Pouring milk on troubled waters

Finally, my colleagues have become aware of the word 'hipster', the pejorative du jour of the last seven years. They appear to have grasped the rules with which it is generally applied quite well too: never directly address another with the term, ascribe general attributes of hipsterness (having a beard, a tattoo or anything vaguely trendy) to indistinct groups of others not directly known to you, maybe rib your peers by pointing out the attributes that they have in common with these vaguely designated others, etc. I am aware of all of this because amongst my colleagues, the inference is generally directed towards me, being the one with the biggest beard and having recently lived in East London. Although such behaviour is new to my colleagues, it is a version of a game many of us have been playing for years: always happy to apply the epithet to others, never even willing to countenance the possibility that it might apply to us. I remember going to Portland (Oregon) in 2011 and being amused to find a local magazine editorial confronting the H word head on: "Hipsterhipsterhipsterhipster" it began in an attempt almost to exorcise it, before going on to explain how Portland was not Portlandia. And it was right too: Portland is great city with much to offer beyond coffee, beards and bicycles. However, I was reading this article in a room at the Ace Hotel, where the bored receptionist, seemingly made entirely of slender limbs, had done everything but slam a typewriter on the desk in order to impersonate his Portlandia double when we'd checked in. He wouldn't have intended that association (in his defence, I think the Portlandia episode might have come later - in his prosecution I think it might genuinely have been based on him), it simply arrived as negative association from external observation. And from the fact that he was a bit of a dick. 

That miserable git from Shooting Stars recently wrote a terrible article about how much he hated Hipsters. One of the biggest failures of this article was that he was entirely unable to identify his quarry: ultimately settling for the people that had been foolish enough to take on the activities his generation had just grown out of. If that isn't a crass 'young people are rubbish' I don't know what is. The problem with Will Self's article is that he fell straight into Hipster identification trap: find an other that you don't like/understand and who are probably measurably cooler than you (and very much in the way that these things can be measured, or at least can be perceived to be) then apply the favoured pejorative of the time to them. In a desire to get past lazy journalism, Self went a step further and attempted to explain just what had caused this most nebulous of pejorative others to exist. Of course it was at this point that it became clear that he was really just talking about people younger than him, in much the same way as I'm sure previous generations labelled all young people 'hippies', except that hippies were an identifiable subculture. No one goes out of their way to be identified as a hipster. Or do they? 

I've been looking at this whole thing very much as if it were a given that the H-word is simply a nebulous pejorative applied to anyone irritatingly more fashion conscious than you and not an identity that people wish for themselves. And then I saw the Channel 4 News cereal thing. Firstly, it was the first time I'd heard a news presenter identify hipsters as a subculture, responsible for shaping parts of the socio-cultural landscape. Secondly, there were the owners of the cereal shop themeves, who were a walking, talking cliché: fullsome beards, check; slick back quiff-type hair, check; sleeve tattoos, check; ridiculous concept boutique that no right minded person can imagine ever spending money in, check; utter obliviousness to the greater social context into which they've dumped their massive offence-turd of clueless consumerism, check. This last was fantastically illustrated by the man terminating the interview ("can we stop the interview, I don't like the questions you're asking") when the interviewer pointed out that they were in Tower Hamlets, one of London's poorest boroughs and that the actual local residents might struggle with paying £3 plus for a bowl of cereal. I guess I'd always assumed that there was a bit of a responsible future-looking attitude to the hipster mentality - riding bicycles, eating locally grown heritage blah, etc. - but I guess that's just me falling into the trap of ascribing certain value-sets to a broadly and poorly defined other based on observations of a few people that I have selected as my representatives of that other. Most likely I have chosen those with whom I can in some way identify (after all, I wanted to stay at the Ace Hotel in Portland), yet I do not always like what I see. Similarly Will Self only saw younger, more hirsute and irritating versions of himself. It's as if we look in a mirror only to find our reflection beguiling and repulsive at the same time. 

Of course I presume that only vacuous idiots would see their reflection in the cereal guys, with their by-numbers approach to life, but just because these people are visible and idiotic does not mean we can ascribe crass stupidity to an entire group of people, especially when we have so comprehensively failed to define that group in any other way. Many people that the majority would define as hipsters have set up bakeries and craft breweries, markets and butchers; many of these things may be in some ways novel, but they are not novelty, or crass or stupid. They are simply taking something already extant and looking for new experience in it: it's what young people do. Does it say something about our society that we want them to fail, that we want to find the most shallow of motives in everything they do; that when we do find the shallowest example of this minority we hold them up as an exemplar, damning the whole?

Parmesan

The level of the debate surrounding the photo of a house with a white van in front of it and some St George's flags hanging from the windows was exceptional. Of course I mean exceptional in that from the very beginning nothing of any substance was said. 

Firstly, Emily Thornberry posted a picture on Twitter stating that it was in Rochester. Then everyone (not least Ed Milliband) decided to read all sorts of negative connotations into this and blame them on her and get all upset about the Labour Party sneering at the working class. 

Just in case the working class aren't clear on this: everyone is sneering at you, even the Labour Party (but probably not as much as anyone else who claims to speak on your behalf). It's OK, you get used to it, I should know, I'm a member of the liberal intelligentsia, and everyone sneers at us too. At least as the working class, everyone usually sneers at you in private whilst publicly asserting your unassailable right to do, say or act however you like because you are the only social subgroup to be considered genuine; the rest of us are lying to ourselves. This at least is what I can glean from my (admittedly limited) interaction with the popular press. 

As saying that you speak on behalf of the working class is a cardinal sin, all parties involved in any 'debate' concerning the working class tend to spend most of their time trying to accuse the other parties of having the audacity to patronise the working class whilst trying to avoid being accused of the same thing themselves. Although in many ways, this makes such debate more complex and nuanced than most modern political debate, if anything it means that even less of the actual issue gets discussed. This is an achievement of sorts, just not one that should be celebrated. 

The level of debate surrounding politics at the moment is so low as to be utterly meaningless: no one even bothers introducing proper policies any more, they just make up some headline grabbing crap that'll never actually make it on to statute and then ram all the ugly stuff into the small print. When it actually gets debated in parliament everyone is so busy shouting empty platitudes at each other that genuinely fractious legislation can sail by without anyone batting an eyelid. It's like government exists at two levels: the hilarious press circus and the bit that quietly gets on with selling off our assets to its mates. What's really odd is that I'm sure there are some very clever people in parliament (not all of them obviously, otherwise how do you account for David Cameron), but they all seem so shit scared of being presented as idiots that they never dare say anything intelligent. 

I don't have a cure for this because it's fairly deep rooted: we went to war in 2003 based on evidence that everyone knew was made up; we just chose to ignore the blindingly obvious, like we'd collectively stuck our fingers in our ears and gone 'lalalalalalala, not listening...oh look we invaded a country illegally, whoops'. So if we can ignore the massive steaming, humming dung heap that was the 'case for war' in 2003, is it any wonder that no one has pointed out the fact that nothing in the last Tory election manifesto has actually even been hinted at in the last five years. I'm sure the excuse would be coalition government, but you can't blame everything on the Lib Dems, even though the Tories have made a pretty good fist of it. The truth is that for some time now an election manifesto has been a fairly meaningless way of grabbing headlines without actually having to commit to anything. 

So where does this leave us? I think we should accept that the content of the the debates around the elections is basically meaningless and that there is nothing we can do to change this. Indeed I think we should embrace this fact by demanding that politicians take all spurious claims to future policy out of their debates and instead simply pick a topic for debate like they did at school or Oxbridge. I think next May our politicians should stick to one topic and only debate which is the best cheese. 

Privilege

I was at a pelican crossing the other day whilst a large number of people were crossing the road. As soon as the lights began to flash amber, the chauffeur of the car at the crossing began to drive, effectively pushing the still crossing pedestrians out of the way. Although the chauffeur briefly acknowledged the pedestrians' immediate compliance with his rewriting of the laws of the road (allowing him not to have to run them over), I doubt if his passenger did or if she was even aware that this was in defiance of convention or law. After all, why should the rights and safety of a bunch of pedestrians get in the way of her arriving at her destination fractionally earlier? 

It may be that I am in some way more sensitive to it these days or it may be simply the case that it occurs more, but I have noticed an increase in the number of people who seem to think that wealth gives them more rights. This is a mistake: wealth brings advantage, it does not bring precedence. At least it shouldn't. It should not change your position as a citizen in that the same laws should apply to you. Of course we know that this is not always the case, we know that there are those with enough money to pay to avoid the inconvenience of having to comply with the law. In the 20th century - with the wealth of the colonial period still sloshing about - perhaps we would have expected this to be a thing of the past, or a state of affairs restricted to tin pot dictatorships. However, as the UK slips back into its place as a medium sized country buffeted by global market forces, we tend to take on more and more of the values of the tin pot dictatorships we used to look down upon. This is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to the UK though, throughout the world, there appears to be a subservience attached to wealth that goes beyond simply reverence. 

At a political level (and this is certainly true of the UK) there is a continual undignified scramble to get wealth into the country regardless of whether that wealth stays in the country or benefits the country in any way. This seems to be driven by a more general perception of wealth as good in some way other than the potential of it disseminating itself amongst others. It seems that we have been told that wealth accumulation is a good thing so much that we believe wealth to be some form of abstract moral force for good, rather than simply a resource that has no moral value except in its use. This perception seems to extend to the wealthy, who appear to believe that their ability to accumulate (or inherit) wealth makes them some sort of übermensch, soaring above the concerns and petty ties of the rest of us mere mortals. Unfortunately, because we are presented no alternatives, we aspire to be like these people, assume that this is possible or even probable and therefore cannot see why they should be party to the petty restrictions that we ourselves will happily rise above once we achieve their elevated position. We allow our media to lionise these people, presenting their lives as the utopia we seek and as a result we come to believe that they must be in some way better than us. It is a 'better' that we believe we can aspire to, but it is a 'better' none the less. So we sit like expectant children and lap up any wisdom that the grownups impart, safe in the knowledge that they have all the answers. We defer moral authority to them in the same way a child does to adults, but we are not children. We have allowed ourselves to be infantilised by the unfulfilled promise of shiny things and assurances that there are those more worthy than us. 

Of course the narrative of the right is that I'm just a bitter lefty, jealous of others, but I beg to differ. I am not jealous of the wealth of others, I count myself perfectly well off. Of course I could always do with a bit more, but I would think that wouldn't I: I'm conditioned to. My issue is not with others' wealth or with others accumulating wealth, it is with those who think that wealth entitles them to more than those without wealth beyond the luxury that wealth brings, or that it gives them primacy over others, or makes them better people. It does none of these things: no one should mistake the fawning of sycophants blinded by the glare of their wealth for a change in their societal rights and obligations. 

Pungent

It is a running joke amongst my friends that I don't drink New World wine. It's not true, I don't discriminate against any wine simply due to its origin. However, like anyone else, I have acquired my own taste in wine, which has come largely from being given various French wines to drink by my family throughout my formative years. This means that the big bold jammy flavours that dominate much New World wine don't really chime with my palette. Some people genuinely like this kind of wine, perhaps many people, but I suspect that much like I have with (most) French wine, many people have learned to like this style of wine. Wine being wine though, or at least a lot of the nonsense that floats around wine being what it is, many people probably think that this kind of taste defines 'good' wine. This is obviously horse shit: whilst there is good and bad wine, much of it is just wine you like or wine you don't like. I don't particularly like big brash wine, but that doesn't mean I don't think other people shouldn't drink it if that's what they like. However I'd equally like to carry on enjoying the wine that I like, which is why I worry when I hear about French wine makers making wines in the 'new world' style. I even heard about a wine maker in Burgundy taking a load of their wine, sticking it in new oak barrels and doing all sorts of other things to give it that New World style. In Burgundy: the second most famous wine producing region in France. 

I'm sure the last sentence could easily be interpreted as snobbery (as I'm sure it will if any of my friends are reading this!) but it is actually a concern about diversity: if even the French start making wine in a New World style, who is going to make Old World style wine? The interesting thing about wine (and unfortunately much of what has traditionally helped the snobs scare others off) is its massive diversity and variation: for the inquisitive there is always something new to discover, even if you might not like all of it (and no one does). If everyone starts making the same kind of wine, that diversity goes away and wine just becomes another way of getting drunk. The success especially of cheaper Australian wine has been all about delivering a consistent product, i.e. one that will always taste exactly the same and can be produced in large batches. This is the same approach that was applied to lager in Britain in the 1970s, which resulted in a very consistent product but with a very small amount of flavour. Of course no one can accuse Australian wine of lacking flavour, but I can't help feeling that here too quantity may be a substitute for quality. 

Having lots of flavour as signifier for quality is a modern phenomenon that can be observed across all forms of drink that one can be snooty about: coffee, wine and beer all now have their big flavour aficionados. Look at the craft beer craze: to all intents and purposes it is a good thing, popularising the small brewery and brining different kinds of beers to the market, except that almost all of the beer is American-style IPA made with very strong imported hops. Certainly these days it seems as if, in London at least, you can go into a pub claiming to sell real ale and you might struggle to get a classic bitter, mild or traditional IPA. It seems churlish to complain when there are more different beers around now than there have been for many a year, but when that difference can only really be defined by subtle variations in the volume at which they shout "HERE, HAVE SOME MORE HOPS," you have to ask how much actual variety there is. Clearly very hoppy beer is an acquired taste - just like very fruity wine or very fruity coffee - I'm just not sure why I should acquire it. There are many other tastes out there that I have acquired that I'm perfectly happy with, as well as (I hope) still more that I have yet to acquire and look forward to acquiring. I object to the inference that I lack taste simply because I'm not that keen on certain very strong flavours. To me this trend towards making every taste bigger is merely an attempt to codify taste along the same lines as American fast food companies codify value: bigger is always better. It requires no independent thought or personal valuation, because the decision has been made simple for you: bad food has no flavour, so good food must have lots of flavour and the best food must have the most. 

Again I am sounding like I think all of the new food and drink movements are a bad thing, and I absolutely don't. I just think that like every other potential cultural niche, 'artisan' food and drink can no longer be of any interest to anyone for any period of time before it is instantly codified, commodified and commercialised. The various food fads that have swept through London in the last few years like forest fires, their flames fanned by the wind of blogger, social media and general Internet hype - dirty burgers, barbecue and ramen to name but a few -  are testament to the fact that barely two restaurants can constitute a movement in the scramble for the new in food just as much as two vaguely similar bands used to constitute a new form of music in the pre-Britpop NME. We have arrived at a world where enough of us are keen to taste the next exciting, exclusive, underground thing that the definitions of luxury and exclusivity have to be broadened to fit us all in, and in broadening they have to appeal to a wider audience and to appeal to a wider audience they have to shout louder, and in shouting louder, they have become much less subtle or nuanced. Perhaps this is simply the inevitable result of an ever growing global middle class: that even things that are not mass produced fall foul of the homogenising forces of mass opinion. I hope not. I hope that just because my tastes are counter to the prevailing trend, that doesn't mean that they are to be drowned out entirely by the noise of ever louder flavour. 

Peripheral vision

The other day got on a Jubilee Line train in rush hour. It was very crowded and I had to squeeze in to the space just inside the door. I quickly looked around the carriage to see if there was any space to stand in and noticed plenty of it in the space between the seats. I excused myself as I squeezed through the crowd to the empty space and rather expected one or two people to follow me, but they didn't. They didn't even look round, they just remained crushed up against each other in the space between the two sets of doors. There was easily space for three people in the space beside me, but no one was inquisitive enough to notice. 

I can't help seeing this as indicative of current attitudes in general: people are so desperate to hang on to their miserable little bit of existence that they don't even look round to see if there is a simple alternative that will be better for everyone, themselves included. 

It also shows that I'm the kind of idiot who thinks society is for observing rather than engaging with. 

Posits

The annual Long Layer talk this year between Brian Eno and David Graeber was a sporadically interesting affair. If Eno had spent a little less time auditioning for 'Grumpy Old Men' it might have been more consistently interesting. David Graeber on the other hand was that rarest of modern personages: someone trying to posit solutions. It is a workplace cliché to say "I don't want problems I want solutions", but actual solutions are fairly thin on the ground. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have heard lots of blame apportioned and lots of assertions that it cannot be allowed to happen again, but no concrete ideas about how we might fix a clearly very dysfunctional system. There has been endless tinkering around the edges: introducing watered down laws to reduce bankers' bonuses or marginally change lending criteria. There has been plenty of blame ascribed to governments and institutions and of course bankers. At the height of the crisis some people even tried to blame Robert Peston for drawing our attention to the black hole in our financial system in the first place. Blame is great because it is always someone else's fault and therefore always someone else's problem. So the fundamental flaws in our system have been 'addressed' by assigning blame to certain groups of people and then almost arbitrarily restricting some aspect of their financial interactions. 

Perhaps I am being too cynical or too quick to judge, perhaps it is inevitable that in the immediate aftermath of a financial crisis of such magnitude there is bound to be a protracted period of hand wringing and mud slinging before people finally calm down enough to look properly at the problem, its causes and potential solutions. On Analysis on Radio 4 last week, Robert Peston presented a program about the ideas of two American economists concerning the causes of the 2008 crisis and the structural changes required to prevent them happening again. Refreshingly, they pointed out that everyone was to blame: irresponsible mortgage lenders, the banks who bought packaged debt from them and the individuals who borrowed amounts of money they couldn't afford to repay. More interestingly, they posited a change in the current system that could ensure that this couldn't just happen again. Largely this was to be achieved by switching the risk of default away from the borrower by allowing mortgage payments to decrease if the value of the mortgaged property falls. In return for the lender taking on more debt, they are guaranteed 5% of any increase in value of the property when it is sold. This is not necessarily a complete solution to all our problems, but on analysis it was heralded as radical and potentially controversial. To me this only seems to highlight the very limited set of parameters within which we consider sensible or even possible to operate our economy. An almost all pervasive conservatism has left us with little else to do but moan about a situation we daren't consider actually attempting to change. 

Because of this pervasive conservative orthodoxy, people like Graeber are considered so outlandish as to barely be considered at all. One of the interesting points Graeber made at the talk was the fact that as soon as it became apparent that the Occupy movement was not going to form a political party and join the established and manageable political process, the media quickly lost interest and decided that this was too radical to be reported on basically within mainstream media. Which speaks volumes the kind of commercial media we have now: concerned with appealing to as broader base of their 'constituents' as possible, scared that unorthodox ideas might scare them off. 

In the postwar period, the media presented the unorthodox to us as something we might want to consider, something we might want to discuss, even something we might get very upset about, but fundamentally something that was worth consideration. At some point around the end of the century, the media (along with the rest of us) were convinced that unorthodoxy was the preserve of the mentally unsound (or the poor, who are basically the same thing in this orthodoxy). So why would anyone, much less journalists who could otherwise get genuine access to the corridors of power be interested in such ephemera?

We are, as a society these days, entirely defined by our relationship to the epicentre of the mainstream. Teenagers are no longer able to have tribes that exist entirely apart from their peers or their guardians, and so are unable to experience the taste of truly independent thought. Everything we do is in relation to an ill defined but entirely conservative epicentre (and yes I do mean that I terms of the dictionary definition - Google it). 100 years ago, your average intellectual would have many friends with whom s/he disagreed entirely, yet they were able to form a friendship based largely on debate. These days, we form our wider social networks solely out of people we agree with entirely, and we wonder why our society gets steadily more crap. If we are not prepared to even countenance the (few) voices of genuine change in our world, then we deserve entirely the future that even the prophets of the orthodoxy have predicted for us. 

Posture

Given the Lisfrac fracture sustained playing my annual cricket match last year, I decided it might be more sensible just to umpire this year. This really wasn't much of a sacrifice for me; as I have explained before, much as I love to watch, I'm not sure I actually like playing cricket. Indeed I think I probably enjoyed umpiring more, although I think this is largely because it afforded me more control over the game than my sub-mediocre batting or bowling ever could. What became apparent throughout the course of the match though was that certain things common to all competitive sports will never fail to irritate the crap out of me and all of these things appear to manifest themselves in one particular player who has attended our match every year it's been played. He's not a bad person, I've been for a beer with him and he is perfectly affable, but once he gets on a cricket pitch, he really wants to win. And it really matters to him. Really. When he was run out last year, he stropped off round the world. Literally. In fairness, I don't think his decision to go travelling was entirely driven by being run out in a sub-Sunday league quality cricket match, but I think it helped. Anyway, my problem is that winning means so much to this guy that he spends and otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon knock about in the park relentlessly sledging everyone in sight, badgering the umpire and time-wasting. It worked too: his side won in the gloom of a long summer dusk (although I think some of them even got sick of him criticising their bowling). 

So it's clear that I don't care as much as this guy about winning a cricket match, so why should it bother me? I guess it goes to the heart of one of my biggest beefs with the world in general: if you want to succeed, it pays to be a complete tool. By that I mean that the guides to success that encourage you to be single-minded, selfish and ruthless are right. All of those things will help you to be successful by a very limited meassure of success. Unfortunately, that particular very limited measure of success is the one that remains most popular in modern society; look at obituaries of 'great' people, and more often than not, they will find a way of saying 'he was a complete tool, but he made lots of money, so well done him'. I guess this is no surprise; people whose only motivation is money are likely to make more money than those who have other priorities, and equally they are likely to have less time to be nice to people. Of course the fact that that so much is made of the correlation between being a dick and making lots of money that many people think that the two are interdependent and therefore that they ought to be a dick if they are going to be successful. 

As the title of this blog suggests, I'm usually dealing with the temptations of the modern world and how I might avoid them (although less of that than perhaps I'd like - I need to be more solution oriented), however in this instance I have no problem resisting temptation. Not that I'm bragging about what a nice guy I am - I'm sure I can be as much of a dick as anyone else - but the impact of my actions on others concerns me. It is not unknown for me to wake up (admittedly usually when this coincides with a hangover) and worry about the consequences of something that I said or did several years ago. Granted, this is largely a symptom of the hangover shame spiral, but it is an affliction that I assume never affects those titans of industry who have brushed aside countless sensitive souls and bruiseable egos to get to where they are today. Perhaps I am wrong in this, perhaps they wake up every morning wracked with guilt over those they crushed on their way to the top. If so, why do they do it? Does the money and acclaim compensate for the waves of guilt and shame? It's possible, but it's also possible that it is the only compensation available for those with too little imagination to come up with an alternative. It's possible that these people even assume that the guilt is just a natural state of affairs, that all people feel like this all the time and that the world is a horrible place full of pain that deserves to be treated with disdain and exploited ruthlessly. 

Whether these people deal with their guilt through rationalisation or whether they don't feel guilt at all doesn't point to a particularly stable psychology, so why do we lionise them? If they weren't rich, they might well be considered worthy of psychological assessment, but because they are, they get to set an agenda based on their warped ideals. They have managed to create an orthodoxy.    where the only acceptable goal is winning, whether through the accumulation of more money than other people or by the accumulation of other arbitrary quantifiers, such as points. There is no defined end point at which you have won, you just keep accumulating more to continue winning. It is an ideology of present and immediate future only; if all your 'achievements' are in the past, then you have either passed on to deity status where you may sit atop your accumulation and pass judgement on the efforts of those still attempting to accumulate, or you have lost. Equally it is a wasteful and destructive ideal because there is no gain in genuine efficiency. The only efficiency considered of value to accumulators is one that creates a surplus that can be siphoned off and added to the pile of winnings. It is a cynical, miserable and destructive ideology, and it is the basis of almost all the world's current societies. And it is bizarrely alluring, because we all like to win. I get annoyed by the guy who has to win because he makes it harder for me to win, and I might not care that much, but I still want to win. It is this that I need saving from: from the desire to achieve something to the detriment of my fellow humans (for that is what winning is). I don't think it'd stop me being bothered by the guy who really wants to win, because for that to happen he has to stop caring about it too. We all do. 

Parliamental

Whilst David Camerron and chums decide how to play politics with our constitution and Ed Milliband dithers over a non-issue (only two governments since the war have relied on Scottish MPs for their majority), I thought I'd add my two pence worth. I think we should have a federal UK Parliament in Leeds and regional assemblies for each of the 'nations' that make up the UK. This solves a number of problems:

1. Overcrowding - Westminster is too small to be a practical UK parliament. If all MPs attend the House of Commons (a very rare occurrence), many of them have to stand and the Lords isn't much better. If Westminster only has to house English MPs, there would be plenty of room. 

2. No jurisdictional uncertainty - we wouldn't have a situation where non-English MPs have to be asked not to come into the chamber or being turned away from the lobbies because they won't physically be in the English Parliament. 

3. Less London-centric power structure - Leeds is geographically in the centre of the country, but perhaps more importantly is in the centre of a swathe of northern cities that are essential to the long term socioeconomic wellbeing of the UK. Moving the nation's governmental centre there would go some way to rebalancing the current imbalance in England and the UK generally. Admittedly some improvements to infrastructure would also be required, such as a high speed rail link from Liverpool to Newcastle via Manchester and Leeds, but this is required anyway. 

4. Modernisation - Westminster is steeped in history and constrained by it. A modern democracy needs an open and accessible parliament. The modern communications infrastructure required for this could not easily be retrofitted into a building so utterly wracked with listings as the Palace of Westminster. It would be easier and cheaper to build a new parliament building, fit for purpose in the 21st century.

Anyway, that's my proposal. People will say it lacks detail - what powers and responsibilities would the UK parliament have for example - but unlike David Cameron I don't think it's my place to impose an entirely revised constitution on the people of the UK. I simply wanted to posit the idea of an alternative to the bickered fudge that the current establishment will end up dumping on us for Christmas. 

Pejorative

I've previously written in this blog about the disappointment of following your 'heroes' on Twitter. As a result of this, the rationalised list of sports 'personalities' that I follow is effectively reduced to one man: Michael Vaughn. I follow the former England captain mainly because he is unintentionally very funny. For a man approaching 40 who has lived much of his life in the public eye, he is startlingly and endearingly naive. Whilst this usually leads to much thoroughly entertaining tweeting, it is easy to get depressed by humanity if one is to read the responses to many of his tweets. A number of his recent tweets about the England vs India Test series have elicited strings of badly spelled tirades littered with effing, c-bombs and insults about his mother. I realise that this is nothing compared to the sort of unbelievably threatening and sexually violent abuse directed at pretty much any feminist in the public eye, but I would suggest that it comes from a similar place. Based on the thoroughly unscientific evidence of my experience, a little extrapolation and a dash of presumption, I am fairly certain that the vast majority of this abuse comes from men. The modern narrative (and indeed the excuse that many of the perpetrators of the more extreme misogynist abuse) is that in a world where women are beginning to get some equality, men are increasingly unsure of their position and therefore feel the need to lash out agressively. My response to this 'excuse' is the same as my response to anyone who is having a strop because they can't have everything their own way: grow up.  

Of course Michael Vaughn's response to the abusive comments he gets on Twitter seems to be largely to shrug them off, baffled that people from other countries can't take 'a bit of banter'. Unfortunately, it would appear that many of them can't, which is perhaps an indicator of the vast cultural divides still extant between countries that many view to have a shared (if partially imposed) cultural heritage. I am generally not a fan of banter; as far as I can tell it is simply a term used to excuse oneself from causing massive offence by insulting another. In too many instances 'banter' is used to excuse the inexcusable by those who think freedom of speech means freedom to give offence. However, in many contexts, banter could be interpreted as a form of progress in western male social behaviour. If banter allows contentious concepts to be discussed without the risk of actual physical conflict then it may be (partially) viewed as a progressive force. 

Unfortunately for those on a global stage, the mitigating effects of labelling a statement 'banter' are not universal. In many countries, male concepts of 'honour' mean that people will take 'banter' seriously and respond in an extreme and (in the eyes of western observers at least) disproportionate manner. It would be an oversimplification to argue that the countries where men 'can't take a bit of banter' are those where other problematic concepts of masculine honour exist, leading to so-called 'honour' killings and rape, but a correlation could be made. Much of the 'traditional' concepts of male honour are tied up with a man's power over others, much of which manifests as, or is interpreted as sexual power over women. If a man believes in such a 'code' of 'honour' and feels his 'honour' threatened, questioned or undermined, he will respond initially with threats and ultimately with acts of violence. The fact that the violence is likely to be sexual violence if its target is female simply ties in with a logic that equates sexual dominance with honour. 

In this context, anything that bursts the bubble of dangerous hubris that surrounds such logic must be counted as a good thing. Applied and accepted in the spirit it was intended, banter can undermine the dangerous conventions that have established themselves around masculine pride, but it is a blunt instrument. As Michael Vaughn and others have perhaps discovered, it does not magically wipe away all offence, which is most notable when that offence is unpardonable. Indeed, it is what is counted as unpardonable offence that perhaps differs from one country to the next. In the UK, many men will question their friend's sexuality and it will be considered 'just a bit of banter' (I'm not saying it isn't offensive, especially where the inference is that one form of sexuality is inferior), but threatening a woman sexually is not ever considered acceptable, even if someone tries to excuse it as 'banter'. That us not to say that it doesn't happen in the UK, just that it is not considered acceptable by the moral majority. 

The last two sentences were the first written after I became aware of a furore over a selection of offensive texts written by some football person* being incorrectly classified as banter. The list of subjects of those texts (gender, race, sexuality) pretty much read as a definition of what is not allowed to be termed 'banter' in modern British society, yet in some countries would be accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow. 

Reading over everything I have written so far, I realise that I've slightly missed the point. The broader cultural differences that allowed me to notice the different contexts in which 'banter' will or won't be accepted, blinded me to the fact that the perceived acceptability of any 'banter' is entirely contextual. OK, maybe 'blinded me' is a bit much, but I did think that the context was limited to national or cultural boundaries when it is not at all. With banter, the audience is everything: if it is between a few mates (who are all equally misogynist, racist or whatever) then it is banter; if it is between a broader sweep of society then it is more likely to be offensive. In this sense both Michael Vaughn and the Malky Mackay (the football guy) suffer from a similar problem: Vaughn doesn't understand the breadth of his audience, while Mackay never intended his words to reach a wider audience. Obviously I am not drawing direct parallels between the two men; to my knowledge, Vaughn has never said anything that could be construed as racist, sexist or homophobic, and he has (rightly in my opinion) never had cause to apologise for his tweets, but there can be no doubt that there are those who take considerable offence at some of what he writes in jest. However, in both cases, it is 'banter' that reveals the prejudices of the speaker and listener. Whilst Mackay denies his texts were banter, I'm fairly sure their definition only changed after they came into the public domain. If they had stayed private (and assuming they had only been shared with friends with similar prejudices) everyone involved would have viewed them as banter and gone about their lives with their prejudices intact. Of course Mackay argues that he has none of these prejudices, in which case, the defence of 'banter' would have best been held on to. Part of the purpose of banter appears to be to ride the limit of what the other finds acceptable and it is clearly easier to push that limit with a small group of friends one knows well than with a national or global audience. This appears to lead people to say things when they believe they are amongst friends that they would not countenance in public life, it apparently encourages people to make racist, sexist or homophobic remarks simply because they are taboo, but in the process poses the risk of normalising such language. The more we give voice to a concept without being challenged or asked to justify it, the more legitimate it appears to us, especially if we view it as a piece of harmless fun. So if we need to think about our audience before saying something, should we be saying it at all? The defence of banter is no defence. As Michael Vaughn has discovered, even when it is 'harmless banter', someone still finds it offensive. 

* can you tell I'm not really a football person? 

Partition

On the day I started writing this post (it can take me a while) it was reported that Islamic extremists had taken the Iraqi city of Mosul and one of the Republican Party's most senior figures had lost a primary to a TEA Party challenger. In many ways just another day in the 21st century, but I worry what that means: both these events were illustrations of polarisation in societies. The received wisdom is that, tired of the perceived ineffectiveness of moderation, people around the world turn to extremes in the hope of radical change, yet in neither situation is this entirely the case. In Iraq, the Sunni insurgents have found little resistance partly due to the sectarian machinations of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, which have sought to exclude the the Sunni minority from any involvement in government and wider society. As a marginalised and partially vilified population, the Sunni are likely to welcome an armed rebellion that at least recognises their existence. It is likely that a similar sentiment drives many people involved with the TEA Party movement: the idea that their government doesn't represent them and so they need to sweep it away completely. Embarrisngly, in the UK this sentiment has found its focus around a corduroy wearing idiot who presents himself as a man of the people by spending too much time in the pub.  

Regardless of how it manifests itself, the sense of alienation from mainstream politics and the resulting minority factions that are formed are common across the world at the moment. These anti-establishment movements gain significant traction in seemingly short spaces of time, but we have no way of knowing what would happen if they achieve their ends, as none has yet done so. Historically, extremes are either assimilated into the mainstream as politicians address their concerns and/or economic conditions improve, or the situation becomes so intractable that it deteriorates into civil or international war. Of course we take such a suggestion and happily assume it could never happen in the west, but that is historically because a relatively centralised media has ultimately fostered a consensus of compromise. In the internet age, information and potential consensus is disseminated in a much more focused manner, resulting partly in the kind of sentiment we see amongst these minority factions going entirely unquestioned. Indeed in the self-reflective silos of modern social media, the overwhelming impression is one of incomprehension that anyone could not be of the same opinion. When you don't encounter an opposing viewpoint, you become even more convinced of the rationality of your own beliefs. 

The number of 'popular' uprisings in recent times seems to be another symptom of this attitude of self-confirming rectitude. Whilst in cases like the Arab Spring, it is easy to see how the all-enveloping blanket of social media feedback encouraged the protesters to remain strong in the face of the brutal dictatorships that they opposed, the same blanket allows others to believe in the overwhelming popularity of their cause despite evidence to the contrary in the form of democratic elections. Several times recently, groups of people unable to accept the outcome of elections have decided to change that outcome to something more to their liking, either by attempting to redefine their place outside of their current state, or by attempting to overthrow the government. Of course these situations are rarely clear-cut; democratic legitimacy is claimed by both sides in almost all cases and hard to establish in most. Not so, you would hope in the defender of world democracy, and perhaps that (and the memory of the last one) is what stops it descending into civil war. It seems almost ludicrous even mentioning civil war with reference to the modern USA, but then I'm sure that thirty years ago, most Republicans would consider it ludicrous that members of their party would shut down the government over non-negotiable principles, or ditch their party leader because of his record on compromise. The whole ethos of the TEA Party and those like them is that reasoning with those of a different viewpoint is losing. In these new orthodoxies deviation from or dilution of the message is heresy. Unbelievers are branded fanatics and dehumised so that their opinions need not be given any credence. You may think that in many conflict situations it ever was thus, and this is certainly the case (take Israel/Palestine for example), but the rhetoric of uncompromise is much wider than the war zones of the world's intractable conflicts these days. 

I worry that we are genuinely losing the ability to debate with each other; we spend all of our time listening to those who agree with us or shouting to drown out the sound of those who don't. As a species, we have many vast problems to try and overcome - some of which count as existential threats - and we will need to work together to overcome them. Working together requires agreement, which requires compromise, which requires genuine debate based on the understanding that other points of view have validity. The certanties that the World Wide Web allows us to affirm with others of the same opinion are largely illusory and only serve as a barrier to the greater understanding of others that we need if we are to maintain any sort of functioning wider society. If we keep believing we (and solely those who agree with us) have exclusive access to the truth, then we can only look forward to a world defined by conflict, fragmentation and partition. 

Patriotic

I've largely stayed out of debate on the EU lately, as the whole thing is just too depressing to even attempt to engage with. Chief amongst my disappointments is the fact that millions of people are still stupid enough to believe that any one politician is different from the rest simply because he says he is. Didn't we already see the folly of that one with Nick Clegg? Politicians are fundamentally all the same: they are looking for your approval and they will go to pretty much any lengths to get it. Saying that they are not really a politician is clearly just another thing that politicians say; it would only be accurate if they weren't on the TV or radio telling you that you should vote for them. 

My last post was about the hope that we can finally move away from the politics of oversimplified broad agendas of the past and on to voting for issues that we actually care about. I see UKIP as the last gasp of that old fashioned politics: people aren't voting for UKIP because Nigel Farage has presented a series of well reasoned solutions to the myriad issues this country faces, but because he's told them that the source of all their problems is the EU and leaving it will solve all their problems. Somehow he has managed to present this action as policy, which is something that even Alex Salmond has been unable to achieve: not even the most ferverent supporter of Scottish independence believes that that action of leaving the UK will suddenly, magically solve all their country's problems. It is a shame therefore that so many (mainly English people) seem to see Farage's playground politics as some sort of ideology that they can broadly agree with. This is, of course, because it isn't an ideology at all; it is single issue politics disguised as ideology. Hopefully it is just a transitional anomaly caused by the transition from the party-based system to an issues-based representational one, resulting in the worst of both worlds. Voting for UKIP is voting on a single issue that they will have no power to affect, whilst they actually absent themselves from representing you on every other issue that actually might affect you. In many ways, voting for UKIP is equivalent to not voting at all, but then it is likely that a lot of people are voting UKIP as they wouldn't vote at all otherwise, so perhaps they will get the level of representation that they crave. 

This is rapidly turning into the rant that I hoped it wouldn't, so I should probably wrap it up, but before I do, I'd like to quickly look language surrounding this election. For some strange reason, the right-wing press has allocated sole rights to the claim of patriotism to those of the Euroskeptic persuasion. It's as if being patriotic is the same thing as being myopic. I thought being a patriot meant you were willing to go abroad and fight for your country; certainly that's what our grandparents thought. For some reason, the understanding of patriotism has been redefined to mean that you are willng to stay at home and ignore what is happening abroad regardless of the cost to your country of this course of action. As the 70th anniversary of D-Day approaches, I think I'll stick with the old definition of patriotism and engage with Europe in a way that will help my country. 

Potholes

The first episode of a new season of The Reunion on Radio 4 was one of those episodes where, 20 years on you can tell the guests are still not going to agree. Indeed the programme showed that the emotions of those involved in the 1984 miners' strike were still very raw, at least the emotions of those who were emotionally involved in the first place: Ken Clarke did a good job of presenting the cold, 'rational', ideology-dressed-as-economical-necessity of the Thatcher government. This struck me as perhaps the most notable fact of the whole program: that even then the Tories were presenting their ideology as simple economic necessity, unless of course this was Ken Clarke re-casting history to align with contemporary policy. Whether it was conscious or not, this was the point at which Fukuyama's end of history could be seen to have occurred in Britain: the Conservatives won the argument by presenting the arguments of the left as fanatical ideologies that had no practical basis, but rather existed just to oppose progress in a violent and destructive manner. All of the left became the loony left; reason resided with the right. 

I draw attention to this, because I think my generation is fundamentally a post-miners' strike generation and therefore our view of politics is filtered through Fukuyama's post-historical lense. I remember the euphoria in 1997 for those of us who had only known Tory government. We thought Tony Blair had managed to make the left acceptable again, when in fact he had made Labour acceptable again by moving it to the right, to the world of 'rational necessity'. Blair had recognised the power of the image of leftist ideology as irrational and saw no way to counter it other than doing away with leftist ideology almost completely. Perhaps he had seen the way the left in America had been wiped out by the end of history logic of the right and saw the same as inevitable in the UK. This is understandable, as the stigma of unreason is a powerful tool of those who fear ideology: look at the way feminism is consistently and successfully presented as the preserve of unhinged women; the spectre of hysteria still looming large in the language of the patriarchy. The problem with Blair's response is that it is a pre-miners' strike approach to a post-miners' strike situation. 

Many of us who have grown up politically in this era often struggle to fully understand the world that brought such a conflict about. We struggle to comprehend the extraordinary hubris of the left in believing in the ubiquity of the power of mass labour. From our 'enlightened' vantage point, the whole thing seems a little bit simplistic, a binary conflict of black and white viewed from a world where there are so many different shades and colours. Of course we would view it that way, that is how the post-historical viewpoint is supposed to appear: these things are too complex for simple working folk and are best left to the technocrats. This has partially succeeded in turning younger generations off politics, but in many cases they have simply changed their approach away from a traditional party oriented view to a single issue oriented one. This acceptance that the complexity of the world means that voting for the party that best fits your worldview doesn't really work anymore obviously hasn't really permeated our political institutions. Like many outmoded organisations, the politicians at Westminster cling to the status quo tenaciously, hoping that getting their aides to run a Twitter account will suffice in terms of their engagement with the electorate. Meanwhile, as the traditional vote fragments, the likelihood of majority government fades away and MPs have started thinking about how they can keep their seat at Westminster. This is most notable amongst the new Tory cohort, who have repeatedly voted against the government when they thought it was in their own best interest (i.e. they thought they'd get a kicking from their local constituents). This would seem to point to a greater degree of representation and in many ways it does, especially if the MPs take notice of constituents who didn't vote for them as well as those who did. Of course in a world where people no longer vote for parties, any politician would always look to be keeping the largest number of (active) constituents happy. Such a system requires a bit more of voters than simply showing up at a polling station once every five years, but it seems they are willing to engage when a matter concerns them anyway, and often more so than if they were required to get off their arses and actually vote. The potential danger is that politicians will only react to those who shout the loudest, but it ever was thus: politicians currently gear their policies towards older voters who are much more likely to actually vote. The other worry is that politicians become simply the mouthpiece of anyone with an agenda, but at least it would be transparent and anyone with an agenda would need to engage others rather than simply being rich enough to lobby directly. The complexity of the system would lie in establishing a functional executive, as the role could not simply be handed over to the party with the most MPs. In a post party parliament, the current coalition government would appear even more utterly dysfunctional than it currently does, as the executive would have to be chosen by general consensus, based on each candidate's suitability for the post. 

This is clearly a bit of a pipe dream at the moment, but it is not inconceivable. Currently the only thing keeping our major parties from financial ruin is the 'largesse' of a few individual donors, and such power over politics in the hands of a few wealthy individuals or organisations cannot be good for democracy. Therefore the only thing standing between the current situation and my dream of the future is limits on individual party donations, and I mean limits of hundreds rather than thousands of pounds. This would inevitably lead to the collapse of all the major parties, but what is lost if they no longer exist? Traditional party structures appear solely to facilitate the power of minorities and such an illusion of democracy is something that we should be consigning to history and the failures of the twentieth century. 

Hopefully the conceptual problems that my generation have with the miners' strike is the fact that it illustrates the failure of pre 21st century representational democracy, rather than we have all been brainwashed by a 'post-historical' right wing perspective. If we view the miners' strike as the struggle between two executives, neither of whom had the full backing of their constituents for their actions but both of whom used a dysfunctional model of democratic representation to justify their actions, then we understand the democratic ideals which modern communications should allow us to aspire. If we just look at all forms of protest and political conflict as things that only trouble the unsophisticated democracies of the past or other countries, then we completely deserve whatever government we get. 

Present

10 REM --HAPPY BIRTHDAY BASIC!--

20 PRINT "How old is BASIC?"

30 LET N = GETCHAR()

40 IF N <> "" THEN GOTO 70

50 PAUSE 100

60 GOTO 30

70 LET M = GETCHAR()

80 IF M <> "" THEN GOTO 110

90 PAUSE 100

100 GOTO 70

110 LET Z = N + M

120 IF Z = "50" THEN GOTO 150

130 PRINT "Wrong!"

140 GOTO 20

150 PRINT "Correct! Happy Birthday BASIC!"

 

Preparation

"Perhaps the second shot of the energy wars was fired when Scottish and Southern Energy froze their prices for 18 months..." is a sentence that will not grace the pages of history. I'm sure Ed Miliband and the lunks in charge of our major power companies would like to dream that we might all look back on this pathetic mud-slinging exercise as some epic battle, but the truth is that when the shit actually goes down, it will seem like so much window dressing on the Titanic. The undignified scramble by the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to claim credit for the price freeze rather covered up the details of what this price freeze has cost. In order to maintain their profit margins, SSE are looking for 500 voluntary redundancies and ditching plans to build three offshore wind farms (which increasingly appear to be the only type of wind power the Tories will countenance). Being deeply cynical, I can't help but think that maybe this was the real purpose of the whole exercise. If wholesale energy prices fall over the next 18 months, will SSE keep those jobs or recommit to building the offshore wind farms? I think that both are unlikely, with the latter being extremely unlikely. 

Every time anyone has made a point about the high price of energy in the UK, the 'big six' energy firms bleat on about having to pay green levies, which subsidise making homes more energy efficient and the building of more sources of carbon-free generation. I can understand the energy companies not being keen on the former, as it would reduce their profits, but are they genuinely unhappy about being forced to invest in their own long term future? If this truly is the case, it shows the problem with allowing markets to regulate the energy industry: the interests of the markets are so short-termist that market-driven companies are actually willing to sacrifice their long-term profits for the sake of short-term cost cutting. 

The next intervention in this squabble came from Centrica, who said that the breakup of the big six that they clearly think will follow a competition commission investigation into the energy market will result in the collapse of investment in infrastructure and new generating capacity. They may be right: a larger number of smaller companies may well have to work together to deliver infrastructure and generation improvements that are in their long-term interests and we've already seen what these companies think of long-term interests. Why should they make any long-term investments, when they know any self-respecting government will bail them out in a future where their lack of investment has left the country's energy security in a precarious position. This is where the alleged power of the market is undermined: regardless of whether the consumer has a choice of providers, those providers know they don't have to deliver anything other than the bare minimum and they don't have to invest in infrastructure because if it deteriorates to a point where it actually threatens service delivery, the government will step in to fix the problem. The power companies basically hold the people of this country to ransom, and we have no means of redress. 

One of the reasons the EU hasn't reacted more forcefully in the face of Russian aggression in the Ukraine is that countries like Germany are reliant on Russia to supply a significant portion of their gas. This means that these countries are having their foreign policy dictated to them by their energy supplier. If nothing else is, this should be a clear indication that already energy security is national security. We don't leave the physical defence of our country in the hands of private companies (although I am aware of the amount of industry that is supported by our defence policy), so why would we leave our energy security to private companies whose apathy will soon force them hand it over to the foreign power with the greatest remaining mineral assets?

Any true historical scholar will know that the first shots of the energy wars were fired as long ago as the early part of the twentieth century, but it is perhaps only now that we start to see energy as a weapon of that war as well as it's object. Increasingly, countries like Russia will see their mineral reserves as a tool of hard power to compliment their army, navy and airforce. Our only defence against such aggressors will be to have enough alternative energy sources to render their mineral wealth meaningless. This is a serious enough threat to our national security that I don't see why the ministry of defence shouldn't be running all the power stations in the land. Obviously that is a terrible idea, given the fact that the MOD can't even handle buying weapons competently, but the consequences for our national security and independence are too serious for us to leave this in the hands of short-term profits-obsessed companies. We need a viable national policy on energy security now, and if that means nationalisation (there, I said it), then so be it. I know in a world where the right wing won the argument nationalisation is heresy, but I think it may well be a small price to pay for guaranteeing the future independence of our nation. This is a threat that no market can counter.  We need to stand up to a few company directors now to make sure  we can still stand up to despots in the future. 

Provision

Why do the clocks go forward during the night, why don't they go forward during the day? Is it because our society is still formed around the notion that our productivity is more important than our wellbeing? 

Point made

A little while ago I wrote a defence of the Shard from an aesthetic viewpoint. That was before it was complete, and whilst I still don't object to it aesthetically, I am well aware of what it has quickly come to represent: the triumph of wealth over imagination. The uses to which the building has been put reflect the general approach of it's Qatari owners to the spending of their spectacular mineral wealth, which appears to be to build something obscenely big and then fill it full of stuff for obscenely wealthy people to do. Of course the Shard isn't full by any stretch of the imagination: at the beginning of the year it stood 2/3rds empty. This fact seems almost unpardonable when one considers the fact that London suffers a chronic housing shortage. You would think it would bother the building's owners, given that they are losing out on potential millions of pounds in rent, but I doubt they even give it a second thought. Like many of the nations made rich by our obsession with burning as much of our planet as possible, the middle eastern countries invest for the long term. Sensibly, they know that their resources, whilst currently ample, are finite and therefore they should invest in things that will make money long after the oil has run dry. Everyone knows that property is a pretty good long term investment and moreover that in London property prices never go down. So the Shard, like an increasing number of buildings in Central London, doesn't need to make money as such to accumulate wealth for its owners. It could quite easily sit there partially occupied for the next few years until its owners decided they needed to realise the capital and sell it. Of course, it will eventually fill up anyway, so they will probably make a profit long before they come to sell it. All this maybe doesn't matter much with a commercial/clerical building in a slightly odd corner of the City of London borders, but as always with the Shard, the problem is with what it represents: it is property almost entirely divorced from its original purpose, property almost entirely as a commodity; a new form of currency to be traded. 

I should probably declare an interest at this point: Ms P and I are currently in the process of trying to buy our first home. Like almost everyone I know who has bought a first home in London, we have had some help from family and we cannot afford to buy where we rent, so we are moving to a part of London that makes our parents pull funny faces and say things like "I'm sure it's very up and coming". Some might say it ever was thus in London: once Islington was considered an undesirable place to live, as (more recently) was Hackney. The fortunes of an area rose and fell as different parts of the city became fashionable or immigrant communities moved in and out; the city had a cycle of regeneration that made it vibrant and fresh. Now anywhere within zone 4 is fashionable and immigrant communities move to satellite towns where the rent is cheaper but they are more feared because they are a much greater portion of the population, allowing the 'floods of immigrants' claims of opportunist politicians to seem genuine. 

I am lucky, my household income is above national average, so we can at least afford to live somewhere in London, but the house we're hoping to buy was probably built with the intention that it would be relatively affordable housing. So we have become part of the problem: pricing others out of the market, unwittingly assisting in the demographic cleansing of Central London. Our intentions are at least reasonable, we just want a house to live in, whereas much of the property in the city centre no longer serves this purpose, it merely sits there, often empty, accumulating value. Ironically it seems that on this market it is residential property that is most desirable, as this is what is being created wherever possible by developers keen to maximise the money they make selling property to foreign investors. Perhaps even more ironically, this property is likely to gain more value if it is left empty, as by not adding to the housing stock in use, it exacerbates the housing shortage, pushing the price of all property up. Gradually this rush for residential investment property will wash all the character out of whole areas of London, as businesses move away, pushed out by property developers keen to turn their premises into flats and the lack of local business due to the lack of locals. Of course the owners of all this property won't care much as they don't actually live in the property and so don't care if it has any local ameneties; even when they do stay at their London residencies, they will be eating at the international restaurants in the Shard or elsewhere, and getting all their services provided by international concierge services. Local businesses for such people are just something that messes up the view from their car window as they are driven from one over-designed and sterile space to the next. To them the poor are to be kept the other side of a window at all times and in comparison to them 99% of the world is poor. The result is that parts of London will become vast empty storage units for expensive furnature, populated almost exclusively by private security guards. Even tourists will keep away from such areas, as there will be nothing to see or do there. Meanwhile, the rest of London will become a ghetto for the upper-middle classes, filled with identikit coffee shops and sterile gastropubs. All the character, culture and innovation that used to differentiate London from the rest of south-east England will gradually disappear and the city will just a more expensive version of the many featureless urban conurbations that litter the bottom corner of the country. 

Of course the owners of the the homes in this brave new world will be largely unconcerned, as homeowners' main concern is apparently the value of their home. Certainly this is a fact that the current government is relying on, as its current housing policy appears to be geared towards making sure that more people are able to believe they can afford the same number of houses, thus guaranteeing a continuation of house price inflation in the south-east of England. Obviously this is sensible politics for the Tory party, the majority of whose core support already own their own home and so believe themselves to be benefiting from the increase in house prices. Of course, they rarely are; when celebrating how much their house is worth on paper, people seem to forget that they are likely to always need somewhere to live. Equally if they think they're providing a home for their children, they should probably think about the fact that rising house prices simply increase their children's inheritance tax liability. Obviously, building new homes would help mitigate some of the ridiculous lurch skywards of London house prices, but more effective than that in the short term would be measures to make sure that all houses are homes, rather than just investments. Of course the current government is going to do nothing of the sort because that would risk upsetting the kinds of foreign nationals the government likes: the ones who visit occasionally to spend money in the international businesses and so add much less to the local economy than they claim. Meanwhile politicians of almost all stripes make noises about restricting access to the UK for foreign nationals who come here to work and contribute to the local economy, the people who run our hospitals and bars. I struggle to see the logic; we are railing against those who add value to our economy whilst letting those who add nothing to it force us out of our own capital city. 

One simple change could reverse this tragic state of affairs, a change that could be symbolised in the Shard: any building not in use for a period of six months must be rented out (at local council rates) to key workers. The effect would be twofold: it would instantly eleviate the housing shortage in London and it would stop the international super-wealthy buying property near these re-appropriated dwellings, as they don't want to be that close to poor people. Gradually, as the global elite moved out of London, the price of property would deflate or at least rise at a rate more commensurate with wage inflation. I'm not saying it would completely solve London's housing crisis, but it would be a damn site more effective than building the same houses twice in Ebsfleet. Unfortunately no government will ever enact a change that will reduce house prices and certainly not in an election year, when their sole aim seems to be to inflate the economy as quickly as possible so people feel rich enough to vote Tory, regardless of the likelihood that this policy will in the long term leave them fiscally and culturally poorer. 

So it's not going to happen, which is a shame, but we know how we could make the Shard a symbol that London can be proud of, a London for the benefit of Londoners: we could fill the Shard with immigrant nurses. 

Personal ish

Over the Christmas break I caught up with a friend of a friend who I have only met physically once or twice before, but with whom I have a mutually following relationship on twitter (is there a word for this: 'followship', 'twinterdependance'?). So I guess I kind of presumed that we knew each other a bit and was therefore a bit surprised when at one point he said "oh, are you on Twitter then?" Indeed I was so surprised that I pointed out that he was one of the first people to follow me and it was only after I said this that I realised what meaningless statement it was. He would have had no idea that he was one of my first followers just as I have no idea what number follower of his I was. This was simply the first of a number of points in our conversation that made me realise the essentially unidirectional nature of Twitter relationships. My conversant is a much more committed Twitter user than I: he spends seemingly hours a day on Twitter, has many thousands of followers and is a legitimate user in that he is self employed and therefore uses Twitter as a promotional tool as much as anything else. He fully engages in many debates and through this appears consider himself familiar with a number of other public figures who engage in the same debates, at the very least he consders himself to know them in some manner and potentially to be known to (or by) them. I may be utterly wrong on this, but I suspect he knows them and they know him as well as I know him and vice versa (which knowledge, the evening's conversations led me to understand was somewhat lacking or even downright incorrect on my part). Maybe it is simply I who am surprised by this, having never encountered someone who talks about others as if they have met before when they clearly haven't. I am a very circumspect user of social media, so maybe this sensation of finding out which aspects of a person's online persona is actually part of their personality is much more familiar to more persistent social networkers, but to me it seems odd. I quite often find myself having conversations with friends in which I feel a bit lazy for regurgitating thoughts and opinions I have already written in this blog, but I guess at least it's an indication that I'm consistent. Any of my friends will gladly tell you that I am as prone to ranting on about the ills of the world in real life as I am on this blog or Twitter, the difference being that I probably present a bit more eloquently here (you never get the joy of the full shouty jabbing-the-air-with-my-finger version). I see this as just being consistent, but perhaps I am naive to think that my online persona should simply reflect who I am, or perhaps I am in denial if I think that it does. I find it easy to see that many of my friends are nowhere near as single-issue obsessed as their Twitter feeds would have me believe, yet I apparently can't see that someone who didn't know me as a friend might assume that all I am interested in is the lack of thought people give to their lives and environment. I'm pretty sure there is a bit more to me than that (although not much), so perhaps I simply need not to be surprised when the person I meet is not the collection of issues and ideas that I encounter online. 

We are constantly warning children and young people to be wary of strangers online for obvious and good reasons, but we grownups tend to believe that such warnings don't need to apply to us. Of course we are all (hopefully) on guard for the net's worst predators, but we don't seem so concerned about the potential emotional impact that not knowing anyone online could have when it is presented to us. I am not saying that I am emotionally traumatised by finding out that someone I thought I was friends with from the internet wasn't aware of this friendship, but the cumulative effects of such a disparity cannot be underestimated. That I am a fairly casual and occasional user of social media probably explains why this sensation is new to me, but for more frequent users of social media it must be all too familiar. People must surely become used to it and jaded; they must develop attitudes to society adjusted for the fact that people are something different from what they appear to be. Indeed what's to stop them from turning away from society altogether, or at least society as we know it: the society of present interaction. If only the only thing the 'real world' is gong to offer is disappointment, why engage with it at all? Of course, the alternative is to engage with the real world on the terms defined by the world of social media, dividing your friends and associates up into single interest groups and never allowing your interaction with each to stray beyond the confines of their defined interest. This strikes me as an entirely juvenile way to interact with people and indeed a potentially socially and culturally regressive one. Many of the most serendipitous moments in history have come about through the meetings and interactions of unlikely combinations of people, it would be a shame if we let the inflexibility of digital social networks kill the creative spontaneity of real social interaction. I'm sure many people would argue that digital social networks enhance networking because they allow one to connect to many more people, but I'm not sure this isn't the equivalent of battery farming friends. The resulting mass of identikit connections are unlikely ever to challenge our opinions and preconceptions in a meaningful way, allowing them to be reinforced and narrowed. We could end up holding bizarre sets of beliefs based on selected fragments of the opinions of people we don't know. Perhaps this is no different from the past when such opinions came from newspaper colmunists, but at least then we didn't think the columnists knew us or indeed, that we knew them. 

I recognise many people on my train every day, but because I wear headphones all the time I have genuinely no idea what they sound like, yet on some level I suppose I feel I know them. However, if I was to go to a dinner party with them, I would not presume to know anything about their lives because I only know them in the sense that I am familiar with their faces. Sherlock Holmes would be able to deduce much about these people based on the information I have available to me, but that is what makes him exceptional (and fictional). The rest of us will have to make do with the knowledge that we can only gleam from actually spending time in other peoples' company.

Progress Check

I saw two great gigs the other week. The first was - I realised at the time - everything I want in a gig: I knew almost every track in detail, and each was performed pretty much note for note as a facsimile of the recordings produced 20-odd years ago. Whilst this might say something worryingly Patrick Batemanesque about my approach to live music, it more than delivered on my expectations. At the other end of the week was something entirely unique: a 'live' documentary film with a live soundtrack. Whilst the footage (and presumably much of the musical score) will be repeated at each performance, it will not necessarily be in the same manner or order. This was equally enjoyable, as beyond the subject matter and performers, I knew nothing about the performance in advance. The subject matter was R Buckminster Fuller and more specifically the Dymaxion Chronofile, his 50 year attempt to document his entire life and the biggest archive relating to a single person in existence. Of course, with such a vast subject, a one hour documentary can only ever act as a taster, which it did, summarising the life, key achievements and eccentricities of the great man. Chief amongst these eccentricities would seem to be his claim that every person on the planet could be living in a state of plenty by 1985. He repeated this assertion many times and was utterly convinced of its possibility, so it is perhaps fortunate that he didn't live to see it entirely unfulfilled. However, given the temperament of the man, I imagine he may well have simply taken this setback in his stride and tried another approach as he had done so many times before in his life. This is the fundamental difference between 'Bucky' and our current socioeconomic system: he would dust off any failure, pick himself up and look for a new way to innovative; we seem to get up and carry on as if nothing had happened. 
Like many of the ideologues of the 20th century, much of Buckminster Fuller's work floundered due to the overwhelming indifference of the populace, rather than as the result of any active opposition. If anyone ever realised the power of the status quo (and it is likely that someone has) they could harness it to a greatly retarding effect. Of course as a force for regression in the world, the status quo does just fine without any encouragement, people will maintain it out of fear that the alternative could be worse. However, to think that any status quo exists despite its lack of benefit because people are selfish is to miss the point: people are bound to be selfish, as otherwise they would struggle to exist. The problem lies in the fact that people are irrationally selfish, to a point where they sustain a status quo that is actively bad for them if they cannot be 100% sure that the alternative will not be at least better than the status quo. We even have a number of proverbs that reinforce this mindset, notably 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush', which is almost always trotted out as irrefutable wisdom. In many ways, this encouragement to make use of what you have is admirable, but at the same time it encourages the short-termist viewpoint that leads to an overvaluation of the status quo. A bird in the hand is only of any value if you are going to eat it straight away, and even then it is only good for one or two meals, whereas two birds in the bush (assuming that there is one of each sex) are indicative of a potential future bird population and therefore many meals to come. Of course the proverb rather assumes that there are any birds in the bush, otherwise the comparison is valueless; 'a bird in the hand is worth twice as much as nothing' somewhat devalues the bird in the hand. So we can find an implicit appeal to resource management within the proverb, but we have to dig for it, and really people don't think that hard about actual events, let alone proverbs. All too often the existence of birds in the bush is taken for granted in the rush to appreciate the one in the hand. It's not necessarily that straightforward either: in many cases it's hard even to determine where the bush is, making a comparison difficult. 
This lack of easy comparison compounds the natural resistance to change that means that in most cases people have to actually be starving before they will attempt to affect real political change en mass. You can't really blame people for this; as almost every revolution in history has shown, such a leap into the unknown has rarely brought about the desired result, at least not in the short term. But we generally don't affect change in such a drastic or large-scale manner anyway, usually it is just a case of everyone gradually shifting one way because they see no danger in it. If the desired modification of our behaviour is just to shift one way because we see it as a step in the right direction, then we 'simply' need to know which direction is right, collectively. Clearly, this is far from simple: the right direction collectively is unlikely to be the same thing as the right direction individually, or at least it is unlikely to appear to be so. Using the case study of me, it is easy to see that I am part of the problem when it comes to being a cog in the big evil capitalist machine. I maintain the systems that allow money to flow from the salaries of the workers to the pockets of the casino bankers. So should I stop facilitating this system? If I quit someone else will just fill my shoes, but even if that doesn't happen, even if by some freak occurrence my absence did manage to cripple the system, this creates more problems than it solves. This same system is currently the only game in town when it comes to generating the large sums of money required to pay someone a pension for the last 20-30 odd years of their life; the other systems having been largely discredited. There are many questions around why we've ended up in this situation: most of which revolve around the overlapping interests of the companies that determine that there is no alternative to DC pensions and those that make large profits out of the process. I am not suggesting conspiracy, simply that companies are bound to act in their own interests: anything else would be commercial suicide. Given that this is the status quo that these companies and their employees, such as me maintian, those of us keen to change things need to understand where the subtle shift in direction that we should take is. The radical step has no discernible impact on the system and leaves me at the considerable disadvantage of being unemployed. The options available to me therefore seem limited: I can agitate for lower charges and better investment vehicles, but only a bit; I can make sure my personal funds are ethically invested (or at least invested in Gilts where nothing more ethical is available). I guess I could try and dream up alternative investment vehicles (which would be difficult, as it's really not my area of expertise). I could try to form a well intentioned trade body, but that would involve me overcoming the mistrust of any worker-led body ingrained in peoples' minds by thirty years of relentless anti-union press. Beyond that, my choices get much more radical: I can attempt forms of sabotage. I don't really want to do this for two reasons: firstly in all likelihood such action would result in imprisonment for me; secondly, it would likely result in the loss of many people's pension savings, which I am not willing to countenance.  Fundamentally, my reluctance to risk my own and others' well being, and the vested interests of the companies whose processes I service combine to ensure that the status quo is perpetuated regardless of how unjust, inefficient or unsustainable it is.

So it appears that I am in a position where I can make little direct impact or even make small changes to my behaviour that, in concert with many others, will effect real change. I have no personal influence over the decision makers and no means of collective influence. Of course, in a democracy, I should be able to appeal to my political representative with my concerns and they should be raising those concerns at the higher levels that are beyond my reach. Unfortunately that route is effectively barred by the lobbyists who ensure that our representatives favour the concerns of the vested interests over those of the people they are elected to represent. Really I should not have to be the one raising the concerns: in a world where the individuals are afraid to attempt to affect change and organisations are structurally opposed to it, those in political power have a duty to create the circumstances under which change can occur. Unfortunately years of an effective campaign and the relentless use of phrases such as 'nanny state' have meant that any kind of political intervention on behalf of the general population is painted as anti-business and therefore by default bad for everyone. We have reached an odd place where the overwhelmingly dominant ideology has no ideological goal: it merely  aims to create the perfect conditions in which the perpetual growth of certain corporations can be sustained regardless of their impact. The politicians - as keen to divest themselves of responsibility as the rest of us - like to claim that this situation will allow the power of the market to prevail. However, the power of the market cannot prevail when those at the top intervene in the market at every point it becomes disadvantageous to them, the market cannot be a great leveller if people keep tipping it up at one end. 

I'm fairly certain that R. Buckminster Fuller would have counted himself an ideological capitalist, believing in the power of the market to drive the increased efficiencies that would allow his vision of a world of plenty to be realised. Unfortunately the market sees efficiency only in the tried and tested savings of workforce reduction rather than the risky potential of revolutionary design. At every turn the power of the status quo holds us back. I said that all I expected in a gig was for music I know to be played as it was on the album, maybe it's time I expected more.