My daughter came home from school this week with a contract for me to sign.  I don't recall seeing a draft.  I was not involved in the negotiation.  It changed terms and conditions on a service which I was already receiving and from which I could not withdraw.  There had been no indication at the beginning of service provision that such terms and conditions could be imposed without consultation.  In any other area of life, it would be quickly voided.  It was, of course, one of these new School Agreements and I signed because my wife, who is of the pragmatic 'choose your battles and bugger high principle' school of thought, pretty well told me to.  

In fact, it is just a piece of paper.  And that is the problem.  Without debate and struggle, such social contracts are so much fluff.  No-one was going to haul me out of bed at 5.00am to put on rough stripes and be sent to a labour camp for failing to meet its clauses.  The worst that could happen is that some snotty official would feel that they had an edge of high ground in a dispute if they could point to some breach of some clause in a paper that I had signed.  That sort of thing cuts no ice with me but many will be suitably cowed.

So why the ressentiment?  Well, apart from the dubious methodology in the context of my understanding of political philosophy, most obviously, the personal insult.  Because some parents would appear not to be trusted to fulfil a series of conditions that , in fact, seem broadly fine by me (there is no quarrel with the general standards in the Agreement but merely with their formalisation) and would have been accepted as friendly guidelines at any time, I am now being obliged to affirm with my signature (which is part of me) what comes naturally.  The insult is that the authorities quite clearly do not trust me and they do not trust me because they do not know me.  Indeed, not only schools but doctors, the police and banks do not know me and so they do not trust me.  I am insulted because my honour is placed equal to that of the irresponsible parent, the malingerer, the petty criminal and the fraudster.  It may seem thoroughly eighteenth century but I have been slapped across my cheek with a metaphorical glove and I cannot demand satisfaction.

But there is more.  I am not out of control, society is.  Society is out of control because these authorities cannot manage the conditions that, collectively, they have partially created and certainly refused to analyse and protest about in the last thirty years  The authorities' solution is regulation and regulation becomes a matter of paper.  The 'grande illusion' is that if you have written something down, it becomes a fact in the world and a truth - the classic weakness of all those who think the world can be managed by intellect alone and who are really rather scared of it.  So, faced by disorder, authority seems determined to 'file us away' as if signing that bit of paper will really change conduct where it is needed.  Worse, it has chipped away further at my own rapidly diminishing regard for authority and I will certainly be advising my children to remain vigilant, cautious and even resistant in its presence.  It, not me, cannot be trusted in the long run of history.

My daughter made a separate but interesting point.  She is a good, well-behaved kid with a critical faculty that many should envy.  The school (indeed both my kids' schools) have started instituting the sort of small-scale rule changes that drive matters back towards the environment I grew up in.  Many of these are harmless enough and I think many teenagers want and need boundaries to rebel against so one is doing them a favour by creating borders against which they can struggle.  So I have no problem with these rules even when they are on the edge of ridiculous.  But the fact of the rule changes started to get her thinking about the bargain between her and the school and, since the rules were imposed from above without consultation or warning, her instinct was cynical - and rebellious.  Her respect for authority has not been increased because authority appears to be acting without reason and in an arbitrary manner.  Form is taking over from substance - again!

Much of this agenda is the last fling of the expert classes against two phenomena that they cannot cope with - the first is the desire of Middle England to have something done so long as it isn't what needs to be done (essentially the return to social conditions before Thatcher ripped the country apart) and the second is that many of these kids are much brighter and more clued up than they are.  If you want respect from kids, respect them - police the parks, make the rules rational, provide something in return.

Anyway, I've got that out of my system - the current choice between the Tory Party of Ancram and a running-scared Cameron on the one side and a Brown who seems to have discovered Thatcher (albeit for cynical political reasons) on the other suggests that we are going to get a lot more of this stuff dumped ineffectively on the only sections of society who actually are maintaining traditional family standards. 

Tags: family, politics
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: cranky

Now here is a film that I can recommend 100% ... The Prestige.  There is magic as, well, magick and there is magic that is really science and artifice, the illusion of the stage magician.  The Prestige, from the novel by Christopher Priest, is about the last two and more.  It is one of those rare films that is utterly flawless - direction, mise-en-scene, story-line, script, acting (notably Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, but also Michael Caine).  Even David Bowie as Tesla jars no more than Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 - in other words, scarcely at all.  Nothing may be said of the plot, I am afraid, and you might be advised to see the film before reading the book.  But you will feel, as you watch it, as if you are seeing the late nineteenth century world for the first time just as it might have been - and not as BBC costume drama.  You will see behind screens and inside machinery.  You will see how craftsmanship could create things out of wood and metal as fascinating to audiences of that time as anything created today by digital technology for the audiences of our day.  

But none of this would have been possible without the genius of the prolific Christopher Priest (though novel and book are different) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Priest_(science_fiction_writer)   Priest covered social breakdown and migration in the UK with a dark insightful eye in his Fugue for A Darkening Island in 1973 and his Dream of Wessex looked at virtual reality as fantasy in 1977 long before Snowcrash.  His tribute to H.G Wells, The Space Machine (1976), is a rollicking adventure that has its own hidden debt to Arthur C. Clarke, while the 2002 novel The Separation approaches the alternate history of the Second World War in a way that might be a frustrating read on occasions (this is literary science fiction after all, not mere adventure) but is well worth the effort expended.  See the film (which is currently running on Filmflex) and read the books if you can get hold of them.

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Best not to hide away when I get it wrong!  I certainly did not get it wrong in backing Jon Cruddas for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party.  He came from nowhere to third place.  Those interested in these things can pick up some of the story from the Compass Online website at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/article.asp?n=713   What I did not get right was my reasonably firm belief that Hilary Benn would get the job.  I was not alone - the bookies put him ahead and my insiders in the Party Establishment were going to vote for him (see my Posting of June 2nd).  But something went wrong for him between the first week of June and the closing of the ballot.  My sources told me that he was lack lustre in public and failed to present any new ideas.  He switched off the unions and he failed to inspire the constituency activists.

Meanwhile, as Blair started to move off, no doubt  to the great get-rich-quick lecture circuit and the halfling-job of Special Envoy to the Middle East, the release of tension moved the Party to the Left., though not dangerously so.  The two Left-Blair loyalists who had been biding their time, Peter Hain and Benn, were swept aside.  This game was played out under Single Transferable Vote and so enabled Harriet Harman, simultaneously a candidate of the Left and a loyalist to Gordon Brown, to get the job as a woman who had proved herself independent-minded, loyal to the future and in tune with the culture of the party.  The centre-right candidate (Alan Johnston) did creditably (there was only 0.8% between the final two candidates) but the centre of the party had now shifted from the Far Right to the sensible Left.  I always knew Cruddas could not win (he had upset too many on the Hard Left and he had unnnerved the Party Establishment), but I am very pleased that Harman got the job and that Cruddas reached third place.  On this occasion, it was very good to be wrong.

Tags: culture, politics
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: satisfied

On June 17th, I attended a SOAS/British-Syrian Society Conference on the Golan Heights - pretty dry stuff you would think but not so.  As a so-called PR expert, I got called on to the final panel at short notice (Mark Seddon of Al-Jazeera could not make it) to sit alongside such luminaries as my friend Ghayth Armanazi of the Syrian Media Centre, Ian Black of The Guardian, Patrick Seale, Charles Glass and Sharif Nashashibi of Arab Media Watch to discuss why it was that the Arab side of the debate could not get its message across.  Well, I am not bad at bluffing my way through these things - partly because I try to get the same few, very simple, messages through: that political communications is, despite claims to the contrary, rocket science, a highly honed technology that emerging countries simply need to invest in when faced by the superior skills of the West; that information and political warfare are both very different from propaganda and that propaganda no longer works; that democracies work in mysterious ways that need to be understood and mastered (and I believe, eventually, emulated); and that elites are stuck in their own group-think wherever you are in the world (and that group-think literally kills).

The Reception was nice - a chat with old friends from the British-Syrian and Arabist community [Ambassador Sami Kiyami, Antar and Barbara Bandi, Fawaz Akhras, John McHugo] and a few new acquaintances - a bottle of cherry liqueur from the Heights to take home.  The Middle Eastern theme continues on Monday morning as I chair a debate between the two sides on the Israel boycott debate where I shall stay studiously neutral.  Although I am widely associated with the Arab political community, I have a good many friends from the Zionist and London-Jewish community.  I can say that I have never once heard an Arab, let alone a Syrian, ever utter an 'anti-semitic' word in all the years I have moved in those circles.  Yet I know that so many of my Jewish friends are utterly convinced that every Arab is liable to have a copy of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by their bedside.  There are certainly issues surrounding stereotyping and political propaganda in the Arab world, especially at 'street level', but much of the fear has been engineered on both sides.  As the Ambassador pointed out, you should see what they write about Arabs in the French educational system.

The core problems remain what they always have been - imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, relative deprivation and poverty.  If Hamas has developed a base in Gaza this week, it is because some idiots in Washington and Tel Aviv (supported by weaklings in Brussels and London) have not had the imagination and humanity to relieve the suffering of a lot of ordinary people when they could have done.  And so it goes - economic disadvantage and humiliation feed a radicalism that I find hard to condemn because I would share it if I lived in those conditions.  The West is going to reap a whirlwind (not just in the Middle East) from its history of economic exploitation and cultural imperialism as its technological advantage begins to lessen - and only the wise can see this.  It is contentious to say this but whole distinct cultures of Judaism in the Middle East, from Baghdad to Aleppo and onwards, have been sacrificed on the altar of Middle European Zionism as one nationalism calls forth another, eventually culminating in the viciousness of the Iraqi branch of Baathism.  I would love to see Jews in these cities again, not as tourists or businessman, but as part of the community - and, you know, so would many Arabs.  Now even the Christians are being chased out as 'crusaders'.  The vast majority of these Christians are not any more 'Western' or 'agents of imperialism' than the Jews who were forced to leave before them.  So many communities, Palestinian, Iraqi or whatever, forced into enclaves, into a diaspora and into camps - enough already!  

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Denis Healey gave a talk and answered questions at the Labour History Group in Committee Room 4A in the House of Lords on June 14th.  This man is 90 and with a razor sharp mind.  The politics was stimulating enough but what was really interesting was his advice to eager youngsters that they should (in effect) 'get a life', that poetry, music and the arts were always going to be far more important than holding office and politics.  Of course, he has decided to forget that he was once a driven man himself, but he was driven (remembering that this is a man who had seen war at close quarters as beach master at Anzio) by fundamental principle - in his case, to avoid a Third World War that would have involved nuclear weapons of devastating destructive power.  His politics were of then and not now but he had the good grace to understand this. There were, however, insights for today.  He told of why he felt that we had won the Indonesian war against the Communists but  the Americans had lost the near-contemporary one in Vietnam.  As Minister of Defence, he had simply refused to use bombers despite pressure from the military side.  To him it was axiomatic that if you kill villagers, you create more and more determined insurgents. This is a lesson the US has still not learnt if the experience of Afghanistan is anything to go by.

I have seen four 'ancient' Labour politicians at close quarters in the last few years - Michael Foot (with whom I worked in the refinancing of Tribune), Tony Benn, the late Barbara Castle and now Denis Healey. They all four make and made the current bunch seem like pygmies.  Why?  Is it a romantic attachment to the past?  No, not at all.  Each of them are or were in their different ways, people of passion and engagement instead of manipulation and management, men and a woman who could engage with ideas and were grounded in profound core values.  Perhaps I should consider the late Robin Cook as someone who fell into that category.  Perhaps Gordon Brown and John Reid should be included.  But so many contemporary politicians seem flaccid by comparison.  Healey closed with a rendering of a great Shakespearian sonnet to his wide, Edna, wholly from memory as he quoted much poetry that evening from memory.  This too was impressive - a love, expressed in public, that was still strong after so many years.

Tags: international affairs, politics
Current Location: London
Current Mood: pensive

Lobster 53 is now out and contains my quick dissection of State panic at the global security situation [Fifth Column: The Brittle Society].  This has already been well received based on contact from friends who are investigative journalists.  Lobster is a small circulation, twice-yearly but longstanding review of parapolitics.  It is edited by Robin Ramsay, who wrote the small Pocket Essentials Guides to Conspiracy Theory and to the rise of New Labour, but has written much else besides.  Lobster eschews nonsense better suited to the X-Files, and looks openly at how political events, past and future, might be looked at afresh in terms of motivation and personal connection.  It has some investigative scalps to its credit, including the original exposure of the scandals known as the Colin Wallace/'Wilson plots' story.  This may be arcane stuff to today's youngsters but is important in reminding us that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  Lobster is £3.00 and can be obtained from Robin at 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB - robin@lobster.karoo.co.uk - www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 

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The Compass Conference on Saturday was worthy enough but not enlightening.  The Left said what the Left says to itself.  One gets the sense, still, of a community living in a world of ends and values but with no real will or strategy to effect the means ... meanwhile, conferences like this are good for meeting old friends and keeping in touch.  The best value of the day was a friendly beer between Mark Seddon (Al-Jazeera, formerly Editor of Tribune), Ken Penton (Political Officer of Community), Peter Kenyon (Labour Commission) and myself and, earlier, meeting up with the Chartist crowd - Martin Cook, Duncan Bowie, Trevor Fisher et al - old comrades in the forlorn struggle for sensible democracy within both Party and State.  I feel a sort of long, slow letting go of the past.  The only really bright spark of the day was to see so many bright, lively and 'together' youngsters around the Conference.  Chartist itself, a bi-monthly magazine, is just left-wing decency and commonsense writ large - www.chartist.org.uk  It is the hidden jewel of centre-left political discussion (and that is not just because, once in a blue moon, it takes a grumpy middle-aged article from me).

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A new thread in this Journal is going to have to be my home town Tunbridge Wells.  Oh, where to begin!  A glossy magazine ['Issue One It's Full of Surprises'] has appeared through our door this week with an editorial telling us all how wonderful it is to live in Tunbridge Wells.  Well, it may be so if you live in one of the nice suburban areas or one of the cute little Wealden villages within the Borough and come into town for the shopping, but if you live in the town itself, it is a decaying sink pit of urban degradation, disorder, environmental neglect and noise - pretty well like every other small town centre turned over to retail therapy and without a proper community to sustain it.  We may return to this theme.  The latest wheeze is to get us all excited about the Tour de France coming through the town - a day of may-hem for local residents so that the big retailers can send the extra profits back up to head office and the 'newsagent vote' can stay solid for the local Tories whose hold over the Borough is only one notch down from that of Nazarbeyev in Kazakhstan.  

OK, so I sound churlish, but there is a bigger issue here.  Events derived from real community enterprise are being displaced across the country by increasingly massive sponsored profit-making extravaganzas. This is becoming the reality of private/public partnership - not the employment of private will, enterprise and technique by a strong, intelligent and public spirited government but the delegation of wealth creation to 'circuses'.  I am a strong supporter of the right sort of employment of the private sector in meeting social needs - housing, healthcare add-ons, specialist training and education or whatever will improve the lot of the people.  But handing over our streets and communities to disruptive commercial sports and entertainment events!  What good is that!

Communities are expected, indeed are assumed, because of the Press coverage, to be excited and supportive.  Opponents are made to feel anti-social for 'spoiling other people's fun' by talking these events down.  But this is from the official Tunbridge Wells Borough Council magazine:  "The publicity caravan is expected to arrive ... just before 11.30am ... a large procession of sponsors' vehicles with people throwing goodies and souvenirs into the crowds and generally creating excitement for the spectators."  Would you be surprised to know that this is a Council that has shifted to fortnightly rubbish collection and which claims to be environmentally conscious?  Yet here is a Council officially getting excited about give-away consumer tat being thrown into the crowds artificially to generate excitement.  This is a culture of Roman Circuses without the Bread.

Tags: general news, politics, tunbridge wells
Current Location: London & Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: cynical

I am feeling rather pleased with myself.  As far as politics are concerned, I live in two worlds - as cold-hearted objective analyst of what is happening, and what will happen, and as true believer in the possibility of a better world (or 'sad bastard' as my old political mucker Andy Howell might phrase it).  In the first capacity, I put myself on the line in the January Edition of Public Affairs News and made a firm prediction of Gordon Brown as Leader (with no challenger emerging) and Hilary Benn as Deputy Leader.   But my heart was elsewhere - and I threw my lot in wholly with an old political opponent, Jon Cruddas, for the Deputy Leadership as a 'man who had seen the light'.  

Now the results from the Labour Party constituencies shows that Hilary Benn got the most nominations and Jon Cruddas (who was discounted at first by the bookies) got the second most out of the six candidates.  So my head seems to be working OK and so is my heart!  Either will do - and Harman who came third is a good candidate as well.  The 'soul' of the Labour Movement appears to be broadly intact.  Anyway, there is many a slip 'twixt cup and lip but not a bad morning's news.  Why, ten years later, things may actually get (albeit briefly) better ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6712781.stm
http://www.epolitix.com/EN/News/200706/af85126d-7784-4fab-91d6-983b4f59db23.htm

Tags: politics
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: chipper

In the mid-1990s (and earlier in the late 1970s), I wasted a lot of time on politics. I suppose it is in the family tradition but I never seriously wanted to be a politician.  There is little more soul-destroying in life than bag-carrying for people who are often not very bright and not very nice just to climb the greasy pole of public life  So, I dabbled - in and out, doing my duty and little more.  Now I am back at it again - and all because I still hold some small sway over a tiny bit of the New Labour Party with a vote in the Deputy Leadership Election.  The long and tedious story will be of no interest to readers but I sit, once again, in the middle of it all, trying to explain, once again, one set of Lefties' anger to another set of Lefties or to persuade the over-principled to compromise just a little or get nothing at all.  And I am not even a member of the bloody Party any more!  Anyway, it is all over in a few weeks and I can go back to being a political nobody again.  For the record, I am for the Brown-Cruddas slate.  Brown is obviously the next Prime Minister because he has no opposition (and thereby hangs a tale) so the struggle is over who will be his Party Deputy (not Deputy Prime Minister, mind you).  If Cruddas (the preferred candidate) or Harman (the best of the two women candidates) or Benn ( a soft progressive loyalist) get in, then I suppose I'll have to keep my promise and re-join the Party.  The other three candidates fill one with existential gloom: If any of them gets voted in, I can safely stay away with a clear conscience.

Tags: politics
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: pessimistic