brunn was both a relic of the old far right and a sign of things to come. Before he murdered a security guard at the doors of the Washington Holocaust museum – murdered, that is, at a memorial to a mass murder he denied – he was tied into the old web of international neo-fascism. As might be predicted, he went to meetings of the American Friends of the British National party, where he could share his desire to drive the blacks and the Jews from the “white nations” with what friends he could find.
He did not seem to find many. Eighty-eight years old, living in a condo, with a broken marriage behind him, he even joined Mensa, the habitual rest home for failures with delusions of grandeur. Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard, who died for politely opening the door of his car, was in every respect the better man. After the killing, American newspapers decided that von Brunn was a typical white supremacist. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, had gloated that the first black president was a “visual aid” whose presence in the White House would recruit a new generation of racists and the press quoted civil rights groups who worried understandably about how many would sign up and how violent they would be.
Yet for all his roots in neo-Nazism, von Brunn was also a transitional figure who typified a wider range of forces than I can adequately squeeze into the “far right” label. He was an enthusiastic “truther”, who went on the net to deny that the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington had surprised the conspirators in power who secretly controlled America. He hated Bill O’Reilly of Fox News and neocons as much as the New York Times and Obama. “It doesn’t matter that you despise Jews-neocons-Bill O’Reilly,” he declared in one of his incoherent internet postings. “You pay the kosher tax – or else you don’t eat.”
The last time I heard similar remarks was not in the back room of a Leeds pub but the elegant gardens of Christ Church College.
Keep reading →
June 7, 2009
From the City to Westminster, it’s clear that doing nothing is still the profitable and prudent option.
From the Observer
In normal times, he who plays safe plays best. The assumption that an apparently doomed leader will survive or apparently calamitous policy come good in the end is true more frequently than radicals like to admit. Going along with the conventional wisdom not only ensures your career will prosper, but also, and perhaps to your surprise, puts you on the right side of the argument. The environmental catastrophe never happens. The system does not fall apart. The advocates of urgent change turn out to be hysterics and wisdom turns out to lie with those who insisted there was never a need to panic.
I am sorry to dwell on the obvious, but we are not living through normal times but a rolling crisis. The banking crash led to recession, which led to a popular fury at the often minor, but still telling, corruptions of MPs who were fiddling expenses while the financial system boomed and bust. That anger has now concentrated on the shattered Brown administration, whose manifest failings could destroy Labour’s chances of winning another election – maybe forever, if the Liberal Democrats and Greens take over what remains of the centre-left.
In every phase of the crisis, intelligent people who could have spoken out when it may have made a difference chose to stay silent. At a time when the cowardice of the respectable has led to ruin, we do not need to concern ourselves with the pathologies of alarmists but should worry instead about the delusions of safe, sensible men and women who boast of their pragmatism.
James Purnell must be thinking of little else this weekend…
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June 4, 2009
(It’s OK the judges can’t touch me. He calls it “quackery” and “buncombe” but not “bogus”.)
This preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic “hospitals.” The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord — in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
More here
June 4, 2009
The use of the English libel laws to silence critical discussion of medical practice and scientific evidence discourages debate, denies the public access to the full picture and encourages use of the courts to silence critics. The British Chiropractic Association has sued Simon Singh for libel. The scientific community would have preferred that it had defended its position about chiropractic through an open discussion in the medical literature or mainstream media.
Full details of the campaign here
June 2, 2009
I have a discussion of the weakness of Panorama and the future of investigative journalism in a media world dominated by the BBC in the current issue of Standpoint.
In The Storm, Vince Cable’s short, sharp book on the economic crisis, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats predicts that the reaction against the failure of liberal markets will not be a revival of socialism but a turn to state capitalism. He can see the future coming in the merger of business and political interests in Berlusconi’s Italy and Putin’s Russia, the growth of the large, and largely corrupt, sovereign wealth companies in China, Venezuela and the Middle East and the nationalist and protectionist stirrings in Europe and America.
That much is uncontroversial, I thought as I read, but Cable then surprised me by emphasising a feature of growing state power that hardly anyone else has examined. “The collapse of advertising revenue supporting independent media,” he continued, will provide legitimacy to the new order by “strengthening the relative importance of state broadcasters, including our own BBC”.
George Orwell said, “To see what is front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.” People who spend a part of every day with the BBC would be shocked to hear it described as the state broadcaster…
Read the whole thing…
May 31, 2009
When chiropractors drag a science writer into the libel courts, the country has lost its backbone
The Observer, Sunday 31 May 2009
This week, Simon Singh, one of Britain’s best science writers, will decide whether to carry on playing a devilish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He has already lost £100,000 defending his right to speak frankly. He could walk away. No one would think the worse of him if he did. Or he could go on and risk losing the full million by ensnaring himself in the rapacious world of an English judiciary that seems ever eager to bow to the demands of Saudi oil billionaires, Russian oligarchs and the friends of Saddam Hussein to censor critics and punish them with staggering damages and legal fees.
It seems no choice at all. Any friend Singh phoned would tell him to cut his losses and run. But if he were to turn to the audience, he would hear scientists all but screaming at him to go to the Court of Appeal and challenge a judgment that threatens the robust discussions open societies depend on.
Go read the whole thing…
