Quantcast
Channel: New Statesman
Viewing all 11165 articles
Browse latest View live

What's behind the puritanical obsession with Jay-Z and Beyoncé's marriage?

0
0
Their performance of “Drunk In Love” at the Grammys was undoubtedly sultry, but why does it give the media licence to speculate about “what goes on” in the couple’s own home?

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

A couple of weeks ago, missionary columnist Naomi Schaefer Riley of the New York Postwrote, “We’re missing the point of marriage.” That sounds about right: In her Tuesday column, she offered a free marriage-counseling session to Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z in a scathing review of the happy couple’s “Drunk In Love” romp that opened the GRAMMY Awards earlier this week. Shawn Corey Carter, she’ll have you know, is “a poor excuse for a husband.”

The transgression: Beyoncé’s bare thighs and high crotch, and Jay-Z’s groping of all relevant anatomy. “Beyoncé’s booty-shaking was certainly no worse than Miley Cyrus’s twerking or any number of other performances by Madonna, for instance. But there’s something particularly icky about doing it while your husband looks on approvingly,” she writes, then quotes Charlotte Hays, the renowned author of When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? saying, “Honestly, I didn’t want to watch Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s foreplay.”

It was a sultry display, no question. (I rooted.) But does the spectacular marketing of Beyoncé’s sexuality mean that neither she nor her husband share a healthy regard for matrimony? And that we’re all vicious horndogs for applauding?

Pulp quarterbacking of celebrity relationships is a pastime in at least three hemispheres, of course, but the Knowles-Carter marriage is a perfect storm for puritanical concern-trolling. He’s a rapper, and she’s half-naked. God save Dolores Tucker. “Indeed,” Riley scoffs, “the happy couple seems to have completely blurred the line between what goes on in their bedroom and what happens on national TV.” No, in fact, it seems that Riley has rather blurred these lines.

Such conflation of popular persons and their personas is, if anything, a disregard of “what goes on” in the couple’s own home, where bills and chores are divided between the two of them, and then maybe a few maids, and none of us. Yet by one spouse’s flaunting the other to a live, televised audience, “they’re suggesting to audiences that this kind of public sexual behavior is compatible with a loving modern marriage.” Why wouldn’t these things be compatible? What’s Naomi Schaefer Riley afraid of, exactly?

So here we have a faith-based columnist’s angst or visceral puritanism masquerading as critique. Likewise, though with a left-feminist gist, Akiba Solomon of Colorlines weighed in (as did others) with a lament that the couple’s shout-out to a classic black biopicWhat’s Love Got to Do With It– and the march of gender equality are, alas, incompatible. “I’m disappointed in Beyoncé,” Solomon sighs. “I wish in this moment she could have been more Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and less ‘Cater 2 U.’”

Beyoncé was neither icon that night – she was Beyoncé. She’s is a woman in her own right, not a fantasy reconfiguration by which the diva might reflect all of our dreams, thinking, and biases. To protest that her performance could have been more purely feminist, or to diagnose marital decay based on her writhing in tandem with her husband, is to wish upon a star. 

We do this naturally as fans. But it’s a chauvinist flex for op-ed folk to reduce real people – famous as they may be – to agendas and insecurities that are more so the critic’s than the artist’s. Yes, Beyoncé recently co-signed the Shriver Report (“Gender Equality Is a Myth!”) and she’s a workaholic musician who riffs off feminist themes. But, as was similarly demonstrated with another Grammy performer, Macklemore, too often we hoist up pop culture magnates as freelance politicians, just so we can tear them down.

Justin Charity is a music and fiction writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

 


I can see you typing: the most awkward part of online chat

0
0
Time empowers you to calculate your words’ effects on their reader, but chat clients like Gchat now let you know when your partner is typing a message, and the longer a response the take, the more we expect that it will somehow disappoint us.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

The first letter of a text or instant message is the most important. Never mind the actual meaning of the words it introduces; the mere keystroke is a starter pistol. Once you’re off, you need to complete your message quickly. That’s because most chat clients let you know when your partner is typing a message. And the longer this message takes to type, the more you start to worry: is it going to be confrontational, confessional, or emotionally challenging in some other way?

Awkward silence has an analogue online, thanks to the typing alerts that linguists call “awareness indicators.” On Google Talk or Gchat, a prompt says “Ben is typing…”; on Apple’s iChat a plain ellipsis signifies the same. These features are not as disposable as they may seem. One of the internet's most remarkable effects on language is the jury-rigging of writing for conversation. In lieu of facial expressions, we type emoticons and emoji; for tone and inflection, we make novel use of punctuationThe typing awareness indicator is another adaptation: a way to pace a written conversation. But it can do more than just indicate awareness. It can induce anxiety, too.

“I’ve been in a few situations where I'm chatting with someone and I start typing a reply, but then stop before I'm finished with the reply,” Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better, wrote me by email:

Maybe I'm rethinking what I'm writing before hitting "send", or maybe I'm temporarily pulled away by something else like a phone call. But I'm aware that the person on the other end may have *seen* me start typing and then stop – so I'm aware they may be wondering exactly what's going on in my head. I've been in the other situation, too, wondering: Hmmm, why did they start typing and then stop? Obviously, most of the time this isn't an issue, but if you're involved in a sensitive or emotionally charged conversation, these questions of pausing can become emotionally charged themselves!

One of writing’s traditional advantages over speech is the time it affords you to collect your thoughts. This time empowers you to calculate your words’ effects on their reader. Rather than blurting out “YOU’RE SO HOT,” you pen a pleasing phrase: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

Text and instant messages, however, are eroding this advantage. We don’t correspond over text and instant messages, like we do in letters; we chat in quick informal exchanges, like we do face-to-face. And one of the underpinnings of spoken conversation is what's known in linguistics as turn-taking. “We need some way of determining when someone else's turn is over and ours can begin,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and author of You Just Don't Understand. “In speaking, we sense whether others are done – their voices trail off, their intonation goes down, they seem to have finished making a point, they leave a pause to let us know they're finished.”

It’s not as simple as it sounds. Tannen’s research has shown that conversational turn-taking actually creates a lot of social friction. Certain cultures – I’ll let you guess which ones – have developed what she calls a “high-involvement style,” where interruption is valued as a sign of engagement. Others have a “high-considerateness style” where it’s seen as polite to wait your turn. When the styles clash, each party tends to think the other is being rude. (OK, if you are still wondering which cultures use the different styles, here’s a clue.) 

Text and instant message conversations aren’t as fraught, since both parties can type at the same time without impinging on each other. “You don't need the other person to give you the floor,” Tannen says. But the physical separation of the parties creates new problems. It’s hard to know when to change the subject if you’re unsure whether the other person is still engaged with the one at hand. And you can’t always tell whether someone has completed her story or is only pausing. 

The typing awareness indicator is directed at these confusions. It helps written exchanges take on the tempo of spoken conversation by facilitating turn-taking – an important innovation when you consider that young people prefer to stay in touch by text than phone call. They can also be used for effect and emphasis. “The thing that gets me is the temporal aspect of it,” says Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. “I’ve typed something, I’ve hit return. I’m going to wait for awhile and then I type something else. I think they correspond to the pauses I’d make if I were speaking.”But knowing when your partner is typing can also have the unsettling effect that Thompson described: It makes visible the care with which we pick our words. And the more visible this care becomes, the more the reader distrusts the message. Conversation is supposed to feel natural, after all. The quip is less funny if it’s not offhanded. Flirtation is not so flattering if it appears to require labor. And the apology can seem less heartfelt when you know it’s been self-lawyered.  

It’s also just the case that the longer a response the take, the more we expect that it will somehow disappoint us. “In speech, it’s well known that if you say something and I respond to it, and my response is not going to be what you want to hear then it’s going to take me longer to answer than if I was just going to say yes,” says Susan Herring, a professor of linguistics and information science at Indiana University.

A similar rule seems to apply in text and online chat, at least once you know the other person has started typing. Recently, I reconnected on Gchat with a friend with whom I had been carelessly out of touch. As I began typing my final note, he remarked that it was taking me a long time – which distracted me and slowed me down even further. “Oh god… I’m going to get a long one,” he wrote. I hesitated once again. “It’s coming,” he typed. All I was trying to say, though, was “okay good, I’ll plan on sunday! we can figure out later.” When I finally sent the message, my friend wrote “all that typing for that!?!?!” 

Such needless anxiety may just be a necessary tradeoff for the convenience of digital written conversations. If we eliminated the typing awareness indicator, we would struggle with online conversational turn-taking. And attempts to improve the indicator have fallen flat. Real-time typing, which lets you see the other person’s message as he composes it, keystroke by keystroke, has been unpopular; Google tried to introduce it a few years ago in Google Wave, but many people had the experience of Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, who wrote it “made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.” 

The most common-sense workaround, of course, is to prepare your thoughts mentally before you begin typing them. That sounds easy enough, but some of us actually use writing as a way of working out our thoughts, not simply recording them after they’re fully formed. If nothing else, then, Google might give its users an alternative: Instead of “Ben is typing…” how about “Ben is thinking…”?

Ben Crair is a story editor at The New RepublicFollow him @bencrair

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

 

Morning Call: pick of the papers

0
0
The ten must-read comment pieces from this morning's papers.

1. Ukraine stands on the brink – and Europe must bring it back (Guardian)

This is no velvet revolution, but nor is it an uprising of fascist Cossacks or a zero-sum game with Russia, writes Timothy Garton Ash. Europe must intervene on the side of democracy and human rights.

2. I don’t begrudge Bob Crow his holiday but I do mind his strike (Daily Telegraph)

It’s outrageous that London can be held to ransom by a minority of the RMT’s members, says Boris Johnson. 

3. Cameron's Tories are even more rebellious than Major's. Whatever happened to loyalty? (Guardian)

Conservatives are now a party more interested in ideological purity than power – and the voters won't like it, says Chris Huhne. 

4. The bare necessities of life will come to you (Times)

Most of us think the poor stay poor and inequality is exploding, writes Matt Ridley. Wrong. The evidence is that these are times of plenty.

5. Emerging-market chaos and the Federal Reserve taper mean this might be as good as it gets for Britain’s economy (Independent)

This recovery looks unsustainable, says David Blanchflower.

6. Ukip has done more than any other party to destroy the racist BNP (Independent)

For the last three years, we’ve been telling those who vote for them out of frustration but don’t agree with their racist agenda to vote for us, writes Nigel Farage. 

7. Michael Gove: inspection failure (Guardian)

It is hard to see why Lady Morgan has been knifed except on partisan grounds as the general election nears, says a Guardian editorial. 

8. Stop kicking out bright foreigners (Financial Times)

Let us use their brains to our advantage, writes James Dyson. 

9. Full marks for Gove’s state-school ambition (Daily Telegraph)

The Education Secretary's agenda represents a much-awaited rejection of bog-standard equality in favour of the excellence that typifies the independent ethos, says a Telegraph editorial.

10. Obama’s trade agenda hangs on a thin Reid (Financial Times)

The Democrat from Nevada never met a trade deal he liked, writes Edward Luce.

Gove is becoming a liability for the Tories

0
0
The Education Secretary's running battles with teachers and "the blob" do not endear him to voters.

For the third day running, the fallout from Michael Gove's decision to remove Labour peer and former Blair adviser Sally Morgan as the chair of Ofsted is leading the headlines. The Lib Dems are warning that they will veto any attempt by him to appoint Tory donor Theodore Agnew as her successor, Labour has written to Jeremy Heywood demanding an investigation, and former Ofsted chief inspector David Bell has warned Gove not to "believe his own hype" in a written rebuke

Few voters will trouble themselves with the details (how many know or care who leads Ofsted?) but the repeated criticisms of Gove from all sides will encourage the suspicion that the education system is being changed in undesirable ways - and that should trouble the Tories. While the Education Secretary is lauded by the commentariat and by Conservative activists, his approval rating among parents is less impressive. A YouGov poll last year found that 25 per cent of voters would be less likely to vote Tory if he became leader with just four per cent more likely.

And voters, contrary to Westminster perception, aren't keen on his policies either. Another YouGov poll, for the Times, showed that just 27 per cent support free schools with 47 per cent opposed. In addition, 66 cent share Labour and the Lib Dems' belief that the schools should only be able to employ qualified teachers and 56 per cent believe the national curriculum should be compulsory. For these reasons, among others, Labour has consistently led the Tories (see p. 8) on education since the end of 2010, with a five point advantage at present. 

Worse, just 12 per cent of teachers (at far from insignificant voting group) would vote Conservative, compared to 43 per cent for Labour and 6 per cent for the Lib Dems. Evidence of why was supplied elsewhere in the poll, which found that 79  per cent believe that the government's impact on the education system has been negative, and that 82 per cent of teachers and 87 per cent of school leaders are opposed to the coalition's expansion of academies and free schools. In addition, 74 per cent said that their morale had declined since the election and 70 per cent of head teachers did not feel trusted by ministers to get on with their jobs. Finally, 91 per cent of teachers opposed publicly-funded schools being run for profit (a policy Gove has said he would consider introducing under a Conservative majority government) and 93 per cent believed academies and free schools should only employ teachers with Qualified Teacher Status.

Those who believe that the Tories derive a political dividend from Gove's clashes with "the blob" (the name he and his ideological allies use for the educational establishment after the 1958 horror film) forget that voters are far more likely to trust teachers than they are politicians. A poll by Ipsos MORI last year found that 86 per cent of voters trust teachers compared to just 18 per cent for politicians (but 41 per cent for trade union officials). 

As David Bell writes in his piece today, "Don’t believe your own hype. Whitehall has a habit of isolating ministers. The day-to-day grind of policy battles, firefighting and political ding-dong can start to cut you off from outside ideas and thinking. The row over Ofsted's shows the importance of retaining, and being seen to retain, independent voices near the top – not simply 'yes men'. The danger is that while The Blob is a useful political tool in the short-term, it simply might not be as deep-rooted as the education secretary believes."

Gove has an important message to deliver today on breaking down"the Berlin Wall" between state and private schools (the subject of this week's NS cover story by David and George Kynaston). But his permanent kulturkampf with teachers means that, on this issue and much else, he is danger of no drowning his own words out. 

Michael Gove must stop fighting "The Blob" and listen to the education experts

0
0
The Education Secretary has fallen for his own hype.

As the old saying goes, there is only one thing more useful in politics than having the right friends. That’s having the right enemies.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has been highly skilled in defining his school reforms against what he calls The Blob– an amorphous, bloated education establishment opposing him at every turn; a mass of bureaucrats, unions and academics who eschew rigour for a left-wing, child-centred, progressive agenda.

But there is another truism in politics – don’t believe your own hype. Whitehall has a habit of isolating ministers. The day-to-day grind of policy battles, firefighting and political ding-dong can start to cut you off from outside ideas and thinking. The row over Ofsted’s leadership shows the importance of retaining, and being seen to retain, independent voices near the top – not simply “yes men”. The danger is that while The Blob is a useful political tool in the short-term, it simply might not be as deep-rooted as the education secretary believes.

Yes, the main teaching unions' leaderships have played right into the government’s hands over the past four years. Their barrage of industrial action and knee-jerk opposition to any change, has allowed the Education Secretary and his supporters to characterise them as cartoon-like bogeymen. The unions’ political naivety has been astonishing.

But there is a far wider group of non-Blobberati voices across the schools sector, higher education, industry and the voluntary sector, who offer an intelligent critique of where we are now.

These people have been broadly supportive of successive governments' education reforms and, as a result, are not so easily dismissed. They believe in improving our education system but they also advocate sensible debate. They should be listened to by politicians of all parties.

A-levels do not go far enough

A good example of bringing together a range of voices was seen last week with the publication of Making Education Work. This was an independent review, strongly influenced by an advisory group, of which I was a member, consisting of senior business leaders, eminent scientists and leading academics. That’s a powerful alliance whose views deserve a hearing.

We noted that the UK’s economy and society had changed out of all recognition in the last 60 years. Yet we are still wedded to a system where sixth formers specialise in three or four gold-standard A-level subjects.

Indeed, it could be argued that this has been entrenched further by a return to “pass or fail” final exams after two years of study, alongside the introduction of more vocationally orientated Tech-Levels.

For me, it is not being Blob-like at all to ask if that is good enough in the long-term.

I’m not one to join in the national self-flagellation around England’s position in the OECD’s PISA rankings– they are one measure but not the only measure.

But it’s clear that globalised trade, communications, technology and employment means our young people now compete directly with their peers across the world. And everywhere, governments, employers and teachers are asking the same question: how do we ensure that they are highly educated, well-equipped to be good citizens and able to contribute to productive economic growth?

The benefit of long-term thinking

That’s why our review has made clear a secondary curriculum must be much more clearly linked to the UK’s economic and social strategy. And it puts forward a number of important recommendations to do this.

First, a permanent, independent strategic advisory body on curriculum, delivery and assessment. It’s time to end education policy being at the behest of five-year electoral cycles and three decades of changing policy priorities. If national infrastructure projects in areas such as energy and transport deserve long-term thinking, surely the same applies to education?

Second, widening the existing narrow choice of A-level subjects with a broader baccalaureate-style system – based on a core of English, mathematics, science and extended project work.

This won’t happen overnight. We stress it will require better specialist teaching and facilities; that it won’t be appropriate for all; and that top-class science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) degrees will still require early specialisation. But given the demands of employers and society, the case for students to study as broadly as possible is a no-brainer.

Third, a much greater emphasis on non-cognitive, so-called “softer skills” is called for. These include clear communication in English and maths, STEM and digital competence, team working, personal and interpersonal skills. Such skills will help to embed codes of conduct, ethics, emotional maturity, and initiative and entrepreneurship, creativity and cultural awareness. This does not undermine rigour – it enhances it.

New decade, same argument

It seems particularly appropriate to be considering these ideas now. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Tomlinson Report into 14-19 education.

It recommended radical reform, including phasing out GCSEs, A and AS-levels and vocational qualifications and replacing them with a new diploma. Too radical as it turned out, when the then-Labour government feared being seen as soft on standards in the run-in to the 2005 election. Tomlinson was ignored and in its place came a watered-down alternative vocational diploma – now discarded.

Yet, a decade later we’re still having the same argument. And without a mature consensus on education reform, we’ll be in the same position in a another decade’s time. I doubt the latest changes to A-levels are the answer on their own. Worse than that, the history of vocational reform suggests Tech-Levels risk being seen as second-rate, however unfairly.

Our report challenges all politicians to demonstrate long-term leadership. Forget fighting The Blob. Building consensus on the future direction of education in this country is a sign of strength, not weakness. Now who is up for the challenge?

Sir David Bell is on the advisory board for the Making Education Better review. He is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading and former Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Don't trust the government's citizenship-stripping policy

0
0
Even if depriving dangerous individuals of their citizenship can be right in principle, can we really trust governments to use such a power prudently in practice?

Should British nationals suspected of terrorist offences or other serious international crimes be stripped of their citizenship? The British government thinks so. Over the past ten years, UK governments have passed legislation that makes it easier to strip citizenship from UK dual nationals when the home secretary deems their citizenship to be “not conducive to the public good”.

Now things have taken a more radical turn. In an amendment just passed by parliament, the government intends to extend denaturalisation powers to naturalised citizens even if it would make them stateless. This is no idle threat. No fewer than 37 UK nationals have been stripped of citizenship since the Conservative government came to power in September 2010, a figure that dwarfs the handful of people who lost citizenship when Labour was in power.

The moral case for such powers is easy to summarise. At first glance, it hardly seems right that an individual who threatens to destroy or undermine a society’s basic institutions should continue to enjoy citizenship of that society. If we presume —- as “contractualist” theories of the state would have it —- that the state is analogous to civil society associations, withdrawal of membership seems particularly appropriate. Virtually all organisations, from golf clubs to churches, have a recognised right to kick out members who set themselves at odds with the key principles of the association in question. We have a rich vocabulary to capture such procedures: associations “expel”, “excommunicate”, or “strike off the register” members who threaten their continued existence or basic norms.

The problem is that the state is not like other organisations, because individuals have no choice but to live under the authority and power of a state. If they are deprived of citizenship and made stateless, they continue to be subject to state power but without the basic protections against it offered by citizenship, including security of residence (protection from deportation), political rights, and a host of entitlements and privileges (including access to education and employment) often reserved solely for citizens.

It was for this reason that, in 1954, the US Supreme Court struck down a law which allowed the American government to take away citizenship as a punishment. Judging denaturalisation to be cruel and unusual, the court argued that “the punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. His very existence is at the sufferance of the country in which he happens to find himself… [He] has lost the very right to have rights].”

Unequal treatment

Another concern is that laws to strip citizenship often apply only to some citizens. In the UK, for example, only naturalised citizens could lose their citizenship before 2002; after that, only dual nationals could (because only they would not become stateless). This means that under current British law, if a dual national and a single national commit the same offence (or more accurately, are suspected of committing the same offence), only the dual national could lose her citizenship. This kind of differential treatment undermines the fundamental concept of citizenship as a status with no gradations or rankings.

Even the British government accepted this idea when it introduced new denaturalisation legislation in 2002. Ministers argued, albeit somewhat disingenuously, that by making native-born British nationals (with a second citizenship) subject to the same denaturalisation powers as naturalised citizens, they were ensuring the equal treatment of naturalised Britons.

But even if denaturalisation powers were evenly applied to all, they would still be morally questionable. This is because it may be wrong to conceptualise citizenship simply as a “privilege” dependent on good behaviour. Long-term residents of a state (including those who entered illegally as children) have a moral right to be recognised as citizens based on the social ties and connections they have established in the course of their stay. As the political theorist Joseph Carens writes, there is “something deeply wrong in forcing people to leave a place where they have lived for a long time. Most people form their deepest human connections where they live. It becomes home.”

If social connections and ties constitute a reason for admitting people into citizenship, they are also a reason for not taking citizenship away once it has been acquired. We recognise this principle when we punish common criminals, who may well pose a threat to society, without withdrawing their citizenship.

An unjust policy

A different concern is that denaturalisation laws like the ones active in the UK are simply arbitrary, and for that reason unjust. Our legislation does not require that an individual be convicted of a crime in a court of law; indeed, one of the attractions of the current legislation for British governments is that it allows the home secretary to get rid of individuals without going through the difficult process of providing the evidence necessary for criminal conviction. To be sure, there is a statutory right of appeal, but given that most Britons are stripped of their citizenship when outside the UK, the chances for an effective appeal are minimal. Current laws define the grounds for deprivation so broadly that a successful appeal on the merits of a decision is highly unlikely.

If these moral concerns about stripping of citizenship fail to convince, there is one final and compelling reason why we should look askance at this power. Even if depriving dangerous individuals of their citizenship can be right in principle, can we really trust governments to use such a power prudently in practice? I think not.

Since the Conservative government came to power, they have denaturalised more people than any UK government since before World War II, and they now propose to extend powers so that even statelessness is not a bar. Initial government assurances that this power would be used sparingly and constrained by human rights considerations now seem risible. The key question supporters of denaturalisation need to ask is not whether it can in principle be right to strip citizenship (on that there may be room for debate), but whether it is wise to entrust denaturalisation to a government that has not hesitated to broaden the scope of its use

Matthew J. Gibney does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Alex Salmond NS Lecture: “Scotland's Future in Scotland's Hands”

0
0
The Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party will come to London at the NS's invitation to set out his vision for an independent Scotland.

 

Ahead of September’s landmark referendum, the New Statesman has invited the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party to set out his vision for an independent Scotland.

One of the most provocative and powerful figures in British politics today, Alex Salmond is a formidable campaigner and communicator. The evening promises to be one of the political highlights of the year.

Mr Salmond’s talk - “Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands” - is on 4 March at 6.30pm at 1 Birdcage Walk in Westminster. It will be followed by an audience Q&A session and then a drinks reception.

Tickets are priced £10 and can be booked via this page.

 

 

At last, there's a list of rich white men in GQ

0
0
"Most Connected Men 2014" comes across more as "Men We Know Who Are Likely To Share This Article On Twitter 2014".

God knows it can be tough waiting for GQ to rank men. It's been a whole month since the magazine revealed the Best-Dressed Men In Britain 2014 list; the September ceremony for the Men Of The Year Awards 2013 feels a lifetime away. It's a huge relief, then, that we now how the Most Connected Men 2014 list (thanks in part, as well, to "Knowledge NetworkingTM" - no, us neither - organisation Editorial Intelligence).

But what is a "most connected man"? 

It's pretty clear - it's not about top-down power. So it's pretty funny that this list is just as (almost all) white and traditionally-powerful as every other bunch of GQ-approved blokes:

At number one, you've got Stephen Fry (prominent broadcaster). The rest of the top ten is Alain de Botton (as close to a household name as there is in philosophy); Lionel Barber (editor of the Financial Times); Amol Rajan (editor of the Independent); Tim Montgomerie (opinions editor for the Times); David Walliams (popular, famous comedian with an equally famous wife); Piers Morgan (national embarrassment); Matthew D'Ancona (writes for GQ - cheat); Evgeny Lebedev (literally bought a newspaper so people would respect him - clearly, worked a charm); Nick Grimshaw (prominent broadcaster, and most recent winner of GQ's best-dressed man list).

This list makes no sense whatsoever. Its criteria are completely ridiculous. The idea that the director-general of the BBC, David Beckham, the prime minister (plus most of his advisers in Number 10), and a bunch of people who founded Michelin-starred restaurants consitute some kind of new social horizontalist elite in British society is stupid. GQ, stop being so stupid.

Also, while they've changed it now, the original photo chosen for the co-founders of Leon was a nice "let's rip a picture from Facebook and Photoshop it for now, we can always change it later" bodge that gave one man an impossibly-narrow skull, and another woman a lobotomy:

And one last thing: stop giving Boris Johnson awards for being a rubbish-but-charmingly-bumbling mayor, you're only encouraging him.


Boris wouldn't have been elected mayor under his 50% strike turnout rule

0
0
The mayor wants strikes to be banned unless 50 per cent of staff vote, but turnout in the 2012 mayoral election was just 38 per cent.

Ahead of this week's anticipated tube strike by the RMT and the TSSA, Boris Johnson has used his Telegraph column to once again call for the coalition to introduce a 50 per cent turnout threshold for industrial action (turnout was 30 per cent in the most recent RMT ballot). He writes: "We need a ballot threshold – so that at least 50 per cent of the relevant workforce has to take the trouble to vote, or else the ballot is void. That is surely the least we can ask. It is time for the Government to legislate."

It's an idea that Boris has been championing for years, without success (and what happened to his promise of a "no-strike deal"?), but it appears increasingly that it will be included in the next Conservative manifesto. He told the Times last month: "This is something I wanted the coalition to do from the very beginning. We haven’t been able to do that and I’m reconciled to that now. Maybe it will be in our manifesto. I think it would be good if Dave put it in. I think there’s a good chance he will." Since it's Boris's brother, Jo, who will be responsible for much of the manifesto (he chairs the No. 10 policy board), the Mayor can be assumed to speak with some authority on this matter. 

On the subject of a 50 per cent threshold, it's worth noting one inconvenient truth for the Mayor: he wouldn't have been elected (or re-elected) under his own rule. In 2008, turnout in the London mayoral election was 45 per cent, before falling to 38 per cent in 2012. If Boris wants to lecture others on this point, he might want to consider the weakness of his own mandate first. 

Gove's "hero" Andrew Adonis attacks decision not to reappoint Ofsted head

0
0
The founder of the academies programme says Labour peer Sally Morgan "should be reappointed as chair of Ofsted, to preserve its independence and integrity."

In a speech in October 2012 to the think-tank Politeia, Michael Gove named two "heroes". The first was Teddy Roosevelt (more recently claimed as an inspiration by Ed Miliband), the second was Andrew Adonis. Gove hailed Tony Blair's former schools minister and the architect of the academies programme as "a man who has always been on the side of the future". He added:

"He created, protected, drove and grew the Academies programme. He did so in (and occasionally despite) a Labour government. He built alliances across parties – most notably in building on reforms introduced by another great moderniser – Kenneth Baker. And he has never stopped challenging all of us in Government to get on with it. 

"Because Andrew understands that one of the greatest enemies of innovation and progress is time."

For this reason, as well as his ministerial experience, it is notable that Adonis has joined those attacking Gove's decision not to reappoint Labour peer Sally Morgan as the chair of Ofsted. 

He tweeted today:

Adonis, who is now shadow infrastructure minister and is leading a growth review for Labour, also declared today that Gove's description of the state system is a "caricature". 

Gove has long sought to present his reforms as a continuation of those pursued by New Labour, an approach that has made it harder for the opposition to successfully challenge him. He said at his speech this morning that academies were "based on the work of [Kenneth] Baker, implemented by Blair and Adonis, and expanded by Cameron and Clegg". 

But Gove's careless partisanship means he is now in danger of losing any claim he has to Labour's mantle. 

Education’s Berlin Wall: the private schools conundrum

0
0
Does a better social mix make these schools acceptable? The left has been silent on this issue for the past 40 years.


High and mighty: in 2013 Tony Blair’s alma mater Fettes, one of Edinburgh’s top independent schools, was ordered to increase its intake of poorer pupils. Photo: Murdo McLeod.

Something happened near the end of 2013. John Major called “truly shocking” the way that “the upper echelons of power . . . are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class”; the Guardian ran the arresting front-page headline “PM’s despair at private school grip on top jobs”; the Times columnist and former Tory MP Matthew Parris dared David Cameron to seize his Clause Four moment and compel private schools to accept 25 per cent of their intake on a state-funded, means-tested basis; even Nigel Farage of Ukip, analysing the Ashes debacle, declared: “Our Test team, like so many sectors of our public life, are increasingly a reflection of the private education system.”

And the left? As so often in the past 40 or more years, it stayed largely silent on the issue of public schools. Indeed, only one senior Labour politician, Andrew Adonis, consistently addresses it in any big-picture sense. The failure of nerve is palpable, even embarrassing. And as so often, it is a failure rooted deep in history.

The modern story begins in the 1940s (centuries after Eton, Harrow, Westminster, St Paul’s, Charterhouse, Winchester and others were endowed and established to provide an education for the poor). “Though engaged in a death struggle with Hitler,” noted an American observer in 1941, “England is at this very moment liter­ally seething with plans for the reform of the public [ie, private] schools, from which almost anything can result after the war.” The tangible upshot was the Fleming committee, established in 1942 and reporting two years later. This had only limited left-wing input but, almost 70 years before Parris, did recommend that 25 per cent of places be allocated to children who would benefit from boarding, funded by a national bursary scheme. “The Public Schools are saved,” commented a relieved Tory politician, the education minister Rab Butler, “& must now be made to do their bit.”

In the event, Flemingism amounted to little more than the proverbial hill of beans. Whether on the part of the private schools themselves (once fee-paying demand began to pick up soon after the war) or the ministry of education (resistant to state bursaries) or the local education authorities (unwilling to see their brightest pupils creamed off) or working-class parents (reluctant to have their children removed to such an alien environment), the lack of enthusiasm was almost total – resulting in only minimal implementation of the scheme. As for the left specifically, it was reluctant to accept a quarter of an inadequate loaf at a time when, amid “the 1945 moment”, the tantalising possibility seemed to exist of something altogether more ambitious: in short, full-scale integration of the private and the state systems, or even abolition of the private.

George Orwell certainly thought so. “The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten . . .” was how he had looked ahead to the postwar socialist future in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”. So too the TUC, which in its response to the Fleming report flatly stated that it had no wish “merely to transfer this [system of educational] privilege from one group in the community to another group”. They reckoned without Clement Attlee. Labour was in with a thumping majority after the July 1945 general election, a bewildered upper class had not yet had time to regroup, and here apparently was a unique opportunity to end a crucial source of political, social and economic privilege – but the Old Haileyburian was simply not willing to go there. “He saw no reason for thinking that the public schools would disappear,” ran the report of the PM’s reassuring speech on a 1946 visit to his old school in Hertfordshire. “He thought the great traditions would carry on, and they might even be extended.” Which left only one game in town. The correct approach to the private school question, Labour’s education minister Ellen Wilkinson insisted at about the same time, was to make state schools “so good and so varied” that it would become “quite absurd” to educate children privately.

The matter was next on the table in the late 1950s, as Labour tried again to formulate a policy, this time against salutary polling evidence that “an overwhelming majority of parents”, including working-class parents, were “in favour of private spending on education” – and that “any attempt to stir up hostility against private education would probably only seem curious to the electorate”. The outcome was Learning to Live, a document that denounced the private sector (“damages national efficiency and offends the sense of justice”) but argued that the higher priority was to improve the state system (“capable of great advances”). The journalist Geoffrey Goodman was appalled. “It is almost inconceivable,” he wrote to the New Statesman, “that a party dedicated to the concept of greater equality . . . can argue that privilege of any kind will wither away in an acquisitive society, provided you offer ‘suitable’ alternatives.” The magazine itself was unmoved. “Some day,” it reflected later in 1958, after the party conference had confirmed the policy, “Labour must clearly make away with the fee-paying public schools; but it had better choose its own time, which will not be until the comprehensive schools have been firmly established in sufficient numbers and have had time to show their merits.”

Did it have to be either/or? After all, the privately educated Anthony Crosland had advocated, in his influential book The Future of Socialism (1956), the integration of private and grammar schools into a single “comprehensive” state secondary system, an approach that by the early 1960s was chiming with the rapidly emerging national mood that questioned the leadership capa­cities of the old establishment. It was also clear by this time that Labour was likely to win the next election on the back of that mood. “Some of us expected a sharp attack,” recalled Repton’s John Thorn, who in 1965 joined a cluster of other private school heads to have dinner with the new secretary of state for education, Crosland. “Now,” drawled the minister at the end as he leaned back in his chair, “what are we going to do about these damned public schools? I suppose we must have a royal commission, something like that.”

So it was. Over the next few years, as Crosland’s comprehensive revolution in state secondary education got under way, the Public Schools Commission deliberated, finally recommending in 1968 a form of super-Flemingism: in this case, a group of private schools that over the next seven years would assign at least half their places to state pupils with boarding needs, their fees to be publicly subsidised. The report received a thorough caning. Crosland’s successor-but-one, Edward Short, called it “somewhat unhelpful”; Tony Benn thought it “a ghastly document”; and the Guardian accused the commission of “proposing, in effect, to use mainly backward, deprived, or maladjusted children to cure the public schools of their social divisiveness”. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened, and the report was left to gather dust.

It was a piquant state of affairs. “I have never been able to understand,” Crosland had written, back in 1956, “why Socialists have been so obsessed with the question of the grammar schools and so indifferent to the much more glaring injustice of the independent schools.” Did he now feel a sense of failure? Why, he would be asked in the 1970s, had he not tried to abolish private schools when he had the chance? Crosland answered to the effect that, at a time when many state school conditions were still Victorian, it would have been a strange use of resources to be finding maintained places for the 6 per cent of children hitherto educated privately. That was presumably an honest reply, but of course there were other reasons why Labour, during the meritocratic, opportunity-seeking 1960s, failed to lay a glove on the private schools: an awareness of Richard Crossman’s warning to his party against policy “actuated by motives of envy”; libertarian considerations; the inconvenient truth that many Labour MPs educated their children privately; perhaps above all an inability to decide (in the retrospective words of one of Crosland’s senior civil servants, Wilma Harte) “whether these schools were so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. “The problem,” Crosland conceded in 1970, “is still there, and we shall eventually have to come back to it” – an assertion, notes his biographer Kevin Jefferys, made “more in hope than anticipation”.

In fact, there was time for one final, forlorn initiative before the great freeze. “A better social mix in no way makes the private schools more acceptable,” Labour’s shadow education secretary Roy Hattersley, no Flemingite, told prep school heads in 1973. “It merely gives them a spurious political respectability.” And he went on: “I must leave you with no doubts about our serious intention initially to reduce and eventually to abolish private education in this country.” Despite Auberon Waugh’s characteristic message of support in the New Statesman– “if the privileged were not so easy to identify, the unprivileged would not be so difficult to appease” – the outcry was immediate, loud and hostile, Frank Fisher, master of Wellington, accusing Labour of proposing “an act of educational vandalism unparalleled in the history of the free world”. In the run-up to a probable election year, Hattersley’s leader rowed back. He agreed in principle, Harold Wilson explained on Panorama, about discouraging private education, but it was “not a high priority”; off the record, he complained that Hattersley had “got religion”.

And that, notwithstanding a vague commitment in 1979 to abolition, was more or less that for the next four decades – decades in which the private schools systematically got their academic act together and became relentlessly formidable, highly resourced exam machines. Even in Michael Foot’s “suicide note” manifesto of 1983, Labour did not promise anything beyond ending their charitable status; and it is startling to scour Tony Benn’s diaries through the 1970s and 1980s and find so little about the issue. The input from risk-averse New Labour was predictably nugatory. It abolished the Tories’ Fleming-lite assisted places scheme but put nothing in its stead; a belated attempt to tackle the charitable status scandal foundered; even Adonis concedes that Tony Blair, albeit the first prime minister to send his children to state secondaries, was “politically and personally – Durham Cathedral School, Fettes, Oxford – not minded to put himself seriously at odds with the private schools”. Gordon Brown had his unfortunate Laura Spence moment in 2000 and thereafter steered almost wholly clear of the subject. Like equality more broadly, it was simply off the agenda. And, to an overwhelming extent, that remains the case four years on from New Labour.

Why? Why is the British left as a whole, and not just the Labour Party, so uncomfortable with the matter? There are several possible explanations, but arguably two stand out.

The first is the understandable concern that to concentrate on private schools, with their superior academic achievements (even if gained on a severely sloping pitch), is implicitly to denigrate state schools. Many on the left have a huge emotional investment in state education and are reluctant to concede that private schools may have intrinsic merits, including an unambiguously single-minded focus on university admission on behalf of the academic child. One of us, privately educated, had an instructive experience last summer on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week in a discussion about social mobility. Raising the question of private schools and their malign impact on equality of opportunity elicited little or no support from Zadie Smith and Owen Jones – both of whom were state-educated and would undoubtedly consider themselves as on the left, but seemed reluctant to say anything that might have negative connotations about state schools. It is impossible not to respect that point of view; yet such silence is frustrating if one believes that the success of state education is directly and negatively affected by the private sector.

The second explanation also has an invidious element, not least because many left-of-centre people, especially among the metropolitan intelligentsia, went to private schools and/or have sent their children to private schools – and consequently have felt inhibited talking about them. The classic institutional example is the Guardian: day in and day out a fine newspaper, but seemingly unable or unwilling to forge and proclaim a consistent editorial line on the subject. Among its columnists there is none finer than Polly Toynbee, who fearlessly and forensically tackles so many topics but remains muted on this one. If these assertions are correct, it is a dismal state of affairs. Children seldom determine where they go to school; parents make decisions about education for any number of reasons. What matters is establishing the most beneficial educational structure, socially, for the future – and that debate should be open to anyone, free from tawdry accusations of bitterness or hypocrisy.

****

Why, then, are private schools (still) a problem? They are for the most part excellent institutions that remain in largely recession-proof demand, particularly in London and the Home Counties. Why should we not just leave them to it?

They matter because of their continued dominance, acting as a roadblock both to upward and (less often noted) downward social mobility. The stats are well worn, but an inventory of privileged access retains the power to shock.

PM an Old Etonian? Check. Mayor of London? Check. A of C? Check.

Deputy PM, Chancellor, Chief Whip all privately educated? Check.

Over a third of MPs, over half of doctors and leading chief executives, over two-thirds of judges, barristers and leading journalists? Check. Top sportsmen, top musicians, top actors? Check.

Sherlock? Check. Moriarty? Check. But Sherlock doesn’t like to talk about it.

All this is not just down to talent and “character”. There is a systematic process at work of giving better educational – and subsequently professional – opportunities to those already from the best-off backgrounds. Although private schools educate only 7 per cent of the population, their students take up almost half the places at Oxbridge and one-third of the places across the whole Russell Group. According to the education charity the Sutton Trust, an independent day school student is 55 times more likely to win a place at Oxbridge and 22 times more likely to go to a top-ranked university than a state school student from a poor household. It is not just education that the parental chequebook buys but the assumption of a substantial socio-economic premium. There are, after all, only so many available rungs on the ladder.

Justifications for the status quo boil down to four principal arguments:

 

1) The true engines of social mobility

With their scholarships and bursaries, private schools portray themselves as the solution, not the problem. This is indisputably the reason for their historical charitable status: they were founded to educate the poor, not the rich. (Eton’s founding charter of 1440 prescribes education “without exacting money or anything else”.) And any negative article will elicit an irate response from head teachers claiming that their schools do plenty.

We need to look closely at the facts. As one examines the figures for the 1,223 member schools of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), a few things become clear: although 33.7 per cent of pupils at private schools receive help with their fees, two-thirds of these are either reductions for military, clergy, siblings and staff, or scholarships, and generally they provide only a quarter of the average day fee (barely one-tenth of the average boarding fee); only one in 12 private school students receives a means-tested bursary; and among these, 58.6 per cent are still paying at least half the full fee. The number of students in receipt of a full bursary, paying no fees at all, is fewer than one in a hundred.

The ISC’s are not the easiest figures to unpack, and it is hard not to suspect a degree of sleight of hand – fees presented as termly figures but bursaries as annual, conflation of fee assistance for boarding and day students. Even as bursaries increase, their total value up by a fifth since 2010, the fact is clear: the overwhelming majority of students at private schools are still fee-paying, and most of these students are paying the full amount. For every example of a child from a poorer background receiving significant financial support, there are multiple children whose parents are paying heavily for the privilege.

Which leads to the much-voiced response of parents who make “sacrifices” to put their children through private school, who are not “rich” in their own right but who work hard and make tough choices. Again, the facts are not on their side. Let’s look not at the minnow, but at the whale – leaving aside for a moment the 13 per cent of private school students who are boarders (including the Etons, Harrows and Winchesters that suck up most of the oxygen from the debate, with boarding fees averaging £33,400 yearly) and focusing instead on the 87 per cent who are day pupils, generally at schools few people have heard of.

The parents of a student at a private day school pay £11,500 on average each year. This is not a figure that the average household – disposable income of approximately £25,000 – can afford. More than this, we should not merely be comparing against the average: we should include and indeed concentrate on the poorest, including those families whose children are eligible for free school meals (annual gross income of less than £16,190). If you are in a position to pay fees, or even a substantial portion of fees, you are far removed from the reality of most parents and are paying to confer an advantage on your child that very few can afford.

2) The real problem lies elsewhere

Defenders or acceptors of the status quo prefer to focus on the state system (not good enough) or the grammar schools (the solution or the real evil, depending on the viewpoint). The latter, though, is a separate debate. Yes, it is an anomaly that 165 grammar schools still exist. Arguably – particularly given recent research which suggests a predominantly middle-class intake – they should go. But their only relevance to this debate is as proof of the potential excellence of state schools.

As for focusing first on the state sector (80 per cent of which is now rated good or outstanding) and leaving the private sector well alone until an ill-defined point in the future, it is an argument that has not moved since Attlee and Wilkinson in the 1940s, and has been only ever an excuse for inaction. One has only to witness pushy private school parents on a touchline to realise that the state sector will never achieve its full capability without them; and it can only be damaging that so many of our leading figures are not personally invested in this most crucial part of our society.

Education is not just another item or service to be bought or sold. It is the most formative part of any child’s upbringing and simultaneously the most powerful engine of cohesion we have. In a society in danger of being torn apart by rapidly increasing divisions in wealth and privilege, education is the one place where all parents and children can be brought together with a common purpose.

3) Defenders of the flame

Private schools argue that they should be protected as outstanding institutions of learning, particularly in the humanities (especially languages and classics), and that for this they rely on their independence. Historically, there is a lot of truth to this: private schools have not been subject to government utilitarianism. But it is an argument that has been fundamentally undermined by the game-changing emergence of state academies and free schools over the past decade. Again, the exact successes and failures of these are separate debates; what they have unarguably done is establish within the state sector the principle of previously impossible levels of independence, including the content of the curriculum.

4) The right to choose

The libertarian argument is the strongest defence the status quo still has – the right for parents to spend their money how they like. It is the defence made by Nick Clegg, under pressure on LBC Radio in January 2013 about whether he would educate his eldest son privately: “I just want the best for my child, and that’s what I think most people listening to this programme want for their children.” (Come September, Clegg’s get-out-of-jail card was the same as Blair’s – the London Oratory, a high-performing Catholic state school.) Yet in the same interview he denounced the “great rift” between private and state as “corrosive for our society and damaging to our economy”. And here lies the question, unacknowledged by Clegg – to whose right do we give priority?

As a society, do we prioritise the right for individuals to educate their child as they wish (a phantom right for most people, given that fees are not an option), or the right of every child, including the poorest, to an even start? It is not the child’s money that is spent on fees; no child has earned the right to a better education, just as no child has failed to earn that right. It is a question of liberty – the maximum possible liberty consistent with a like liberty for others. Do some parents have the right to pay for an education that indirectly harms the life chances of other children by blocking their path?

****

Very few on the left, given the chance to design a national education system from scratch, would include private schools. And it is extremely hard not to look at the schools’ original charitable purposes and be angry at how these have been twisted. Yet instincts of destruction have got the left nowhere: the schools still stand, thriving, and the only consequence is an antagonistic, circular debate – as well as the understandable reaction of the private schools to run a mile from state integration, fearing the iron bulldozer behind the velvet glove.

The question is not whether these schools should exist. We are where we are. The question is, are they educating the wrong children? And how do we end the divide to make them part of the common weal?

A consensus of sorts has started to take shape. In September 2011 David Cameron summoned head teachers from leading private schools to Downing Street, urging them to do more to justify their charitable status and reduce the apartheid. In May 2012 Michael Gove spoke in graphic detail about the “sheer scale, the breadth and the depth of private school dominance of our society” and about a “stratification and segregation [which] are morally indefensible”. And in October 2013, the chief inspector of schools, Michael Wilshaw, told private school heads at the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) that their existing partnerships with state schools largely amounted to “crumbs off your tables, leading more to famine than feast”.

There seem to be three proposals in play. The first is a range of variations on the old idea of more state-funded places at private schools – not only from Matthew Parris, but also from Peter Lampl at the Sutton Trust and Wellington College’s Anthony Seldon, a brave voice for change from within the independent sector. New Labour, of course, ended the assisted places scheme in 1997, rightly arguing that at best it was a middle-class sticking plaster. Under Lampl’s proposal for “open access”, roughly a third of places at an independent day school would be fully funded and another third partly funded; the claim is that more than 80 schools would be willing to adopt the scheme.

Separate from this are the two newer approaches championed in Andrew Adonis’s book Education, Education, Education (2012). The first is to draw private day schools into the state sector as direct-grant academies, in effect nationalised as all-ability, non-fee-paying, state-funded schools. So far six schools have taken this route, most notably the historically prestigious Liverpool College (a moment Adonis describes as “perhaps the single biggest breach in the Berlin Wall between the private and state sectors of education in recent decades”). Their results are strong; their ethos, governance and management are unchanged; the one difference is that they have given up fees and academic selection, opening their intake to children of all backgrounds. Given sufficient political will, Adonis believes, this group could grow to between 50 and 100 schools.

Realistically, the conversion process will not run south of Birmingham; it is in part reliant on schools feeling the economic chill. Where the private education market is thriving, the other new approach is to make every private school the sponsor of an academy, and for many to become leaders of academy chains. This has begun gradually: 34 ISC schools now sponsor or co-sponsor an academy, less than 3 per cent of ISC members. Seldon has called that “agonisingly slow” process “the most frustrating challenge of my career”, citing resistance among private school governing bodies. But with Eton and Wellington prominent in this movement, the aim is systematically to leverage the expertise, influence and resources of the private sector to improve partnering of state schools – a plan to end private schools’ isolation by allowing them to take responsibility for the success of not only their own students but those in local state schools as well.

It is a plan still in its early stages but gaining momentum. Michael Wilshaw is hardly a darling of the left – and is held in particularly low esteem by teaching unions – yet his remarkably frank and critical speech to head teachers at the HMC last October should be read in full: he makes clear that the existing partnerships do not amount to nearly enough and that “if you believe, as so many of your original founders believed, that how you deal with wider society and how you relate to those children less fortunate than your students defines you as schools”, then much more must be done. And as he notes, without more genuine integration the only other step available is to concentrate the minds of the private schools through university quotas that actively reduce their socio-economic premium. (University College London has already instigated moves in this direction and other top-flight universities are weighing up whether to follow its lead.) The private schools have had their clarion call; the coming months will see how they answer.

Which brings us back ineluctably to our question: where is the left as a whole in this debate? Why are Cameron and Gove highlighting the questions more than Labour’s front bench? Private education has somehow been treated differently from virtually any other area of public policy: too difficult, too emotionally charged, the time not yet ripe.

There is a moment to be seized. The loosening up of the state system through academies and free schools has blown away the old plea of the private schools to be left alone in splendid, independent isolation; social mobility is going backwards; the question of our rich/poor divide in education has been spotlighted not only by the make-up and social background of our current cabinet but also by the increased profile of organisations such as Teach First, dedicated to enhancing equality of opportunity. While on the left we have the haunting, ever more distant memory of 1945, with the knowledge that missed opportunities take a very long time to come round again.

In his New Year message Ed Miliband claimed that people “do not want the earth” but prefer credible specifics, as embodied in his pledge on energy bills. Yet, however skilfully done, there is enormous danger in a strategy of pick-and-choose if it vacates the rest of the field to others. The left should not see the private school question as insoluble, nor too dangerous to touch, but rather as the potential cornerstone of a narrative about a less divided society. It is a debate that should be open to all, regardless of which side of the divide they stand: bringing together all parents, all teachers and all children to craft an education system that gives opportunity to every student, and does not reserve the best prizes for a privileged few.

David Kynaston’s latest book is “Modernity Britain: Opening the Box – 1957-59” (Bloomsbury, £25). George Kynaston recently taught for two years at a comprehensive school in the West Midlands

Morning Call: pick of the papers

0
0
The ten must-read comment pieces from this morning's papers.

1. So Michael Gove, want state schools like private ones? Fine – if you can spare half the English countryside (Guardian)

Gove's prescription for state schools – and his crusade against the educational establishment – is driven by an instinct for good headlines, not evidence of what works, says Peter Wilby.

2. Michael Gove is on a political journey. And people he once took with him – like Sally Morgan – are now being left behind (Independent)

Gove's move signals the end of the Tory modernisers' dream, says Steve Richards.

3. The future belongs to the emerging markets (Financial Times)

Just as the west has emerged from crisis before, the newcomer economies will return to growth, writes Gideon Rachman.

4. Lisa Jardine is the latest woman gone in the Tory bonfire of the quangos (Guardian)

Putting (male, Tory donor) stooges in charge of regulatory bodies is a corruption of government, says Polly Toynbee. It must stop.

5. David Cameron’s choice – to stand firm, or dance to Ukip’s tune (Daily Telegraph)

The voters will appreciate a politician who will not let himself be defined by those who want to entrap him, and destroy him, says Benedict Brogan.

6. Everyone could lose from Scotland’s vote (Financial Times)

If Scots catch the smell of fear drifting north, they may vote mischievously, writes Michael Portillo.

7. In America’s long war on drugs – drugs won (Times)

Even conservatives are worried about the cost of prohibition in a country addicted to spending, writes Justin Webb.

8. How to tackle the hoarding of houses in 'Billionaires Row' (Guardian)

Britain is in the middle of a housing crisis, with thousands of people sleeping rough, writes Aditya Chakrabortty. We should use the tax system to penalise under-occupation.

9. Gove needs to make peace as well as war (Times)

The Education Secretary has alienated his own supporters as well as the "Blob" that he blames for failing schools, writes Rachel Sylvester.

10. We are seeing the makings of a welcome return to privately owned banks. Prosperity, however, is another matter (Independent)

The strength of the labor market is largely due to the weakness of wages, notes an Independent leader.

The Big Benefits Row: Was it ever going to change anyone's mind?

0
0
Perhaps if Channel 5's dramatic “debate” about benefits had given less time to attention-seekers like Edwina Currie and Katie Hopkins, it would have been a better conversation about an important issue.

Upon first glancing the title of last night's The Big Benefits Row, I had thought television’s depiction of benefits had finally succumbed to where it has inevitably been heading: a malnourished Job Seeker's Allowance claimant pitted against a sobbing disabled single mother in a fight to the death.

Unfortunately/fortunately (delete as humane), this was not it at all. This was the debate sort of row, with words and opinions and Matthew Wright occasionally reading out racist poll results.

It soon became apparent this was going to be a very dramatic debate too, with a zooming compilation of different people saying the word “benefits” over and over again. BENEFITS. They're everywhere! And everyone was talking about it. At least they were about to be because why else would Katie Hopkins and “White Dee” from Benefits Streets be in the same room?

Ken Livingstone kicked things off by introducing the radical idea that people should be able to find jobs and those jobs should pay enough to be able to live on. This was followed by a row of fiction-busting facts, which seemed very inappropriate for a discussion about benefits and I wondered if Channel 5 had become confused.

Peter Stringfellow, doing an impression of a man who didn't know where he was, was soon pointing off-camera to “those people” who actually did deserve benefits. I thought at first he was being clever and pointing to an empty space but then I realised he'd probably spotted some crippled people that had been put in the corner.  

Away from the audience, Channel 5 had decided to do the whole thing without letting a single disabled person on any of the panels. Which was brilliant because it was sort of like an ironic commentary on mainstream society's exclusion and isolation of us. Or was insultingly and tellingly dismissive of swathes of people affected by the issue at hand. As Sue Marsh, a disability campaigner who had originally been asked to be on the show, tweeted last night:

Luckily Edwina Currie was there instead to say things that were in no way true and/or made no sense. “There are loads of jobs”, we don't pay people a living wage “because we can't afford it”, and anyone could wander into food banks and take bags of food, she announced, as if not hiding her belief that the point of being on television was to say anything that may get a person attention.

Not content, Currie took it on herself to challenge austerity food blogger Jack Monroe on whether her grandfather was rich, as if believing if only she could prove someone in a working class woman's family had at one time in history had some money the entire social security system would fall in on itself and poverty itself would be disproven as a left-wing fabrication. “My grandfather's dead,” Monroe said. “I know, I saw the obituary,” retorted Currie, somewhat menacingly.

The microphones muffled out and Matthew Wright turned to camera, with the face of a man grateful he'd soon be back on the civilised sophistication of The Wright Stuff.“Who knows, perhaps some have you have changed your minds after tonight,” he said optimistically. 

Ironically, that would have been more likely to be achieved if the two panelists who needed to change their mind hadn't been there at all. Currie and Hopkins – all fabrications and hysteria – do a good row. But we might get further if producers simultaneously lost attention seekers’ phone numbers and tried for The Big Benefits Conversationinstead.

 

How many models will speak out against Terry Richardson before the fashion industry cares?

0
0
Allegations abound that the photographer behaves inappropriately on shoots. But he continues to be booked by fashion magazines and brands.

Terry Richardson is the fashion world’s open secret. You might not know his name, but you’ll probably have seen his trademark celebrity snaps: slightly overexposed against a white background. He’s shot everyone, from Barack Obama to Justin Bieber, and he’s worked on campaigns with dozens of high end fashion labels. But that's not the whole story.

In the last few months, I’ve spoken to several women who worked with Richardson and were unhappy with the experience. Take Sarah Hilker, who was 17 when she first met the photographer in 2004. Brandishing a fake ID, she went to a “model search” party for the alternative pin-up community Suicide Girls, where Richardson was shooting.

She tells me that he surveyed the scene, and decided “he was probably the worst type of person to photograph me . . . the images he chose to take at the event were very crass and lewd”. She describes a weird production line, where girls were pushed to undress and play with Richardson for the camera. “There were young women so drunk they could barely stand, never mind be of sound mind to sign a model release form.” 

Hilker previously told Jezebel that she was uncomfortable with what she was pressured to do at the event. "In one corner there was a literal pile of SG bras and panties and the other was a small table with model release forms. Some stranger immediately grabbed me and whisked me over to the panties pile meanwhile, another person came over to me and shoved a model release form in my face. They had no interest in seeing my I.D. or even asking me any questions. I was being pushed towards the front of the line to go shoot with their panties and a blank model release form in my hands. I hadn't even had time to get undressed to put them on."

Richardson with his then-girlfriend at the opening of the Terry Richardson Gallery at Deitch in New York, 2004.

Although she has since shot nude, she decided that she did not want to be a part of what was happening, and she did not speak to Richardson at the event. "I feel rather strongly that agencies and companies should not affiliate themselves with a person that mistreats women, who are their biggest consumers," she told me. "That being said, I also wish that more women were educated and prepared to deal with the hardships that come along with the industry's coldness, the power of saying the word, 'No', with the conviction of walking away, and not regretting it."

Then there's Canadian model Liskula Cohen, who walked off a Vogue shoot with Richardson after his requests got more and more explicit. The men joining her on the shoot were not models or actors, they were friends of Richardson. She told me that “he wanted me to be completely naked and pretend to give one of the men a blow job, while he was also naked”.

Cohen says that after she walked off set, she was replaced by another model who gave blow jobs to both men and “they apparently had no qualms ejaculating on her for Terry’s images”. It's possible that Vogue did not know what was happening on the shoot - although given Richardson's reputation, they might have been able to guess. "Needless to say I have never shared the images or this story with anyone. I live with this guilt inside of me, that I did something terribly wrong," she told the blog Girlie Girl Army. "In 24 years of modelling I have only walked out once. He made me feel as if I was a prostitute, a whore or even less then if possible. . . I want other girls who read this to know that if you do something like this, you will survive, but it will haunt you. I have scoured the internet for these images and thankfully they are nowhere to be found. But it haunts me in my own mind. I would hate for my daughter to see these images. . .  That shoot was nearly 12 years ago and it still outrages me, makes me feel queasy, and makes me feel ashamed. I am a 41-year-old mother and this is how my work experience with Terry has left me."

In a 2010 The Gloss article, ex-model Jamie Peck describes a shoot with Richardson where he asked her to remove her tampon so he could play with it. When she refused, he decided to get naked. “Before I could say “whoa, whoa, whoa!” dude was wearing only his tattoos and waggling the biggest dick I’d ever seen dangerously close to my unclothed person”.

Danish model Rie Rasmussen told Jezebel in 2012 that the girls who work with Richardson “are too afraid to say no because their agency booked them on the job and are too young to stand up for themselves”. Another model who didn’t wish to be named describes Richardson’s ‘creepy demands’ in the same Jezebel post. “Eventually, he had me go down on him and took pictures of him coming on my face, which I had never done before, and when I went to the bathroom to clean up I could hear him and an assistant joking about it, which is when I decided to never tell anyone”.

 

Richardson with Kate Moss. Photo: Getty

On paper, Richardson’s CV looks great. He has photographed celebrities including Madonna, Kate Moss, Miley Cyrus, Chloe Sevigny, Mila Kunis, the Olsen twins, Beyoncé, the casts of Gossip Girl and Glee, Emily Ratajkowski (one of the models in Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines video), and Lady Gaga. His work has been published in Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Vanity Fair, GQ, i-D, Rolling Stone and Vice, and he has been hired by YSL, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Diesel, H&M, Mango, Supreme, Aldo, Jimmy Choo, Sisley and Gucci. The big names want to pose for him, publish him and use his services, this much is clear. The question is why.

It’s difficult to buy the line that top fashion publications and designers aren’t aware of the allegations against Richardson. It’s more likely that they simply don’t want to engage with them when his style is so commercially successful. According to one fashion insider, everyone in the business is aware of the behaviour of "Uncle Terry", but no one wants to say anything - particularly not teenagers and twentysomethings in an industry where models work freelance with no job security, their next booking dependent on a tight-knit world where everyone knows everyone else. 

Terry Richardson famously remarked "it's not who you know, it's who you blow. I don't have a hole in my jeans for nothing". His non-celebrity pictures, largely using young, unknown models, are often pornographic in nature. He has blurred the boundaries between pornography and fashion advertising more than any other living photographer, and the companies and magazines that work with him know that this is part of his appeal. 

A detail from Terryworld, Richardson's art book. 

Whatever you think of porn, however, it is an industry which is beginning to be more aware of the potential pitfalls of asking young women to work for older, powerful men. I asked adult performer Zara DuRose about the standards in the industry, and she told me that when she is booked for a job, what goes on in a scene is agreed, in detail and in writing, beforehand. She confirms that “you have to sign a model release and they take copies of two IDs to confirm that you’re over 18 and a copy of your up-to-date health certificates”. She adds: “I’m not afraid to say if there’s something I don’t want to do. People can talk openly about what they want and how they expect things to work. This way you know where you stand and there are no surprises on the day.” In the supposedly more sweet and innocent fashion industry, comparable standards are not always observed. 

By all accounts, Terry Richardson is treating models in a way that would be unacceptable in the adult industry, where explicit material is the order of the day. And top fashion brands, big companies and mainstream publications are condoning his behaviour by continuing to use him. Beyoncé, who has spoken of her feminism, has been both photographed by Richardson and used him to direct her music videos. Richardson is protected by his powerful fashion friends, who keep offering him work and publishing his pictures, while the women he has allegedly abused remain voiceless, despite having shared their stories. (In this 2004 New York Observer piece, Vice's co-founder Gavin McInnes dismisses objectors to Richardson as "first-year feminist types" before asking of a meth-addicted sex worker with black eyes photographed in Richardson's show: "How is old she? You think she'd mind if her tits were on display?")

There is currently an 20,000 signature-strong change.org petition calling on big brands to stop using Richardson. H&M have stated that they have no plans to use Richardson now or in the future. Lena Dunham, who has shot and socialised with Richardson in the past, denounced him in a recent Guardian article as an “alleged sexual predator” who she does not count as a friend. Richardson has consistently refused to comment on the allegations made against him. 

A jobbing model who needs to work might not have the luxury of turning down a shoot with Richardson. In that case, Liskula Cohen’s advice is “bring a body guard, keep your clothes on, and if he exposes himself call the police”.

The fashion commentator Caryn Franklin describes Richardson as someone who “appears to leverage his postion to ignore professional boundaries when he posts images of himself having explicit sex with young women”.  She says that fashion is an industry that “shows very little concern for the wellbeing of its young models. Agents, editors and designers ignore the online accounts of his predatory behaviour and in refusing to address his dysfunctional approach they are endorsing something that is profoundly wrong”.

Liskula Cohen adds that “as for Vogue and all of his clients, I have no idea why they continue to use him”.

 

Alice Louise’s petition can be found here. Follow Harriet on Twitter: @harriepw

 

At the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Russian establishment is trying to out-gay the gays

0
0
Russia has given its Olympic volunteers a rainbow-coloured uniform. This is a country that, as of last year, has criminalised homosexuality and banned its citizens from publically brandishing the Pride flag. What's really going on here?

This Friday marks the official opening of the Sochi Winter Olympics. In the build up to the most controversial Games in decades things have started to get more colourful than an orgy at the Crayola factory.

When I caught my first glimpse of the Russian volunteers’ uniforms on the news, my immediate response was a majestic snort. The generously hued Sochi tracksuit looks like a melange of multi-coloured pavement scrapings, left in the wake of a particularly flamboyant Gay Pride parade.

“Oh the irony,” I thought, “The sweet, gaudy as pixie snot irony.”

A rainbow-coloured uniform in a country that, as of last year, has criminalised homosexuality and banned its citizens from publically brandishing the Pride flag initially seemed like a hilarious cock-up on the Russian government’s part. But then it hit me; Russians aren’t thick. They invented vodka and nihilism, for fuck’s sake. So if they’re going to dress their Olympic volunteers up in ludicrous rainbow garb, it has to be for a damn good reason.

The Kremlin’s official line on gay rights protests at the Games is that their perpetrators won’t be prosecuted. Visitors to Sochi are free to wave rainbow flags, wear Gay Pride badges, etc. But in slopping every colour perceivable to the human eye onto the volunteers’ uniforms, it seems that the Sochi masterminds are peacockishly trying to draw attention away from all colourful displays of dissent. Essentially, the Russian establishment is trying to out-gay the gays. What we have here isn’t so much a whitewash as a red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet-wash. And thus began the 2014 Rainbow Wars, the history books probably won’t say.

In October last year, the Germans premiered their similarly shouty athletes’ uniform. While the Russians are trying to throw dissidence into a colour fug, Germany is still insisting that their polychromatic little number isn’t intended as a protest. So I suppose we’re meant to believe that Team Merkel showing up to Sochi dressed as anthropomorphic unicorn turds is just a sehr komisch coincidence.  

Last month, Vice’s excellent documentary Young and Gay in Putin’s Russia revealed that gay rights activists in Russia are overwhelmingly opposed to an international Sochi boycott. As the campaigners argue, such action would actually put gay Russians at risk of retaliation and do little to draw attention to human rights abuses. What they want instead is for the Winter Olympics to be used as a platform for protest. And when all eyes are on their country, why not? But as the Russian authorities are attempting to drown out the gay and the likes of the Germans are refusing to take sides, the likelihood of Sochi being used to its full, government-bashing potential is looking low.

I’m hoping that, over the next few weeks, I’ll be proven wrong. If, between the skiing and general farting about in snow, the international LGBT community manages to make some noise, I’ll happily sprinkle some hundreds and thousands over my words, and eat them. Meanwhile, the campaign for worldwide gay rights continues at home, with an upcoming protest outside the Russian embassy in London on Valentine’s Day.


What happened when Ron and Hermione went for relationship counselling?

0
0
All Harry Potter fans everywhere know that clever, brave, audacious female protagonist Hermione should have ended up with the hero, not Ron Weasley. Here, we drop in on that unhappy marriage twenty years later. . .

In a recent interview with Wonderland magazine that made headlines, J K Rowling admitted what Potter fans everywhere knew deep down in the depths of their souls: that clever, brave, audacious female protagonist should have ended up with Harry Potter. Here, we give you a sneak peek at Ron and Hermione’s relationship twenty years down the line, as they languish in the death throes of their marriage. . .*

***

Ron and Hermione enter an office decorated in soft, soothing colours. A box of tissues sits on a pine coffee table in front of a jade green sofa the same colour as the Windows 95 theme. A woman sits, smiling faintly but reassuringly, on a chair opposite, holding a clipboard. She stands to greet them.

Gwen: Hello, Mrs and Mrs Weasley, my name is Gwen and I’ll be assessing you for relationship counselling this afternoon.

Gwen holds out her hand. Ron shakes it glumly.

Hermione: It’s Mr Weasley and Ms Granger, actually. Do I look like the kind of woman who changes her name after marriage?

Ron: (sotto voce) Hostile. . .

Hermione: (hisses) I’m not being hostile, you –

Ron: (still muttering) Why have you brought us to a Muggle? I thought we were going to be seeing someone who would actually be able to understand our problems?

Hermione: Muggles get divorced too, Ron, for fuck’s sake. . .

Ron: See? Hostile? She’s just so hostile.

Gwen: If you could just take a seat for a moment, and I’ll explain the process. We’re running ahead of ourselves a little. . .

Ron and Hermione sit down

Gwen: My job as a trained relationship counsellor, at least for this initial session, involves asking you some questions about your marriage in an attempt to determine just what it is that you could get out of counselling. We really hope that, at the end of your time here, you’ll leave Relate feeling a real sense of positive change. . .

Ron laughs bitterly

Gwen: So if you could perhaps start off, Mr and Mrs. . . Ron and Hermione, by telling me exactly when you started experiencing problems in your marriage.

Ron looks downwards sullenly, not speaking

Hermione: (sharply) I’ll start, shall I? I suppose you could say that we began experiencing problems almost immediately after our wedding, which was more than twenty years ago now. There was a real feeling – and I’m sure I’m not alone in saying this, Ron – that we just weren’t really supposed to have ended up together. It just felt wrong, somehow. . . almost like an arranged marriage, I suppose you could say. . .

Ron: She says I crushed her spirit. . .

Hermione: Now, Ron, I didn’t say that exactly. Must you extrapolate quite so wildly from everything. . .

Ron: (sarcastically) OK, sorry. She says that my insistence on a patriarchal mode of oppressive domesticity –

Hermione: The problem that has no name –

Ron: The problem that has no name. Means that… she is suffering from – what was it, baby? -  a ‘slow death of the mind and spirit’…

Gwen: So you’ve been reading Betty Friedan. . .

Ron: Books, books. All she ever does is read books. I can’t remember the last time we went to sleep and just. . . held each other.

Hermione: Look, Gwen, I’m a career woman. I’m a woman who has it all. I’ve crawled my way up the political ladder and I did it with very little hands-on help from him. The division of domestic labour remains the. . .

Ron: Basically she’s been offered a job and I don’t want her to take it because it means she’ll never see the kids. . .

Gwen: Which job?

Hermione: (haughtily) I have been recently informed that the position of Minister for Magic is available to me, should I wish to accept it. . .

Gwen: Minister for what. . .

Ron: Er. . .

Hermione: Er. . .

Ron: Basically, Paul Daniels wants her to be his new assistant. It’s a Magic Circle thing. Very prestigious.

Gwen: Ok then. . .

Hermione: (whispers) Nice save.

Gwen: So. . .Ron. . .would you say that your objection to Hermione’s prestigious new proposed position as. . .er. . . Paul Daniels' assistant. . .might be rooted in jealousy at the fact that she will spending much of her time with. . .another man. What’s more, a man who is well-known for his allure and sexual magnetism when it comes to members of the opposite sex.

Hermione: Ron has had trouble with jealousy in the past. Haven’t you, Ron?

Ron glares at her

Gwen: (gently) Tell us about it, Ron. . .

Ron: I haven’t, actually. Not really. Hermione has never so much as looked at another man. I was her first sexual experience. . .

Hermione: Ah. . .

Ron: Ah?

Hermione: About that. . .

Ron: About that?

Hermione: Well, not quite.

Ron: Not quite?

Hermione: Did you forget about Viktor?

Ron: You told me nothing ever happened with Viktor.

Hermione: Well, it didn’t. Not really. It’s not as though we shagged.

Gwen: Who’s Viktor?

Ron: Some tit from a rival school. We’re talking like, 1995 here. What the hell, Hermione?

Hermione: He may have. . .he may have. . . given me a cheeky finger after the Yule Ball. I’m not saying that did happen. But we’d had quite a bit of Butterbeer and I definitely wanted it. And so what if he did, Ron? It’s old news. It’s practically History of Magic now.

Ron: You lying, conniving. . .

Gwen: If you could sit back down, Mr. Weasley, we don’t appreciate raised voices here at Relate. This is intended to be a safe space.

Hermione: Oh, what? So you’d have preferred it if I’d told you? It was bad enough that you were so intimidated by my friendship with Harry for years and years and years, to the point where we’re not even on fucking Christmas card terms anymore (tears up) I miss him so much, Ron. He was our best friend. . .he always understood me in ways. . .

Ron: ‘The chosen one’, give it a bloody rest. . .

Hermione: At least he had courage, Ron. At least he wasn’t so much of a coward that he was willing to squander two decades on an unhappy marriage that didn’t feel right. At least he didn’t allow his future to be written for him. He’s living his truth, Ron. I get that your nonentity of a sister will never get over it; I get that you’re angry with him, but for Christ’s sake Ron, I can’t take not having him in my life. . .

Ron: He wanted an open relationship! With that barmy tart Luna Lovegood! I knew he had a thing for her, with her cynical wide-eyed waif shtick and her polyamory and her weird sexual practices. Poor Ginny, poor, poor Ginny. . .

Gwen: Can we all. . .just please. . .calm down for a moment?

Ron: You’re fighting a losing battle asking her to bloody calm down, Gwen.

Hermione: And why do you always say ‘bloody’ so much? Can’t you fucking swear properly? Do you know what, Ron? Fuck you. I’ve had enough of your shit, your jealousy, your sullenness, the fact that you never read any novels, and your lack of support in my (extremely successful) professional life. I was the best mind of my generation, the most talented witch there was, and all you’ve done is hold me back and destroy my dreams. I understand that you didn’t want to give up your low paying position as a Ministry underling to be my house husband, I understand that. I can even, sort of, respect it. But your complete lack of emotional support has got me crying out for something real, something involving some sodding passion. . .

Ron: You’re having an affair, aren’t you? You’re seeing someone else?

Hermione: I want to be taken, Ron. I just want to have a normal, healthy sex life, is that so much to ask?

Ron: We do have a normal healthy sex life, ‘mione

Hermione has started to cry, her head in her hands

Hermione: Remember that night, somewhere around film six or seven, I can’t quite remember when because it had started to seem like an endless blur by that point, when Harry and I danced in the invisible tent?

Gwen: I’m sorry - invisible tent?

They ignore her. Ron’s head is in his hands now

Hermione: I told you about it - remember, when you were off doing God knows what, off on some jolly. You’d abandoned us, Ron, like the sad little coward that you are. Well, that dance was one of the most – if not the most – sexually charged moments of my entire life. More sexually charged than any other moment in our twenty years of marriage. I’ve never forgotten it…

Ron: I knew it! I knew you slept together than night!

Hermione: The thing is, we didn’t, Ron. We just danced. But I rubbed myself off thinking about it afterwards, Ron, and have done every other night since. I never really loved you. And I think you always knew that. So why don’t we call it a day? We’re lying to ourselves, we’re lying to poor, idiotic Gwen here, and we’re lying to the whole magical community. I can’t live a lie anymore, Ron. I had so much potential, I don’t know why I had to get married in the first place. I could be living in sin on Harry’s houseboat right now, instead of wiping dirty bottoms. Enough.

Ron: But. . . I love you. I have always loved you.

Hermione: There’s no space for love in the revolution, Ron. I’m going to take this job, I’ve decided. It’s my destiny and my responsibility, as a witch and as a woman. . .

Ron is crying now. Hermione has stood up. She shakes Gwen’s hand

Hermione: Thank you, Gwen, for making everything so much clearer for me now. If you could pass my cloak. . .

A loud, guttural sob emits from Ron

Hermione: It wasn’t meant to be, Ron. My darling Ron. I am so very sorry, but it wasn’t meant to be. It was always Harry. I myself – and everyone else – knows that now. Goodbye, Ron. My solicitor will be in touch about access.

Ron: Don’t. . .don’t go.

Hermione: I must, Ron. I must. It’ll get easier, I promise.

Hermione sweeps from the room, but returns, seconds later, to pop her head around the door.

Hermione: Maybe, like, check to see if Lavender’s on Facebook?

*Massive apologies to J K Rowling

Protecting farms or front rooms? The impossible dilemma that climate change forces upon us

0
0
We need a concerted national debate about how we best protect ourselves from increasingly extreme weather.

At last, someone has said it. Chris Smith, chair of the Environment Agency, wrote in the Telegraph of the impossible dilemma facing Britain as climate change leads to ever-worsening flooding:

"…This involves tricky issues of policy and priority: town or country, front rooms or farmland? Flood defences cost money; and how much should the taxpayer be prepared to spend on different places, communities and livelihoods – in Somerset, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or East Anglia? There’s no bottomless purse, and we need to make difficult but sensible choices about where and what we try to protect."

Smith’s words go to the heart of the challenge climate change poses to these shores. Do we continue to defend all parts of the country against rising sea levels and increasing floods – or abandon whole swathes of low-lying land to its fate? This vexed, heartrending conundrum ought to be one of the biggest issues in British politics. Yet it is barely spoken about in Westminster.

The scientists and engineers facing up to the problem are far less circumspect. "Retreat is the only sensible policy," says Colin Thorne, professor of physical geography at Nottingham University and respected flooding expert. "If we fight nature, we will lose in the end… Can the Somerset Levels be defended between now and the end of the century? No."

The thousands of farmers and households living on the Somerset Levels might reasonably beg to differ. But, outside of the recent horrendous flooding, when has this question ever been debated in public? The MP for part of the Levels, Ian Liddell-Granger, has talked endlessly about dredging in Parliament; but not once, as far as I am aware, seriously discussed the long-term future of his constituents in the face of climate change. North-East Somerset MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, meanwhile, seems more interested in having a pop at the Environment Agency than working out how to manage increasingly torrential rainfall in his area. Both are doing their constituents a considerable disservice. 

Or take the city of Hull. It is one of the cities most at risk from flooding in Britain, being situated on low-lying land near to the mouth of the river Humber. When the worst storm surge to hit Britain in sixty years threatened Hull in December, its sea defences mercifully held, despite the waters rising to record levels. But what of its longer-term prospects, as sea levels are projected to rise by up to a metre over the next century? A report by the Institute of Chartered Engineers (ICE) in 2010 outlined the options as being, starkly, "retreat, defend or attack". The "retreat" option sees Hull retreat from its existing sea-front on the Humber, with the old city centre becoming an island. Whether or not you see this as a more realistic or desirable option than continuing to defend the whole city, the challenge remains – with remarkably little said about it in public.

Mind you, the government has been aware of these challenges for quite some time. As far back as 1989, when climate change first registered as an issue in Westminster, a government-funded research council published a report entitled Climatic Change, Rising Sea Level and the British Coast. Alongside some alarming maps showing the great tracts of land at risk from rising sea-levels, the study concluded: “Various options for sea defence and coastal protection would have to be considered [due to global warming], including raising the existing sea walls, building new walls further inland… and even abandoning whole sections of coast.”

Defra’s most recent Climate Change Risk Assessment is scarcely less alarming: it projects that a million more people will be at significant flood risk by the 2020s. The independent Committee on Climate Change has warned that a half-billion pound gap has emerged between flood defence spending and what needs to be invested to keep pace with climate change. With stats like these, we need a concerted national debate about how we best protect ourselves from increasingly extreme weather.

The failure of politicians to consider this threat is a dereliction of the state’s most basic duties towards protecting its citizens. In the face of invading armies, the response is always adamant: "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be", as Churchill famously said. But faced with a very different, yet no less insidious threat to our territorial integrity, our leaders seem to find it harder to grasp an adequate response.

After all, you can’t see off climate change with bombs and guns. Instead, politicians have to accept the dreadful challenge put forward by Smith: that of making "difficult but sensible choices". The most sensible choice of all, of course, would be to avoid the worst excesses of climate change in the first place - cutting carbon emissions and leading the charge for a global climate agreement. But for a government that has cut flood defence spending, excluded climate change from its flood insurance scheme and appointed a climate sceptic as Environment Secretary, making sensible decisions currently seems too much to ask.

Drinking alcohol during pregnancy “could be ruled a crime” – can women be held responsible?

0
0
Pregnancy can be difficult, lonely and dangerous, and life doesn't stop just because you've conceived. Should pregnant women be forced to care for themselves in a way that others are not required to?

When I first read the headline on Sunday, it made me furious. Drinking alcohol during pregnancy “could be ruled a crime”. I found myself thinking of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, of women reduced to walking wombs, of the rights of the pregnant, then those of the “pre-pregnant,” being endlessly eroded. I imagined individuals being judged on their reproductive potential alone, denied all rights for the sake of those not yet born. I thought all this, then I read the article that followed and felt I may have over-reacted.

The facts of the matter, as reported by the Telegraph, appear straightforward:

A council is planning to go to the Court of Appeal in an attempt to secure criminal injuries compensation for a six-year-old girl who was born with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder as a result of her mother’s drinking while she was in the womb.

Although not yet convicted of any crime, the mother is alleged to have “maliciously administered poison so as to endanger life or inflict grievous bodily harm”. Those working on behalf of the council claim to have strong evidence that the mother was advised of the possible impact of her behaviour and repeatedly asked to stop. Her daughter is in foster care and “very badly damaged as a consequence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder”. Reading this, I still question whether criminalising the behaviour of the mother is helpful. Nevertheless, an uncritical acceptance that “these things happen” seems equally untenable.

I am ordinarily on the extreme side of pro-choice, thinking of pregnancy as an active process. No woman should have to a create life against her will. Even so, it strikes me that if you are creating a life, that life will belong to someone else. How can you shape someone else’s entire destiny, potentially causing decades of suffering, just because he or she begins to form inside you? To end a life before birth is one thing; to give birth to a person whose quality of life will be drastically restricted because of you seems to me quite another. It’s at this point that I hesitate and think “well, bodily autonomy is one thing, but what’s nine months? How much freedom does a pregnant woman need?” I rarely find my pro-choice convictions challenged, but in this instance I do.

Many of the pro-choice answers to this strike me as inadequate. We could point out that there’s nothing wrong with one or two drinks over the course of a pregnancy. We could position this legal case at the far end of a cultural shift towards controlling pregnant women’s lives. We could argue that the status of pregnant women as autonomous human beings should be protected at all costs. I don’t disagree with any of these things, but they don’t seem enough. The amount of alcohol required to cause serious damage tends to be more than one or two drinks. This is not a matter of condemning women for the sake of it (for once). However opportunistic the reporting feels in light of recent attacks on abortion rights, the harm caused to this girl is real and lasting. But what should this mean for the behaviour of the mother? Our response cannot be a blanket defence but it has to be meaningful and, I would argue, supportive.

I don’t know why a woman would drink to excess during her pregnancy, knowing that it would harm her foetus. I do know why a woman would drink to excess at other times, and that being pregnant does not necessarily change one’s social and cultural environment such that self-destructive urges will disappear. Pregnancy can be difficult, lonely and dangerous. You are not always supported. In many instances, you will be at greater risk of violence. You may be frightened. You can’t become a different person simply because you need to be. Pregnancy is not magic like that. This is not offered up in mitigation of the damage done, but to question whether self-destructive behaviour that is ordinarily contained should be classed as a criminal activity once a foetus is present. Should pregnant women be forced to care for themselves in a way that others are not required to? Is the answer to expose them to greater pressure, or to offer even more support for those falling between the cracks?

In the US Bei Bei Shuai faces trial for murder with a possible sentence of 45 years to life. Her crime is to have attempted suicide with rat poison while pregnant; she survived but her baby, whom she called Angel, died two days after birth. Perhaps this case seems a million miles away from a criminal injuries compensation case in the UK, but the bluntness of the approach feels similar. There is no clear path between a desperate choice and the foetus growing inside you. There is so much flesh and blood in between. You have to decide, every day, what to do with that flesh and blood. That for one woman taking rat poison seemed the only bearable option is horrendous. To see this as an attack on a foetus rather than proof that those who are pregnant are merely people, susceptible to the same cruelties and weaknesses as everyone else, seems to me unbearably harsh.

I took SSRIs during both my pregnancies. I would rather be the kind of person who does not take SSRIs during their pregnancies, but that is what I did. We make decisions that may or may not be right, depending on what we need to make life bearable for ourselves. Criminalising people for what would, without pregnancy, be a free choice seems to me inhumane. Creating a life does not give anyone a nine-month break from the difficult task of living one.

 

Adam Curtis: “We don't read newspapers because the journalism is so boring”

0
0
An interview with Adam Curtis, producer of the BBC documentaries The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self.

Adam Curtis remains at the forefront of documentary filmmaking. He began in the early 80s, but his first major breakthrough came in 1992 with Pandora’s Box, a film which warned of the dangers technocratic politics and saw him pick up his first of six career BAFTAs.

Holed up in a BBC basement, Curtis brings together disparate subjects and uses archival footage to chart political history. His love of music is playfully interwoven into the narrative, whilst his unique, deadpan voice discusses the failures of political systems and ideologies.

In his 2004 film, Power of Nightmares, his most remarkable piece of work to date, Curtis debunked the myth that al-Qaeda was an organised global network posing an apocalyptic threat to the West, which, In a post-911 context that saw governments and mass media exaggerating al-Qaeda’s size and influence, was a bold message. Time, of course, has been incredibly kind to his analysis.


All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)

After a six month chase attempting to secure an interview, I finally came into contact with him at the Latitude Festival where he was discussing static culture, his latest area of fascination. After forcing a written invitation into his hand, not long later I met him at the British Library in central London. He turned out to be engaging and personable, veering frantically one from one topic to another, remaining insightful and charming throughout.

What follows is an extract from a long conversation regarding his work, politics, journalism and our willing acceptance of the computer systems that guide our choices.

So, let's start with this idea of “static culture”. Just explain what you mean by that. If we use music as an example, are you saying that musicians today are just going back and recycling sounds and themes from the past?

All culture always goes back and feeds off the past, it can't help it, but there are two ways of doing it. Either you can go back and get inspiration from the past and create something genuinely new, which is the whole history of all sorts of things – not just art and music. What bothers me at the moment is that you get a very different sense out of pop culture, which is that it is literally like a form of archaeology. It's going back and rebuilding it almost as a sort of work of art in itself. I mean its weird, it’s not just in pop music, you get it in a lot of avant-garde art at the moment. There are people going back and making plays based on Fassbinder films of the 1970s, and they're just literally replicating it, and it's very odd. And that's why I was being a bit rude about Savages because, whilst Savages are technically extremely good, and live are extremely powerful, they are a bit like archaeologists from the 1920s, going back and digging up the tomb of Tutankhamen, and laying it all out for you to see, but they’re digging up The Slits, or New Order, or Siouxsie Sioux, and presenting it to us, and that's it. It's very odd. It's almost like a terminus railway station in a city where all the trains just keep on arriving and nothing ever leaves.

What I'm really complaining about is a lack of progressive ideas in music. Everything seems to be about just going back and reworking it and it becomes static – sort of like a zombie culture. As I listen to Savages, I have a terrible vision of Siouxsie Sioux coming towards me like a zombie. And nothing will kill that kind of music, because, and this is rude, but what is now called post-punk – that slightly angular stuff that borrowed off punk but took stuff from funk and all sorts of other devices – had its time and had its place. At the moment it’s just being reworked and it doesn't have any meaning to it. Like Mumford and Sons rework folk music and they don’t add any meaning to it either. It’s like they’ve stuck on beards.

So, just give me a concrete example of what Savages could do to their music to make it new and fresh?

Well, if they made a new kind of music out of it, really. The things that I really admire at the moment are people who fuse sort of industrial noise and real romance, real feeling. That’s why I like Nine Inch Nails so much, because I think he does have this ability to be incredibly romantic, yet almost like industrial noise.

What could Savages do? They could take that noise and make it romantic. Post-punk was specifically anti-romantic at its time because it was very much of the mood of the early 80's, of industrial collapse, a collapse on the left – it was sort of nihilistic music and it had an anti-romantic feel to it for that reason. So it had a purpose then. What people are yearning for now is some kind of romantic visions of something beyond our present condition, and that would be good music. So if I was Savages, I would take that music and I would try and fuse it with something achingly romantic, yet at the same time they can be radically revolutionary, and try and argue that feminism has gone the wrong way. I agree with all that, I have no problem with that, but I want it to take me somewhere emotionally. They are anti-emotional in an age that is aching for real, genuine emotion. It’s too bloody self-conscious for its own good, and you keep people in their place by making them self-conscious. All this music is so aware of its own roots.

I mean you must have met this yourself, when you come out of concerts, or cinemas, and you hear people saying, “It’s just like Tarantino with a bit of Clint Eastwood in it …” Everyone is so self-conscious. 

And when everyone is self-conscious you are stuck in your place, because you’re always aware of everything, and you will never make the big leap like falling in love or creating a revolution or doing anything really radical because you are so aware of yourself and all the pressures on you. 

I'm sorry to go on about Savages, I'm sure they are extremely nice people, but they sort of represent a self-conscious knowingness that makes everyone just freeze because they are so self-conscious. You know it yourself, if you suddenly trip over in the street you suddenly feel incredibly self-conscious because you feel that everyone is looking at you. I mean they are not, or if they are it doesn't matter, but you feel terribly self-conscious and for a moment you are frozen and you blush. Well that is what music is like at the moment; it’s like its tripped up in the street and it doesn't know how to get back on course.

After I had listened to you talking about this at Latitude, I was thinking about reunion tours, which I think feeds into this a little bit. If you look at The Stone Roses who are touring the world playing one album from 1989, is this a byproduct of what you’re talking about?

Yes, it’s an incredibly static time. Why do you think we’ve got so many zombie movies? It's quite obvious – it's so obvious when you know it – it's because the dead won't go away. We are surrounded by the dead. Okay, The Stone Roses are touring live, but it’s a dead album. There’s a lot of music – like Kurt Cobain and all these people – they’re dead. The Rolling Stones; the music is dead, but it won’t go away. It's constantly replayed to us, and it is like zombie culture. So many things just go back and dig up the bloody grave. I'm sorry, but that's what Savages do.

What about exceptions to the rules, then? You’ve mentioned Massive Attack, but who else do you think produces genuinely progressive music?

Well, this is where a lot of people think I'm stupid, but I think trash pop is inventive. Some of it is rubbish but, for example, I think Rihanna is great. As a piece of pop music, We Found Love (in a hopeless place) is a great pop song, and genuinely inventive and it uses noises in a very clever way. And also the character that she plays, Rihanna, is a fascinating, tragic and troubled one which also contributes to a great story, and that's what pop music is all about.


Massive Attack performing in 2010. Photo: Getty.

I think we're going through a very healthy phase of pop music, but in terms of progressive music I don't think we are. I mean they come and they go – the Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand – and they all try and be angular, and a bit Jerky and what they are missing out on is what Rihanna is doing; it’s sort of the high drama of our time that is what people are really interested in. Progressive music has completely failed to understand that, because it is so bloody self-conscious. It's partly the fact of the technology we have; it constantly plays back music to us from the past. We hear it back on the radio, iTunes plays it to us; also you get them reinforcing medium through things like Pandora and Amazon: "If you like this, you'll like that …" Spotify, which is always guiding you to new music and again it keeps you in your place. This is another aspect of static culture. It's not so much about dead music but you play on Spotify a track you like, it will tell you – and quite accurately – other tracks you might like that are like that. So, again you’re kept in a static place constantly bombarded by a bit more of what you liked yesterday. That's what I think.

So this idea that computer systems are dictating too much to us, which is reducing our imagination to see a future … how are we going to break that?

I have a theory that people might get fed up with computers, quite simply. I think the interesting thing about the Edward Snowden case is it makes you realise how much the cloud thing on the Internet is a surveillance system. I don't mean it is a conspiracy. It’s sort of like you are part of something you might not necessarily want to be part of. And I just wonder whether, in fact – the Internet won't go away – but its magic will disappear. Our delight in screens that we can go like that with [AC scrolls with fingers] will disappear. It will become a functional local library, coupled with sort of weird people chatting online, and the stuff that you don't know is true or not, and another culture will arise separately from it, which might go back a bit to books and newspapers. I still think newspapers might come back if they could do some good journalism. I mean the reason we don't read newspapers these days is because the journalism is so boring.

I've heard you lament the fact that the financial crash hasn’t presented to us in understandable terms by the media …

I think this is a really interesting thing. So much of the way the present world is managed is through – not even systems – its organizations, which are boring. They don't have any stories to tell. Economics, for example, which is central to our life at the moment … I just drift off when people talk about collateralised debt obligations, and I am not alone. It's impossible to illustrate on television, it's impossible to tell a story about it, because basically it's just someone doing keystrokes somewhere in Canary Wharf in relation to a server in … I dunno … Denver, and something happens, and that's it. I use the phrase, ‘They are unstoryfiable’. Journalism cannot really describe it any longer, so it falls back onto its old myths of dark enemies out there. Whether those dark enemies are Al-Qaeda, Soviets, or criminal masterminds who are grooming children for white slavery. All of which may or may not be true, but it's what they fall back on and don't report. I mean, the Guardian made a noble attempt to describe that company, Serco, which no-one has ever heard of, but which is an incredibly powerful outsourcer of government things, and it's been doing some not very good things recently, but it's incredibly boring and that's the problem. Journalism is a trick to find a way of making the boring interesting, and as yet it hasn't found a way of doing it.

Journalism isn't describing to us the world as it is, which we know is there, but we want someone to make sense of it for us. We want someone to explain to us about what's going on with the banks, but in ways we can get emotionally. We want someone to describe to us who these strange people are like G4S, who constantly turn up doing odd things like at the Olympics and then disappear again. We want people to notice that.  Just like we want music that will actually take us out of ourselves and make us feel not alone and emotionally part of something. Both music and journalism are totally failing to do that at the moment. And it's a moment in history when they haven't caught up, maybe something else will catch up and describe it to us.

Will journalism catch up?

Yeah, of course it will, what else is there? I mean I don't buy this internet … the internet is just a new system of delivery, it’s not a new content thing. Of course journalism will catch up, it's just no one has found it yet. It's a way of connecting with you and me emotionally.

So, what are we waiting for? Are we waiting for a particular journalist with an idea?

Yeah. Or a group of journalists who will find a way of connecting with us. It happened back in the 60s with what was called “New Journalism” because they had the funny idea that you spend time with someone and you write about what was in that person's head, and then you described it like a novelist. And that connected with the new sensibility. 

Well, the new sensibility at the moment is a sense of isolation and a sense of, “What the hell is this all for?” and a sense of uncertainty and anxiety. That’s what is around at the moment. No one has captured that yet in a way that makes you feel connected to what they're saying. Instead what we have are these people who play on the anxiety which is not right, you know: “All the world's going to die … Al-Qaeda is going to kill you with an atomic weapon coming up the Thames on a boat.” They are taking serious issues but amplifying them to try and scare you to get your attention, but in fact, what they should be doing is trying to connect with you emotionally and actually describe the world and help you understand it more. Then it excites you and frightens you; I'm not pleading for a boring journalism, I’m pleading for a better journalism. And I think the same is true of music, which takes you out of yourself. 

What about The Power of Nightmares? The central theme of that is that Al-Qaeda and terrorism isn't as apocalyptic as some suggested. I think time has been kind to that message. At first people were probably thinking you were …

Exaggerating?

Yes, but I think that film stands up.

I would argue that what I said back then absolutely stands up, despite all the horrors that have happened. What I was saying has absolutely been proved by the facts. There is no organised network; there is a serious, dangerous and very nasty threat from small groups of disaffected Islamists who have no real form of connection with each other and are inspired by a corroded and corrupted idea, and they are actually on the decline. That doesn't mean it's not a serious threat.

Also, a lot of my colleagues – on the basis of absolutely no evidence – created a complete fiction of this apocalyptic, organized network and they should be ashamed of doing it.

What do you think about the rise of – it's not really a rise – the presence of the EDL and this anti-Muslim narrative that stemmed from a lot of what you were trying to push back against?

It’s not that strong. It’s stronger in France than it is here, and also again, so much of that is disaffection with unemployment and uncertainty. I mean the real problem of our time is the uncertainty that people feel, and no politicians are really dealing with it, so of course they take it out on easy targets like that. UKIP, I don't think is a significant force, I really don't. The really interesting thing of our time is not what we had back with Al-Qaeda, which is journalists trying to tell us all these fears. It’s just the general sort of emptiness and unknowingness, politicians not having the faintest clue what's going on. It’s a sense of drift that no one has really got hold of now.

Going back to music and journalism, we don't have the sense that anyone is reporting to us, or communicating to us, what is really going on in the world at the moment. We have got this idea that we have screens around us all the time and we see everything and we somehow know everything that is happening in the world because it is reported to us 24 hours a day but actually we also have a sense that we haven't got the faintest idea of what’s going on. Things just come and go like that, and no journalism is making sense of it. It reports it to us, but it doesn't make sense of it. Music and culture is absolutely failing to create a framework of sensibility for us to understand it. It’s just rehashing stuff from … I don’t know … Marcel Duchamp in 1919. 

Again it’s in a static way, because no one knows what's going on. The fears have diminished because that was a reaction. Now we're in this “I don't know what’s going on” so let’s just go listen to Coldplay… [laughs] Not that there is anything wrong with Coldplay.

So, when the financial crash happened, I expected more socialist ideas to start penetrating the narrative, and I don't really think that that has happened. Why do you think that is?

That’s one of the great shocking things of the last decade ... I mean, it’s astonishing. The failure of the left to engage with what happened after 2008 is just mind-boggling. They should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. It’s amazing, they just go around mouthing stuff with absolutely no way of explaining what's going on in a way that doesn't sound again a bit like Savages. They are mouthing the sort of stuff that was said in the 1980s about Margaret Thatcher. 

We are in a genuinely new world at the moment and no one knows its dimensions and they have to come up with something. The Occupy movement absolutely astonished me. They had a brilliant slogan the 99 and 1 per cent – that was the first time I thought someone’s got it, but then they completely blew it. I went to their meetings and they have been completely captivated by this pseudo-managerial theory of a new kind of democracy where there are no leaders and everyone sits around gesticulating if they disagree. It was one of the most absurd ideas in modern politics. 


An anti-capitalist protester from the Occupy movement outside St Paul's Cathedral. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty.

If you are dealing with questions of power you have to understand power, and you can't pretend it doesn’t exist, either on your side or their side. The point about managerialism is it pretends power doesn't exist; it’s a way of keeping you in your place. For them to buy into that was the most cosmically stupid ideas I have ever heard in my life. If you want to change the world you have to deal with questions of power: the power of the ones who don't want you to change it, and the power of those assembled on your side who do want to change it. Humans are humans, and power is a really complicated thing and you can't ignore it and by ignoring it they let everything go, so now there is a vacuum, an absolute vacuum. We have alternative comedians telling us everything is shit … well that’s nothing! I know that.

In The Century of Self you discuss this idea that politicians interview the public through focus groups and then use the results to dictate policy. That seems the wrong way round to me.

If you like this, then you’ll like that. It’s the same thing. It’s what’s called a market idea of democracy, and the Market Idea of democracy says that real democracy is not about taking people somewhere else: it’s about finding out what they want and giving it to them. But in market terms, that’s absolutely right. I don’t have any problems with the free market, its fine, that’s what it does. It’s extremely appropriate in finding out what goods you want and giving it to you and also knowing what you might like and giving it to you. When it is then transferred into politics, that’s when the problem happens. When it is then transferred into culture and journalism, everything just becomes reinforcing. It becomes like a feedback loop. So in the BBC we do this, we know what journalism works for people and we give more of that and it becomes … it creates that very static world but that’s not necessarily the fault of the system.

There are other ways of journalism, it’s just that journalists don’t know how to do it any longer because they haven’t really got the new apparatus to understand and describe the world to us. So they rely on just going to ask you. I know this myself; a lot of journalists I know in television and in print go on about, “Oh if only we didn’t have this terrible system where we are forced to do these focus groups and stuff we could do much better journalism” then you say to them, “Well, what sort of journalism would you do?” And they come out with the same old stuff: that bankers are bad, spies are terrible, and you think actually maybe this is all a bit of a smokescreen to disguise the fact that you sort of run out of puff yourself and everyone is waiting. I have this terrible feeling that we are all waiting for something new, some new view of the world to come along and that maybe we are sort of at the end of our own cold war at the moment.

All the institutions are declining. Universities are declining, spies are completely useless, and banks were our last shot at giving us cheap money and keep things going when industry collapsed. Its all a little bit like these giant institutions are all declining, a bit like the eighties and we are waiting for something new to come along and culture is letting us down. I mean everyone is obsessed by culture at the moment and it’s supposed to be radical. I moved into this world a bit with the Massive Attack thing and they all think they are so radical. They are not radical at all; they play back to us old ideas all the time. I mean all the so-called radical art that was around in the last two Manchester festivals I've been at could have been done in 1919 by Marcel Duchamp. That’s not to say it’s bad, but to pretend that it is somehow a new radical vision of the world is wrong and it's reinforcing what's been around since the early days of modernism. Some of it is very good – Savages are very good – but it’s been around. It's enjoyable and it's fun, but this idea that somehow art can point the way to the future is not what seems to be happening to me at the moment. Art is stuck in the past, just like music is stuck in the past, and journalism is stuck in the past. Something will happen; it’s quite an exciting idea, really.


BBC headquarters at New Broadcasting House in November 2012. Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty.

One doesn't know what it would be, and it may be right at the margins, it may have nothing to do with journalism. I'm making this up because my dates are so bad, but If you were around in the 1860’s and you have these people wandering around going, “We have this idea of history, that it is like a science, and that you can analyze it and logically that means that the class structure will happen like this and we will have Marxists ...” You'd think they were nutty, that they were geeks. They were probably the geeks of their time, they were right at the fringe. I think maybe we are far too much of the establishment. All these radicals – including myself – we think we are somewhere radical but actually we are deeply, deeply, deeply conservative at the moment. And what has a veneer of radicalism is actually possibly the most conservative force at the moment. By that I mean radical culture, art, music and a lot of radical journalism and radical politics – whilst none of it is bad – its mechanisms, and ways of seeing the world are borrowed from the past and its stuck in the past. It’s stuck with a nostalgia for a radicalism of the past and that’s not the radicalism that’s necessary.

Yes there is a lot of poverty around, yes there is a lot of people being thrown out of work – I know all that – but the really big thing that is in the back of most people’s minds at the moment is a sense of total uncertainty, loneliness, isolation and not knowing where they're going for what they're doing. A sense of unconnectedness. And if you really want to change the world and make it better for those who are out of work and who are poor you have got to get the bigger group on your side and the way you get that bigger group on your side is by connecting with those uncertainties in the back of their minds, the loneliness the uncertainty and sense of isolation that is really big at the moment. And no one is doing that, no one has got a music, no one has got a journalism, a politics, a culture that heartfully connects with it. People are yearning for it; I know it I feel it. I like the culture, I like reading some good journalism, I like going to see bands but none of it goes, “Yes, that’s it that gets me." That’s what I think, and we are just waiting for it. It’s quite exciting because you know it can't go on like this. Something is going to come along.

I found it really interesting in The Century of Self, this idea that New Labour were seen as visionary, but they were just charlatans in a way weren't they? They stole a lot of ideas from the Democrats in America. Peter Mandelson, for example …

I wouldn't say they were charlatans, I would say they were opportunists. They were technocrats. Basically they were technocrats who stole an ideological cloak of Labour, and draped over what was really ... They are managerial technocrats, because that's really all focus groups are. It's a managerial idea. It's going, well listen we'll just ask them what they want and give it to them and that will make them happy and the key thing is to go and identify the swing voter, that's the key technocrat thing. They went and identified who were the swing voters; they're the ones who never make up their minds. Ask them what they want, give it to them, and bingo – you'll get the swing voters on your side. Which means that a great deal of your future is decided by indecisive people in Uttoxeter.

Philip Gould: do you think he was the thinking behind the New Labour movement?

Yeah, he was clever; he was the technocrat. Because Gould spotted early on the whole idea of focus groups, and how you could extend them. What went wrong with New Labour, which I think is quite interesting, is that Blair got fed up with focus groups and started to do something off his own back, which was Iraq. It was almost like he got fed up and felt imprisoned by them. No one has ever explained to me why Blair went to war in Iraq. My own personal theory is that he got so fed up with having to focus group everything that he just thought, “Oh sod it, I'm going to do something off my own back” and then he discovered he could. Because the really interesting thing about that time – it's really odd – you have this obsession with focus group politics, which is that you have to ask people what they want otherwise they will turn against you and you will lose power. Yet at the same time, you can decide to invade Iraq, two million people can come out onto the streets of London, you go, “Fuck off!" and they go “Alright" and you go home. I mean where is the power in society?

It's the same with the economic thing, isn't it? We are told this is what's happened so we have to accept X, Y, Z cuts in this area.

But that’s because the left hasn't come up with an alternative theory. In a way you can't really blame people for going, “Ok” because the job of the so-called left is to come up with an explanation that makes me think “Oh yeah, I get it and that's wrong. I must do something about it. I get it, they have simplified it down to me, and I get it". But if you start talking to me about austerity versus collateralised debt obligations and was the austerity to do with the banks being bailed out or because Gordon Brown spent too much money on hospitals? I just drift away. I go and watch The Departed on Channel Four and think about zombies.

Why do you think people at ground level seem to have more anger and ire towards what they perceive as feckless welfare claimants at the bottom, than they do where the real problem exists, at the top? Why do you think there is such a disconnect?

Because it’s a very easy thing to do and it's a traditional thing on the right to do, to blame others for stealing from you. All the left has got to do is find an equally simple way of explaining what is going on at the top and re-divert your attention and anger to that, but they are not doing it. I have no idea why they're not doing it. I’m not a politician; I’m a journalist. It’s not my job to do it and especially with the BBC it's not my job to do it, but I am absolutely astonished that they’re not doing it. They really should hang their heads in shame, because it means they are not up to their jobs. If the right can do the divide and rule thing which you have just described of getting lower middle class people to get pissed off with the working class claimants, I'm afraid the left’s job is to take that anger and uncertainty which the right are accessing and redirect it to better and more purposeful -from their point of view – targets. And they are not doing it, they are just not.

The right seem to set the terms of the debate and the left operate within it, don't they?

Yes, you have to set your own terms and that’s all it is.

What’s next for you, then?

I think I'm going to do a history of entertainment, and the relationship between entertainment and power. I am subtitling the rise of the media industrial complex, from gangsters and Jimmy Savile in Leeds in the 1950s, to YouTube and Google in the present day, via Rupert Murdoch. Entertainment and Power: The Rise of the Media Industrial Complex.

There you go.

Five questions answered on Lloyds’ announcement on increasing PPI provisions

0
0
Will it affect the groups’ profits?

Lloyds Banking Group today announced it is to increase its provision for the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI). We answer five questions on the bank's announcement.

By how much is the bank increasing its PPI provisions?

The group said it will increase the fund by another £1.8bn, bringing the total to nearly £10bn. It said this extra provision reflects an increase in successful claims.

Has this affected the group's profits?

The banking group also announced that its underlying profits for 2013 would be £6.2bn, which is nearly double what analysts have been expecting. As a result, the bank has said it could restart dividend payments this year. Lloyds has not paid any dividends to shareholders since 2008.

What is the total cost of the PPI scandal expected to be for all banks?

The bill for all banks is expected to be around £20bn.

What else has Lloyds said?

Antonio Horta-Osorio, chief executive of Lloyds, said: "Our profitability, despite legacy issues, is testament to the strength of our business model and the commitment of our people, and has enabled the UK government to start to return the bank to full private ownership.”

The bank also announced it will be setting aside another £130m to cover the cost of compensation payments to SMEs mis-sold interest rate hedging products.

Does the government still have shares in the Lloyds bank?

Yes, the UK government still owns 32.7 per cent of the bank's shares. However, it hopes to sell these, most likely in April, because it wants the bank to return to private ownership by the next general election.

Viewing all 11165 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images