Saturday, November 08, 2008 

Weekend links.

Perhaps it's the exhaustion from the over exertion during the week, but the comment this weekend seems a little thin.

Not so thin though that Obama's victory is still not rightly reverberating throughout the newspapers and online. The initial euphoria does seem however to have rightly given way to more circumspect analysis of how much is likely to change, with the even the first pieces emerging, from Back Towards the Locus and Mark Braund of open scepticism towards Obama. Paul Linford compares Obama's victory with Labour's in Glenrothes, whilst Gerry Hassan on OurKingdom writes of the continuing struggle for Scotland's soul. Mike Power via Neil Clark also reminds of us of how Janet Daley predicted that America would instead vote for the "war hero, the statesman who talks about foreign policy and national security with real authority." John McCain may have been a fundamentally decent man, but he's also long been a unrepentant warmonger, and exactly what was not needed after 8 years of the same under Bush.

Elsewhere, in general miscellanea, Daniel Davies takes on Trevor Phillips, who seems to have decided that his job is to think the unthinkable, which often in reality means talking out of his backside. Davies assaults him on immigration, whilst also nonsense were his remarks that a Barack Obama in this country could not become prime minister due to the institutional racism not in society, but in political parties. The fact is that a Barack Obama has not emerged in this country because our politicians routinely fail to inspire those of their own allegiance, let alone the general public. When one does, the obstacles in his or her way hardly be insurmountable. The Heresiarch meanwhile attacks Iain Dale for his apparent belief in psychics(!), Catherine Bennett remarks on how animals are often treated better than humans, the Guardian celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Human Rights Act, and it would be remiss not to link to Alix Mortimer's takedown of Hazel Blears's remarks on blogging nihilism.

Finally, the award for the worst tabloid comment piece of the weekend is again a struggle between the usual suspects. Lorraine Kelly writes that Barack Obama's best asset is his wife (not his oratory, breaking of the political mould, calmness in a crisis or opposition to the Iraq war then), whilst Amanda "Glenda Slagg" Platell aims her scattergun at the familiar targets of Fergie, Michelle Obama, which really has to be quoted to just emphasise Platell's nastiness

Michelle Obama the new Jackie O? Not with that frock she wore on the big night, arguably the most hideous acceptance outfit in the history of the free world.

No, I suspect Mrs Obama will be more like Cherie Blair - her cleverness matched only by her chippiness, her humble beginnings rammed down our throats at every opportunity.

'My number one job as First Lady is to be Mom first,' she has said. In which case, why has she spent the most formative years of her daughters' lives as a highly paid hospital administrator?

and Ulrika Jonsson. We're going to break the rules though and instead give the award to Bidisha on CiF, who wearingly mistakes the mockery and contempt for Sarah Palin for misogyny. No, Bidisha, it isn't hatred of women: it's that Palin was the epitome of Republican reverse-snobbery, an uneducated ignorant bigot that shockingly if McCain had won was, to use the cliche, a heartbeat away from being the most powerful person on the planet. That's what was frightening, and why she has deserved everything she's got.

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Friday, November 07, 2008 

A blip?

What a difference a couple of months can make: back then we were seriously discussing the possibility that Glenrothes could be Gordon Brown's last stand as Labour leader, where a defeat to the Scottish National Party would mean his cabinet colleagues would move against him, with David Miliband the most likely successor. Harold Macmillian said that it was events that were most likely to blow a government off course, but it was the apparently imminent collapse of the banking system which has turned out to be Gordon Brown's saving grace. Having bailed out them and by his own spin, having led the world at large to decide upon a similar policy, he's almost certain now to lead Labour into the next election.

The circumstances of the win in Glenrothes are enough to make you question whether there was a cock-up or conspiracy in Labour's apparent acceptance that were going to lose yesterday's vote. Use of Occam's razor would suggest the former, but how on earth do you go from the apparent doom expressed to the media by Nick Palmer, who said that he didn't know any Labour MPs who expected to win, to what looks like a remarkable in the circumstances 6,000+ majority? The betting was all on the SNP to win, with Paul Routledge alleging there was a conspiracy amongst SNP supporters to lay bets around the country in order to get the odds back in their favour, and the pundits all agreed that the SNP were likely to take it, but how do you not apparently manage to realise that you've got a more than healthy majority in the bag?

Labour's share of the vote in actual fact increased, despite their majority dropping by around 4,000, something which has not happened to a government fighting a by-election since 1982. The vote for both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats collapsed, possibly because of their failure to campaign in what was seen as a straight fight between the SNP and Labour, but it's hardly encouraging for the leadership of either party, especially David Cameron, whose hopes for the next election were on the SNP taking Labour's Scottish seats in the areas where his party is not close to being in the running.

Most impressive is perhaps not the result, but the way in which Labour so successfully, at least for now, turned the onus onto Alex Salmond. Despite the fact that it's Gordon Brown himself who's primarily responsible for the bursting of the biggest economic bubble of recent times, the attack on Salmond's plans for independence was pointed and damning. An independent Scotland would not have been able to bail out the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in the way that Westminster had, went the argument, whilst the television networks happily played along, repeating and replaying Salmond's in hindsight naive rhetoric about how Scotland, along with Iceland, Ireland and the Scandanivan nations could form an arc of prosperity if only it was freed from the union.

The last few days, in contrast, really should have been horrendously damaging for Gordon Brown and New Labour: first the European commission reported that the UK would face the deepest recession among the EU's mature economies, then the IMF issued a similar verdict, which also said the UK would be the worst hit of the world's developed economies. For a man and a spin machine which had boasted repeatedly that we were well-placed to deal with the economic downturn, if not among the best-placed, this should have been enough to puncture any sign of personal political recovery. Instead, with the election of Barack Obama helping to distract attention away from events here, the story has been the exact opposite.

To draw much else from the victory in Glenrothes would be wrong. It's almost as if the whole by-election was conducted in a vacuum: the opinion polls show at best that the Brown bounce has been fairly negligible, at least in personal terms. Labour has clawed itself back up from 20% behind the Tories to between 8 and 9% behind, which in a general election would deliver either a hung parliament or a very slight majority for David Cameron, which for a government in the middle of a third term in a soon to be recession isn't bad, but certainly isn't going to save it. As the downturn starts to really bite and unemployment rises further, it's then the resentment against Labour will likely start to really affect things. The odds are most certainly still on for a Conservative victory, and Labour's hopes in the long-term still look fleeting at best, Gordon Brown saviour of the world economy or not.

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Frank Field and preventing a British Kristallnacht.

For some reason the Guardian doesn't seem to have published today's response column from Frank Field online. One has to wonder if this might be something to do with the arguments made by Field in it. Responding to an article by Paul Oestreicher on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, in which Oestreicher referred to Field but once, quoting Peter Selby's attack on him, Field defends his call for "balanced migration" by saying that his ultimate aim is, and I quote directly, "[T]he aim must be to prevent a mini Kristallnacht in this country."

To suggest that this is a wholly distasteful comparison and allusion is an understatement, but it is perhaps one that is more appropriate than Field realises. Kristallnacht was sponsored and abetted by the German government. Field's argument that is as "unemployment rises there is a danger of increased tension as British citizens lose their jobs." This is almost identical to Phil Woolas's completely unprompted comments that "people losing their jobs makes the immigration issue extremely thorny", and that it had been "too easy to get into this country in the past and it was going to get harder." It's true that during recessions tensions are bound to rise, but those tensions very rarely turn to major unrest or riots without the deliberate involvement of those with the most to benefit from such unrest. The riots in northern England in 2001 were almost uniquely sparked by the activities of the British National Party and National Front in the respective towns. What you do not do when tensions are liable to rise is then stoke the fire: Woolas may have been addressing what he thought was a coming problem, but he also through his statement suggested that it had been too easy to get into this country, when that is simply not backed up by the facts, as Diane Abbott pointed out. He was pandering to those whom have been arguing such for years, encouraging the kind of victimhood which the BNP feeds of off. Woolas was quite openly pointing towards who's really to blame for the economic mess, and it wasn't his party. From someone that had accused the Tories' Sayeedi Warsi of pandering to the BNP over very similar comments, this was hypocrisy of the highest order.

Likewise, Field seems to be taking the opportunity afforded by the recession to gain supporters for his immigration "reforms". His invocation of a "mini Kristallnacht" as something which can only be avoided if his slamming shut of the door is introduced is not worthy of a politician that stood up to the government over the 10p tax rate. He tries to shut down dissent to his ideas by claiming that they are overwhelming supported by the public, as though this means they are unquestionable. Then finally, to add insult to injury, he states that "[A]ny outbreaks of anger will be denied public support if voters know that the labour market is closed to new migrants from outside the EU." In other words, unless we adopt my proposals, it will be understandable if the public supports the indiscriminate targeting of "foreigners" like that which occurred in Germany in 1938. And Field has the audacity to suggest that his policies should not be confused with the position of asylum seekers, when he seems to be tacitly suggesting that riots would be understandable in the current circumstances, in which asylum seekers, legal workers, illegal workers and long time citizens of this country would all be tarred with the same brush. What a thoroughly boorish and unpleasant man Field really is.

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The rise of poppy fascism.

One of the most curious things about this time of year is how supposed impartiality is temporarily suspended on almost all TV channels during the build-up to Remembrance Sunday. When this first started is beyond me, but surely poppy fascism, as Jon Snow so accurately described it, is now reaching ever more ridiculous heights. The sight last week of the panellists on Question Time, which had decamped to America for the US presidential election all wearing poppies ought to perhaps have suggested to some of the producers or higher-ups that decree that everyone seen on screen must have a poppy that there should be sensible limits on how far it should go. The BBC incidentally claims, or claimed at the time not to have a compulsory policy on poppy wearing, but incidents such as last Thursday's suggest otherwise.

It isn't of course their fault. They're just running scared, as usual, of the tabloids that think that not wearing one at this time of year is some sort of insult to the memory of those who so selflessly gave their lives in the past. It doesn't matter that the Royal British Legion themselves, in the aftermath of Snow's justification for not wearing one said that wearing a poppy is entirely voluntary and that he was justified in holding his opinion; such outbreaks of free-thinking are anathema, as is the idea of non-conformity.

Likewise, bans on wearing poppies should be similarly resisted. A young woman who protested to the Sun about not being allowed to wear one on the make-up counter in a Christian Dior store was perfectly justified in doing so; it's then that as usual things start getting completely out of hand. The Sun in response has stated that it will, predictably, name and shame any bosses or companies that ban them. Again, that's perfectly acceptable. What is not acceptable is then to do the exact opposite of that and go randomly around shopping centres looking for stores that aren't selling poppies or have employees wearing them, as the paper has:

Here’s what we found in spot checks:

LONDON: Sainsbury’s, Victoria: Poppies not sold, just two staff wearing.

M&S, central London: Not sold. One staff member wearing. A worker said: “We sell them in some stores, but not this one.”

NatWest, central London: None of 15 staff wearing.

BIRMINGHAM: HMV, Bullring: Not sold. No staff wearing them.

Tesco Express: No poppies at tills. Primark: None sold, but a quarter of staff wearing them.

YORK: Morrisons: Two staff members wearing. But a poppy vendor in store.

WHSmith: Lone security-guard wearing. Not sold.

Borders books: Not sold, one worker spotted wearing a poppy.


We've gone then from denouncing bosses that have banned them into doing the exact opposite: naming and shaming stores where employees just happen to be not wearing them. That they have a personal choice to not do so is apparently neither here nor there, as is the fact that banks and stores like HMV might have more usual things to be stocking and doing than competing with the sellers that almost always operate outdoors. The mindset behind this kind of behaviour was again summed up by someone quoted at the time of the Snow controversy:

"Any questioning of the poppy can only cause anguish to the people that have worn it with pride over the years, the families of those who gave their lives and those people who are still doing so."

Yes, any questioning. Snow's invocation of fascism, which was fought so we still had freedom of choice, could not be more apt.

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Thursday, November 06, 2008 

Offended about offence.

Talking as we were of politicians without a clue what they're going on about, here's Keith Vaz, moral crusader against video games on his latest high horse:

AN MP wants a sick computer game — where players carry out suicide bombings — hauled off the internet.

Labour’s Keith Vaz, who chairs the Home Affairs Select Committee, said Kaboom: The Suicide Bombing Game “devalues human life” and contains an “unnecessary” level of violence.

Quite so; what sort of video game which has suicide bombing as its theme should contain violence at all?

Kaboom: The Suicide Bombing Game is so popular that searching for Kaboom on Google doesn't bring it up on the first page (search for Obsolete and this pathetic blog even manages to turn up 4th). It does however now bring up the Daily Mail's story on Vaz's rage as the 8th result. Having then thusly succeeded in bringing Kaboom to a wider audience, it's only correct that we further extend its popularity by linking to it.

Kaboom is then a really rather poor, even by the standards of Flash, game in which the aim is to kill as many passers-by as possible. Perhaps I'm just sick in the head, but it's faintly amusing and fun for about five minutes to try and get the highest "score" you can, although killing more than six people with your Kim Jong Il lookalike cartoon bomber seems to be fairly difficult. Strangely, rather than distributing the detritus of the bomber over a large distance, the only gore which emerges when you detonate yourself is that of the victims, who always respectively lose their head, one of their legs and what looks vaguely like a badly drawn heart. It may scare and repulse very small children, but even your average 8-year-old is not going to be scarred for life by coming across this during an unsupervised web jaunt. It's completely harmless, pretty unlikely to be used by potential terrorists for training purposes, unless they too, instead of heading off to meet their 72 virgins in paradise can miraculously reform and explode over and over again, and possibly only likely to offend those who have nothing better to do than get offended about stupid things on the internet.

You have to wonder if Vaz has even actually bothered to play the game, which unlike playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, which he's usually campaigning against, costs nothing to do. It instead seems likely he himself is just picking up on a bandwagon started by the UK Bali Bombings Victims Group, which four years after the game was first created noted its existence and demanded it be removed from the internet. Vaz though has put down an early day motion, which is parliament's ultimate form of narcissism: utterly pointless, but it makes you look like you actually do something (charges of hypocrisy can be made in the comments). Printing these out costs in the region of £627,000 a year, and it's little wonder when the likes of Ann Cryer, the most prolific signer of lost and ridiculous causes has currently during this session, which ends shortly, put her signature to a staggering 1,863, including Vaz's one on Kaboom. Other notable ones she's signed include Blackpool Tower and Strictly Come Dancing, the Rugby League World Cup, which you'll be pleased to learn the House welcomes, Salvia Divinorum (Drug! People daring to enjoy themselves on said drug! Ban it!), Scout Membership Increases and Bethlehem and Banksy.

Maybe it's just the current mood, but pronouncing yourself offended about something that doesn't affect your life in the slightest possible way seems to have suddenly came back en vogue, having previously festered under the other outrage, which is when political correctness goes mad. The relationship between them can be incredibly slight: 5cc points out that Donal Blaney, who wanted Ross and Brand to be sacked over their calls to Andrew Sachs, thought that the "storm" about Jeremy Clarkson's remarks about lorry drivers and their propensity to kill prostitutes was all about leftists who had waited years to get him, except that err, the Daily Mail, not usually the natural home of "leftists and ecofascists" was the main one kicking up a fuss. The Sun also didn't see why anyone should be offended; it was just a joke after all, and that they employ Clarkson is neither here nor there. The Sun isn't so dismissve, equally strangely, about online jokes involving dead babies. That they are on Facebook, which directly competes with the News Corporation owned MySpace is also completely irrelevant.

It would be too much to expect our politicians to approach every subject rationally, consider whether it genuinely affects anyone other than those instantly likely to be offended because of misfortune which has sadly befallen them, and then decide whether action is necessary, mainly because they have to respond to public anxiety, and if public anxiety, or rather, what masquerades as public anxiety i.e. the front pages of the nation's tabloids is currently decreeing that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross should be lynched in public, they have a direct duty to agree with that public anxiety. That is after all how the political system works. You'd just like on occasion to come across just one of them that does the exact opposite of following the crowd. I would vote for the first politician that comes out, for example, and tells Rupert Murdoch to go fuck himself. Until then, we'll just have to make do with Keith Vaz.

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Wednesday, November 05, 2008 

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

The problem with the election of Obama for our own parliamentary equivalents is that it doesn't exactly show them in the most flattering light. Here's a master of oratory who's managed to inspire millions to go to the polls, and here's our bunch, left looking like a stood-up date on a particularly filthy evening. Whilst we've learned the lesson the hard way about charisma and the apparent "everyman" quality, you're still left absolutely bewildered, wondering where our own personal Obama might suddenly come from. With no suitable candidate in sight, we instead have to make do with both Gordon Brown and David Cameron fighting over which of them is most like Obama, reminiscent of two little boys at school squabbling over who the new girl likes the most.

Appropriately enough, the anti-Barack Obama decided upon today of all days to stick her head above the parapet and talk about something she clearly has absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever. I'm talking of course about the walking, talking, Labour-vote destroying robot which is Hazel Blears. Hazel Blears deciding to talk about political disengagement is a little like getting David Irving to talk about the problem of Holocaust denial; Blears, with perhaps only Tony McNulty for company, is the epitome of everything that an member of parliament should not be. She's loyal to the point of willing to sacrifice herself instead of the leader, or at least was to Tony Blair; she refuses to answer any question with anything resembling a straight answer; she has not a single apparent ideological bone in her body which might explain why she's joined the party she has; and when faced with overwhelming odds against her, she starts making things up. These might all be qualities which are essential to rise up the ranks of almost any political party today, but for those of us who actually want our representatives to have some specialist knowledge of any subject whatsoever, excepting motorbikes, or heaven forbid, even be more intelligent than we are, Blears and her friends, overwhelmingly Blairites, incidentally, are everything that is wrong with our politics as it stands.

All things considered, it therefore takes quite some chutzpah to imagine that you're suitably qualified to lecture anyone on political disengagement. Blears isn't interested in just why people are politically disengaged; she wishes to apportion blame. Predictably, it's not the fault of the politicians themselves for having indistinguishable policies, all the charm of a wet Sunday night in Salford or for prostituting their wares to the gutter press, but rather the media itself and additionally, bloggers.

Says Hazel:

Famously, Tony Blair called the media a "feral beast" in one of his last speeches as prime minister. But behind the eye-catching phrase was a serious and helpful analysis of a 24-hour broadcast media and shrinking, and increasingly competitive, newspaper market which demands more impact from its reporting – not the reporting of facts to enable citizens to make sense of the world, but the translation of every political discussion into a row, every difficulty a crisis, every rocky patch for the prime minister the "worst week ever".

Serious and helpful as in spelling out the bleeding obvious, as your humble narrator set out at the time. The liar in chief himself had to have balls to come out and attack the feral beast, having used said beast to get elected and then stay in power, but he of course didn't attack those most responsible for the cynicism with which politics in this country greeted, the Daily Mail and Sun, because if he had they would have chewed up said balls and spat them out in double-quick time. No, he instead attacked the Independent, which nobly stood up him to over the war and many other things, for daring to put its opinions on its front page, something the other tabloids had been doing for decades. Disingenuous could have been a adjective invented to describe Tony Blair, but he at least made the speech on his way out. Blears you would have thought still desperately believes she's on the way up.

In any event, Blears' claim that somehow it's just the media that exaggerates differences of opinion and bad days is simply nonsense. Blair himself was again partially responsible for this: he demanded and expected complete and utter unstinting loyalty. Read Alastair Campbell's diaries and see how he complained bitterly whenever the Labour party resisted his latest wheeze on principled grounds, with him condemning his colleagues for not "being serious". Blair went for such an uncompromising stance both because he wanted to be seen as the indomitable, strong leader, but also because the media had a hefty role in ensuring that Neil Kinnock never became prime minister. Campbell and Blair himself didn't want to see a Labour prime minister on the front page of the Sun again on election day inside a light-bulb, but the ends, suppressing all dissent and Faustian pacts with the likes of the Sun never justified the means. Politicians have themselves to blame as much as anyone else.

Blears continues:

And I would single out the rise of the commentariat as especially note-worthy. It is within living memory that journalists' names started to appear in newspapers; before then, no name was attached to articles. And in recent years commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting, to the point where commentators are viewed by some as every bit as important as elected politicians, with views as valid as cabinet ministers. And if you can wield influence and even power, without ever standing for office or being held to account by an electorate, it further undermines our democracy.

As Unity has already argued, this is the equivalent to suggesting that only politicians are allowed to have complete freedom of speech. Blears is correct in suggesting that comment has swelled as investigations and genuine journalism has declined, and that the Guardian's maxim, that comment is free but facts are sacred has irrevocably broken down, but the idea that commentators are viewed as valid as elected politicians is abject nonsense.

As is her follow-up point:

The commentariat operates without scrutiny or redress. They cannot be held to account for their views, even when they perform the most athletic and acrobatic of flip-flops in the space of a few weeks. I can understand when commentators disagree with each other; it's when they disagree with themselves we should worry.

Even before the advent of the blog, commentators had to deal with letters in green ink as well as to the editor, and also the occupational hazard of appearing in Hackwatch in Private Eye, not to mention being parodied by Craig Brown, as many of those considered to be the most influential have been. Half of blogging is mocking what the mainstream thinks, or disagreeing with it, especially the likes of Polly Toynbee, so ruthlessly watched and baited by the right online. The only way in which Blears' statement makes sense is if you remove the word "commentariat" and replace it with "tabloid press", but she's hardly about to start attacking them.

There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office.

Ah yes, that's it; what's wrong with our politics is that politicians themselves don't have enough space to inculcate us with their philosophy and policies. Once they have we'll realise just how wrong we are about the lack of difference between them.

She then gets onto those of us pathetic and vain enough to run blogs:

This brings me to the role of political bloggers. Perhaps because of the nature of the technology, there is a tendency for political blogs to have a Samizdat style. The most popular blogs are rightwing, ranging from the considered Tory views of Iain Dale, to the vicious nihilism of Guido Fawkes. Perhaps this is simply anti-establishment. Blogs have only existed under a Labour government. Perhaps if there was a Tory government, all the leading blogs would be left-of-centre?

There are some informative and entertaining political blogs, including those written by elected councillors. But mostly, political blogs are written by people with a disdain for the political system and politicians, who see their function as unearthing scandals, conspiracies and perceived hypocrisy.

Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.


If Blears thinks that Guido represents vicious nihilism, then she presumably hasn't read the finest of our swear bloggers, more's the pity. She does have something resembling a point regarding how the most popular blogs are right-wing; partly that is obviously because the government is nominally left-wing, but it's also because the left is far more disparate than the right tends to be in this country. As Unity has again already stated, politicians' blogs are almost notable only for their dreariness, with perhaps only Tom Watson and Tom Harris, excluding Bob, rising above it. Blears sees most bloggers as having a disdain for politicians and the political system, but while some are only concerned with the propagation of their own political world view, there are hundreds if not thousands of others who blog because they care about that self-same political system, and think that the current lot are debasing it through their very actions. Of course Blears would see this as a threat: she's wholly satisfied with how things are at the moment, where loyalty to the party counts above what is actually best for the country. She likes how this government has not been held to account for the Iraq war, for the complete abandonment of those that it was elected to defend, and for being in complete subservience to the City over everyone and everything else. Bloggers, for all their faults, and they are myriad, are the future. Barack Obama and the Democrats in America recognised this, and they treated them as more than equals. Instead of learning from their harnessing of the web, Blears only sees the dangers rather than the opportunities. She dares not imagine that she and her party are the problem, not the solution.

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Barack knew.

For all that has already been written, is currently being written, and will be written, for all of it that will come to be seen as the over-enthusiastic euphoria-influenced dementia that it was, for all of the similarly deluded denunciations of how America has in effect just signed away its freedom, it's still too easy to play down just how honestly transformational Barack Obama's election is and will be. Not because of the scale of the victory: whilst winning a more convincing victory than either of Bush's, it was not the landslide that some claim it was, broadly in line with the more successful Democratic victories; not because Obama won the popular vote; not because Obama overcame the GOP smear machine despite the filth that was consistently thrown at him; not because of the turnout, however unprecedented it was; but because of the one thing that never should have mattered: the colour of his skin.

Despite all of the hope and the expectation, we weren't willing to believe that he really could win, or really had won until McCain conceded. If McCain had ran his campaign with the same magnaminity, respect, grace, heartfeltness and humility with which he delivered his concession speech, the result could surely have been different. McCain always was a fundamentally decent, honourable man, undone on this occasion by his volatility, both in his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, even if she did help to deliver the base, and then his behaviour over the crash, first claiming the economy was fundamentally sound, next cancelling his campaign to go back to Washington to attempt to fix things single-handed. He cannot be blamed for how the campaign was run; the smears were always going to happen, regardless of the candidate. In an ideal world, he would surely be offered some sort of job by Obama; thanks to those smears, that seems highly unlikely.

Before that speech, the paranoia was still overwhelming. We feared the polls had been wrong; we feared that the exit polls, like in 2004, were wrong; we feared the Bradley effect; we feared, that somehow, the Republicans would manage to steal a second election, if not a third. As it was, we need not have worried. Pennsylvania should have tipped us off, but it took Fox News, of all stations, to call Ohio for Obama, for it to finally begin to sink in. Florida followed, and before we knew it, the game, such as it was, was over. That was the point when I went to bed, and unlike the others, my tears waited until this morning. Not at McCain's dignity; not at Obama's beautifully worded, measured and delivered victory speech, with a crowd more befitting of Glastonbury than a political rally; but instead at the tears on the face of Jesse Jackson, the old warrior, the man who only a few months ago had wanted to cut the president-elect's nuts out, who had never believed that he would see an African-American win the presidency in his life-time, now overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing the reality before his eyes. For those of us who have been critical of the fatuity of the American dream when so many in that nation remain downtrodden without any real hope, this was the shattering of our cynicism happening in front of our noses. This doesn't just show the American child of whatever skin colour, gender or sexuality that anything is possible; it shows the world's children that anything is possible.

We should not give in to wilful exaggeration, or not confront the sad fact that from here the only way is inexorably down. Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States of America at a time when few would want the job. His first task is to tame the recession which is coming, to rebuild an economy which like ours has for too long relied on the financial sector for its profits and growth. He faces two wars, one which appears to be winding down, with another which seems to coming up to boil. He faces a world which thanks to his predecessor has turned against America, no longer willing to listen to the chutzpah and bullying which has so often been the tone and content of diplomacy over the last 8 years. The amount of expectation on one man's shoulders would be enough to crush a lesser person's will. He will inevitably, especially to the European left, and maybe even the American anti-war left, be a disappointment, as the pragmatism which he will need to display will take precedence over populist measures. A swift withdrawal from Iraq, however welcome, cannot be countenanced whilst there is still the possibility that the former Sunni insurgents who now form the Awakening councils or what remains of them could go back to war, especially against a Shia administration that may yet abandon them. Likewise, in Afghanistan, where Obama seems to favour something resembling a "surge", we cannot expect him to come to the realisation that others have that Afghanistan cannot possibly exist as a democratic sovereign state in its current form. Deals with the Taliban, or what is described as it, will have to be considered. There is unlikely to be any significant difference between Obama's policy on Russia's re-emergence than that of the current administration.

The biggest problem Obama will face though is keeping together the incredibly fragile coalition that has brought him to power. America is still frighteningly polarised between the two parties, especially considering how little they often disagree over, even with Obama securing 52% of the vote to McCain's 46%. Overwhelmingly, the reason why he won that share of the vote is the economy, and those that voted for him will not be instant returns next time round. While some may have decided to be colour-blind this year, with voters directly in some cases saying to canvassers that they were "voting for the nigger", that will not last. While the Republican machine may be temporarily broken and bowed today, what Hillary Clinton long ago described as the "vast right-wing conspiracy" will shortly be doing everything in its power to make Obama a one-term president. The young that turned out yesterday, empowered by belief in this one man, will be the apathetic of the years to come. Whilst Obama is not Tony Blair, we should not dismiss the possibility that we don't yet know what we've let ourselves in for.

Tonight though such things are for another day. Today we should just enjoy the fact that after 8 years of seemingly endless war, abuses of power, contempt, arrogance, ignorance and imperial hubris, the underdog who almost became the establishment candidate has triumphed. Another world is possible. We need to hope, once again, that Barack Obama can begin to deliver on his and that exceptional promise.

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Tuesday, November 04, 2008 

Till tomorrow.

No point whatsoever in adding to the millions of words currently going unread, so here's the whole presidential election cycle as one very large image. Oh, and if Obama doesn't win, we just might be fucked.

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Labour isn't working.

When your default world-view is cynicism, not much tends to shock you. Even by the modern standards of the Labour party, this is little short of astonishing:

Ed Balls, the children's secretary, and Yvette Cooper, the chief secretary to the Treasury, have launched an attack on the so-called London living wage – the £7.45 an hour recommended minimum for all workers in the capital. They claim it would be "artificial, inflationary" and not "necessary or appropriate."

...

But the children's ministry, which is a signatory to the Child Poverty Pledge, said: "An artificial 'living wage for London' could distort labour markets and prove poor value for money. Moreover, in seeking to reflect perceptions of the cost of living, this proposal could also raise inflation expectations at a time when increased vigilance is needed on inflationary risks. We do not believe it is necessary or appropriate."

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter crap. The real danger at the moment as has been argued by David Blancheflower and others is not inflationary pressures but unemployment and if anything, deflation (not stagflation, obviously. durrr).

Who on earth is New Labour attempting to appease with this in effect two fingers to the working poor? Why, that would be the CBI, the same organisation which opposed the minimum wage from the very beginning and complains every time the government dares to raise it.

To try and get your head around just how foolish this is, even the Tories support the living wage, or at the moment at least pay lip service towards it, as do the Liberal Democrats. Why then would any person in London or other major city on the minimum wage vote Labour when they don't even pretend to be on their side, and make such utterly dismal arguments to defend the indefensible?

The irony is that this comes just as Labour has attempted to mount a defence of its record on social mobility - which the Cabinet Office's report suggests has improved, at least very slightly, since 2000. Pollyanna Toynbee naturally noted this and swiftly determined that the Tories would it wreck this slight improvement should they come to power. This is on top of a recent report from the OECD which found that also, since 2000, inequality had declined. The criticism isn't that the government hasn't tried, it has, although it has often tried to do so without soliciting attention, but that it hasn't done anywhere near enough. For all the spending on tax credits, notoriously complicated, open to fraud and only available to those over 25, the benefits have been slight. This is why increasing attention is being paid to the citizen's basic income, along with the proposal to lift the lowest paid out of tax altogether. To do so though would mean taxing the higher paid a higher rate, and to judge by the complete lack of backbone being displayed towards the bankers that we now own a share of, there simply isn't the political will for any such drastic changes to be made. When a Labour government seems to be abandoning the very basic foundations of what the party was built around, you have to wonder whether there ought to be a prosecution attempted against it under the Trades Descriptions Act.

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Monday, November 03, 2008 

From Ross and Brand to pay, with Cameron jumping on the bandwagon.

By Sunday, the Ross-Brand-Sachs story had just about burnt itself out. After all, the Mail and the others had won an extraordinary victory: Brand gone, the head of Radio 2 gone, Ross suspended and the BBC as a whole doing its best to alienate even its biggest supporters through the spinelessness which it was displaying towards those who wouldn't be satisfied until it is fully abolished. There's only so much you can make of it without even your own readers, including those that might have complained, becoming heartily sick of the boasting, pomposity and hypocrisy on stilts. If you need an indicator of just how scared the BBC had become, on Have I Got News for You on Friday night they even censored the word "twat", something almost unheard of, lest the Mail pick up on it. Back in the 70s Fawlty Towers itself featured the word twat uncensored, in one of the rearranged name plates at the very beginning. That's how far the clock has potentially been turned back.

This though is still a huge opportunity for attacking the BBC. It just needed a new angle, one which the News of the Screws could happily provide: wages. According to them, various BBC executives receive in total £14.6m a year, with some earning more than the prime minister, instantly meaning that they could not possibly be worth it. Throughout the article there is of course not a single example of comparing like with like, such as how much executives on ITV, Channel 4, or hell, even Sky receive. There's a reason for this: as Mark Thompson himself points out, his counterparts on ITV and Channel 4 earn more than he does. From last year's ITV annual report for example (PDF), we learn that Michael Grade earned in total, taking in benefits as well as salary £1,934,000, more than double what Thompson did (page 110). John Cresswell (CFO) also with benefits earned more than Thompson, taking home £1,231,000. Dawn Airey (who has since joined Five) and Rupert Howell received basic salaries of £450,000 each, of which only four BBC employees, including Thompson, earned more, and one of those is paid out of the BBC's profits from worldwide sales. The ITV report also provides an explanation of why they are paid sums which to most of us are beyond our wildest dreams:

Market positioning of salary and other elements of reward is approached on an individual basis. The aim is for base salary to be set around market median, whilst recognising the need on occasion for an appropriate premium to recognise superior talent. The Board is of the view that a senior executive team of high calibre is critical to developing and delivering the Turnaround strategy and to delivering long term value. Therefore, in a number of instances this year, senior individuals with exceptional industry knowledge and commercial skills have been recruited to the Senior Executive team, and the Committee has judged it appropriate to pay a talent premium.

In line with the majority of employees and senior executives, executive directors’ base salaries are reviewed on an annual basis, effective from 1 January. The salaries of Michael Grade, John Cresswell, Dawn Airey and Rupert Howell remain at market competitive levels and therefore the Committee determined that they would not receive any increase at 1 January 2008 over their 2007 salaries. The salaries of Dawn Airey and Rupert Howell (basic salary of £450,000 per annum in each case) were market competitive at the time of their appointments in October 2007, and have not been subject to increase since then.

In other words, most of those being castigated for their earnings out of the public purse could if they so wished most likely earn more. Jonathan Ross was an one-off, and one which is hardly likely now to be repeated.

This isn't to say that there shouldn't be concern over the largesse at public expense, or that all of those getting wads of cash are worthy of it: Peter White's salary of £220,000 for promoting the digital switch-over is completely ridiculous. Speaking of ridiculous, that is what can only be said of Simon Cowell's apparent remark to the newspaper that "these salaries are crazy". He would know about crazy salaries: according to reports, he earns £20.5 million for presenting American Idol, or £6 million more than the entirety of the BBC list. Who pays him such a ludicrous sum? Fox, owned by the same parent company as... the News of the World. That is also without taking into account how much he's paid by ITV, of which BSkyB, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, has a 17.9% share in. Add in comments by Esther Rantzen, formerly of the BBC parish but who is now rightly not considered worth a penny of anyone's money, and also Nick Ross, also no longer working for the BBC, and you have chutzpah defined.

We all know why Murdoch and his ventures target the BBC so: it stands in the way of his complete dominance of the British media. Through its quality and impartiality, it shows up his offerings for what they are: cheap and ludicrously right-wing. One thing you don't see however is politicians prostituting themselves at the feet of Mark Thompson, as Tony Blair once did and David Cameron now is. Cameron in the summer, as we learned a couple of weeks back, accepted private jet flights from Murdoch's son in law, Matthew Freud, to go and visit Rupe on his yacht, although Cameron strangely forgot to mention they were to see Murdoch in the register of member's interests. This same man was last week demanding full transparency from the BBC even whilst he himself could not manage it. As for what Cameron and Murdoch discussed we don't know, but it seems unlikely that it was their respective health. After all, after Cameron's otherwise piss-poor conference speech, the Sun had Cameron as Bob the Builder on their front page, ready to fix our broken society with a few choice implementations of mortar.

No surprises then that Cameron is already repaying the favour, deciding upon the pages of the Sun to further pursue the BBC. If Murdoch or the Sun's editors were hoping for a full-throated denunciation of everything the BBC does though, then they haven't got it. If anything, Cameron goes out of his way to be fair to the corporation, saying he's got nothing against the way the BBC is funded. Undoubtedly this is partially down to Cameron not being about to burn bridges which he still needs to cross to get across to the public; once he's in power, which still looks highly likely, he can do whatever he likes, and a highly cut down settlement for the licence fee under the Tories seems odds on. He acknowledges this when he writes:

With ITV doing less and less politics, and with newspaper readership in decline, the importance of the BBC in general — and the big audience evening news programmes in particular — for political parties trying to get their message across cannot be overstated.

Ah, but the BBC is still biased, after all:

But, I can hear the cry, what about the left-wing bias?

My answer is: yes, the BBC does have what even Andrew Marr called an “innate liberal bias”, principally because it does not have to behave like a commercial organisation and make its money from scratch every year.

That tends to make the BBC instinctively pro-Big State, distinctly iffy about the free market and sometimes dismissive of a conservative viewpoint.

I’ll never forget, some years ago, sitting next to a BBC presenter at a function and being told it was just about all right to have Conservative politicians on the radio, but “there weren’t really any you would want to see socially”.


Yep, Cameron's evidence for the BBC's bias amounts to a BBC presenter telling him that there are no Conservative politicians you'd want to see socially, which has to be the biggest statement of the blooming obvious you're likely to come across. It can in fact be extended across politicians as a whole; how many can you name that you'd like a drink with, and that's excepting those you'd like to meet so you could physically assault them. As others have pointed out, the Tories didn't have many complaints about the BBC's coverage whilst Gordon Brown was doing so badly, but once George Osborne was in the soup over his own dalliances on yachts the familiar cry went up again of how the BBC was biased against them.

Finally Cameron does get to the point:

The BBC has lost touch with the values of the people who support it through the licence fee.

How could anyone who works at an organisation that prides itself as socially responsible possibly have approved broadcasting the sick telephone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand?


Because it went out past the watershed, involved individuals known for their near the knuckle comedy and was a ridiculous scandal created by the right-wing tabloid press? This social responsibility garbage, as put forward by the Tories' Jeremy Hunt, is censorship in a modern form. It may have lost touch with the values of the 35,000 that complained, but it hasn't with the however many thousand that joined Facebook groups in protest at the overreaction, or the millions that didn't complain.

It’s become bloated with many of its executives overpaid. The licence fee has gone up by 15 per cent on top of inflation since 1997.

Jonathan Ross’s £6million annual contract costs the equivalent of what 43,000 people pay in their licence fee.

Is it really the job of the BBC to pay these sorts of figures?

Shouldn’t they rely on the kudos of the platforms they have — after all there is no real national commercial equivalent to Radio 2 — to attract and keep talent?

And while we are at it — on the kudos of the BBC — why on earth is the director-general paid over £800,000 a year?

More than 50 people at this great public institution get more than the Prime Minister.

I simply don’t believe these kinds of salaries are necessary to get the best candidates. These are some of the best jobs in British broadcasting and it is a huge honour to be asked to do them.


The BBC of course doesn't decide how much the licence fee should go up - the government does, so Cameron should blame them if he wants to apportion it. Relying on kudos rather than remuneration is laughable, as is the idea that individuals now will be satisfied with the "honour" of the job they're in rather than the pay. If they can get more, substantially more at least, they will go elsewhere, hence why all of those competing for the talents tend to pay around the same. The very top jobs are undoubtedly something of an honour - Thompson if he had stayed at Channel 4 could be getting £1,211,000 (PDF), as his successor does, when his benefits are taken into account, instead of the over £800,000 he gets at the BBC. Any less and he might well decide he could be doing better.

The BBC has become oversized and over-reached itself.

What on earth was the BBC doing taking over the Lonely Planet guides and threatening other travel guide publishers with unfair competition?

Why is it now planning to take on struggling local newspapers with its plans for local online video news?


Cameron does have a point on the Lonely Planet takeover, which was just inviting deserved criticism. He's less right however on the struggling local newspapers, most of which have no one to blame for their plight but themselves, or rather, their owners. As Nick Davies pointed out in Flat Earth News, the "grocers" have been more concerned with paying their shareholders dividends than investing in journalism, with the result being that with advertising increasingly going online, there is no money to provide anything approaching a decent local service. The BBC is just moving into an area which has been abandoned by others, including ITV, and likely to be providing a service which few others are prepared to.

The BBC needs a vision that goes beyond chasing ratings for their own sake.

As our pre-eminent public service broadcaster it should set the standards in quality TV. The mission must be to attract large audiences to quality programmes, not large audiences by going to the lowest common denominator.

The argument that the BBC needs to win big ratings on BBC1 to prove that it is providing value is bogus.

The BBC should be judged on what it does to promote excellence in all it does and should justify its existence and funding on the basis of its reach — how many people use different parts of the product — rather than on nightly ratings figures.


Now we're onto the quality versus ratings argument. Quality doesn't have to equal boring, but that's undoubtedly what some would like to limit it to, with worthy documentaries and news programming and little else, closer to the PBS model than the BBC's current one. This is fine as far as it goes, and the awfulness of much of the output on BBC Three, for instance, which with the closing of could be split into providing more funding for BBC Four and for journalism is an attractive proposition. How though does Cameron define "quality"? If it's attracting large audiences to the likes of those worthy documentaries and news programming, then it's just simply not going to happen, as they have always been, with the exception of nature documentaries, niche products. They're not going to get bigger audiences without monumental advertising campaigns. After all, the BBC does justify its existence on how different people use different parts of the product, as Cameron puts it: thanks to the licence fee it has been at the forefront of developing an online presence, and noted the possibilities for it far before ITV, Sky or the likes of the tabloid newspapers did. That would doubtless under any cut in the BBC's licence fee be one of the first things to suffer: it would be pushed into defending its core audiences, and at the moment that would exactly result in the further cutting of news programming and those documentaries, because that's the way the entire TV industry is going. This is where Cameron has to decide exactly what he wants, and at the moment he doesn't seem to have much idea.

We also need to look at how the BBC is regulated. The BBC Trust has been an improvement on the previous BBC governors.

But if people have a complaint about standards, should they not be able to complain to a body that is properly independent of the BBC?

And when decisions are taken about salaries paid to senior management, should they not be reviewed by an external body to avoid any charge of cronyism?


Like the Press Complaints Commission, for instance, on the boards of which editors and others from the industry sit? Giving Ofcom oversight over the BBC is potentially the next move, but when Ofcom has already put its own agenda firmly on the table over its determination that the licence fee should be top-sliced, something that Cameron as yet does not support, and when it gives the go ahead to ITV to slash its local news output, why should anyone believe it would be any better than that currently provided by the Trust? As for the salaries paid, the BBC Trust has already investigated them after the Ross controversy, and found that it was paying for the most part the same as the market rate.

The squeezing and crushing of commercial competitors online or in publishing needs to be stopped. We need the BBC, but we also need healthy competition to the BBC to boost choice and drive up quality.

Above all the BBC needs to be given a clear remit — the pursuit of excellence.


Like that provided presumably by Cameron's former employer ITV - on which I can honestly say that there is only one programme I ever watch - the wonderful Harry Hill's TV Burp, a commentary on other television programmes. The BBC already pursues excellence - a slight pruning and it would be even better, but who honestly believes that Cameron or his sponsors at the Sun would only go that far? Even further reason to truly fear and oppose both the current attacks on the BBC and the potential of a Conservative government.

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