Accusations against Clegg and the Eastleigh By-Election

I have no idea whether Mr Clegg knew of any allegations made against a Lib Dem colleague. My point is that it is seemingly fortuitous for the Tories that this claim comes to light days before a by election where the race seems to be between the Lib Dems and the Tories.  Given past actions by the Tories, for whom the title ‘nasty party’ and ‘toxic’ are deserved, it does seem strange these accusations surface right now.

I certainly do not underplay serious allegations of improper behaviour  and given what has happened in the Savile case it is perfectly conceivable people have made complaints against the peer, found they were fobbed off at the time and now seek to re-apply the charges. One thing we need to know as soon as possible is whether there is any underhand link between the way these  accusations surfaced this week and the behaviour of any other political party standing in the Eastleigh by election?

One outcome of the allegations being made now is that attention in some newspapers is deflected from the daily failure of government economic policies for which the Lib Dems must share the blame. Now that the triple ‘A’ rating is lost, although it was only ever a measure made for tabloid economics which is the strategy pursued by Osborne and Cameron, it is surely important to measure minutely what needs to be done to rescue the ailing economy. It is not clear to me that the Labour party has realistic economic policies that could be applied immediately. It is certainly true that continuing with the coalition government policies sees disasters increasing on a daily basis. We surely need newspaper headlines that cover both stories. Sadly that is not the case today, February 24th 2013.

Re-reading two classics

While I was teaching in Hong Kong last month (January 2013) I re-read The Portrait of a Lady. I did not read any Henry James as an undergraduate but read some of his work during my first two years of teaching in secondary schools. I think I read ‘Portrait’ at that time but I certainly forgot it very quickly. I think that was because I was rapidly moving from interests in literature to interests in education and sociology. Anyhow I caught up with ‘Portrait’ some five years ago and realised I had missed out on getting to know an important book.

but it was the re-reading a few weeks ago that affected me most. This time the relations between Isabel and others became much sharper. Gilbert Osmond may be the height of cruelty but what subtlety and what venom. I was more aware og how James creates mood and also how he uses comments on the scenery. Thus Osmond’s house was described as shuttered. This time I felt less hostilty beween Isabel and Madame Merle at the end. The scene in the convent is full of tension but Isabel recognises her kinship in being an outsider with her nemesis.

I will write more fully on this next time. over the last two weeks I have re-read Middlemarch. This was my favourite novel as an undergraduate and I re-read it a few times in the early 1970s but never since then. So, after a gap of forty years I took to it again. I remembered scenes, speeches, George Eliot‘s author commentaries. I was more aware of her views of self, of light and dark and the way dialogue leads the novel. Even in the speaking of very minor characters there are glimpses of how the town functions. I came away realsing I needed to go back to some of the work that influenced Eliot herself – Comte and Feuerbach in thier very different ways.

I have now signalled I will blog again and in more detail on these two books. Yes, I will read contemporary work as well but there is much to be gained by re-reading classics. Both books had the ability to sustain my interest, surprise me, remind me of previous ideas about them, but above all they had the quality of enduring – of saying ‘I am still here and you can find more inside my pages…’

Reading for a plane trip

I have been reading more historical fiction over the last few weeks, although I have read other things too. The fiction I read included Youencar’s ‘Hadrian’ which struck me as a true historical novel. This was not costume drama, it was The Roman empire. The structure and force of history wax palpable. While it was difficult o engage with some characters it was clear the lives of pele were being explored against a backdrop of an overstretched empire.

After that I read ‘The Song of Achilles’ which is not a historical novel. Rather, its strengths lie in its myth world. There is little contingency although what we have are desperate attempts by Patroclus and Achilles to thwart the prophecy. By showing this Achaen world through the eyes of Patroclus we see it differently. Yes, Agamemnon is a crude brute and not a particularly astute leader but
The pervading sense throughout is of a world about to fall away.

Most of my time lately has been taken up with preparing a module ‘Work, Employment and Globalisation’ to teach in Hong Kong for Sheffield Hallam. Preparation has been a challenge ad I no longer have many books on this. But the library at UEA has been a good resource. I have done a youtube theory presentation and now a podcast as well as the inevitable power points. How to make them interesting is the challenge. I picked up on Los Angeles Review of Books there is a new book put on imagining Hong Kong as city in the past and future. I must see if I can find it when I get out there.

So, what to read on the plane and while I am out there. No airport literature thanks. I am going back to re-read ‘The Portrait of a Lady’. I read this some forty years ago soon after I started teaching English in schools. I left literature behind when I moved into education theory and then sociology. But I re-read ‘The Portrait’ about six years ago and knew I wanted to read more James. He may not be the most popular author around and reading his work is very different reading, say Arab literature in translation. But as I started ‘The Portrait’ I knew I wanted a long flight to read the book carefully. Well, with a flight to Hong Kong leaving this evening I should make inroads into the book.

No Women Bishops Yet

As an outsider it might be risky to comment, but here goes. I cannot think of many occupations where people who feel strongly about an issue are offered degrees of protection for their particular viewpoint. Why should this be available in this case? Like other teachers I found some pedagogical positions congenial amongst people I worked with, other positions deeply uncogenial and unhelpful. We had to get on with it. I am also sure some people would have found some of my positions uncongenial but again we had to get on with it. Why sholuld the CofE be any different?

It is a pity a potential woman bishop cannot bring a case for discrimination to an employability tribunal. That is what is needed. Equality under the law first and then issues of belief and personal practice second. I know that clergy do not have contracts so this opportunity is not available.

Yes, the Church will become even less relevant  to more people which is a pity particularly as we are lucky enough to live in a multifaith society with many cultures. I cannot see the already discriminated against in UK society gaining anything from this. The term ‘heresy’ was used on one news bulletin by one lay synod member describing the proposed legislation. How out of touch can you get?

Free cycle, the ‘big society’

I came across Sheffield Free Cycle a couple of years ago when we wanted to get rid of some stuff but could not be bothered to include it in a car boot sale. I didn’t think much more about it once the large number of requests for our items died down.

This week we have used Free Cycle extensively and I have started to think about it. For anyone new to it Free Cycle requires you to register online, then write whether you want something or whether you are ‘offering’. We are moving house and offered a carpet, a twenty five year old music system which works perfectly well and an antique – our twenty eight year old washing machine. They don’t make em like that anymore and it still works!

Of course you get ‘no shows’, people who ask because they are curious but are not really interested but most of the eight to twelve queries we had for each of our items came to us within 24 hours and was genuine. Clearly the government’s austerity measures are forcing more and more people to rely on this service.

But let’s think of it as a service and activity. Everything has to be free, everything is handled quickly and it is efficient. It is a charitable exercise in giving but also a community service. It is the exact opposite of a Barclays rigged market. It is not ‘big society’ which is why it works. The currency in play is trust and honesty.

Our washing machine has not gone to someone who immediately needs it, quite the opposite. A person who contributes to Free Cycle forums and organisation has taken it thanks to having a partner with a van. What she does is acquire and then recycle items to people who need them. So in this way the person in need without a computer account or who finds it difficult to write is supported. Our washing machine can do a few hundred more cycles for someone who needs it.

Ironically, the alternative for us was to give it away for scrap to a pair of utterly incompetent engineers who could not help dismantle it. I asked them to leave preferring the Free Cycle values and approach.

No we won’t get national markets based on free cycle approaches and its use is limited to small-scale markets. But we can use it to call on politicians to insist that the currency used by Free Cycle – trust and honesty – be a requirement for all public and private bodies. In fact all currency traders should be required to work in community settings, manage car boots, organise free cycle forums as part of their annual work load and there should be no pay without proof of involvement.

Banking Today

For the last week now everyone in the UK has seen reports, interviews, comments on a twisting saga in the banking industry. Bankers rightly hold almost the bottom rung in public estimation after their contribution to the financial crisis of 2008, their self-importance thereafter accompanied by their minimal contribution to redressing the problems they caused. Substantial annual bonuses eroded public confidence but what has proved most chilling is an attitude towards success.

This attitude goes like this – we have to have the best people in charge and we all need that don’t we. To secure the best people we need to pay them a very high salary otherwise they will go elsewhere.

It is this part that the Labour government from 2008-2010 and the current coalition government seem to find impossible to deal with. We do not need swashbuckling profit making top bankers paid at the highest salaries when we find they preside over people acquring profits dishonestly as has happened through the fixing of the LIBOR. This is further compounded by their manipulations of loans leading to a reduced contribution by the big four to paying for a mess they created. In real terms many small businesses are paying crippling and unnecessary charges on loans. Let’s have less successful leaders and entrepreneurs whose strength is their honesty and integrity.

There are many, many hardworking people working in the big four banks who do a very good job often facing difficult customers. I am sure they are as appalled as anyone else over what has happened. I am so glad that I refused my bank’s siren offers to look after my money when I retired saying their investment experience would mean I would not have to worry. A quick calculation of their possible profits showed that one of two things would happen: either my money would have to be invested at a much higher level of risk than I could tolerate, or I would end up with an annual return worth very little. In both scenarios the bank had to be paid for its work and it simply was not worth it. It was all dressed up as highly plausible but – no thanks. It was just another manipulation designed to take money from me to swell the dividends and bonuses for the bank. Shareholder power will always be accompanied by concern over the value of the dividends and that is understandable. Hence we need shareholders to be supplemented by appropriate legislation and strong control. The Glass-Steagal act was an important step but here is an interesting update: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/07/02/stiglitz-the-full-transcript/

Alan Duncan on grammatically correct English

There are not many days when I say ‘I agree with’ a Conservative government minister. Yesterday was one such day  when Alan Duncan, Minister of State for International Development was reported to have insisted  his officials  write all documents  in grammatically correct English. Typical unacceptable phrases that Mr Duncan drew attention to include ‘going forward’ and similar phrases from the marketing/human resources handbook.

I agree there is no room for  weak expression in any written document. Of course we all make mistakes but there is a difference between writing something that needs to be reworded and writing something where so many expressions have no meaning at all.  It is also  just as important to distinguish between situations where people use ungrammatical expressions in the belief they are using approved  terminology and situations where people use these expressions because they cannot think independently and are unable to express any ideas.

It is unfair to attribute this sort of  poor expression to any particular group in an organisatioon. In my experience the problem is quite widespread. If Mr Duncan succeeeds in establishing his requirements he will  identify cases where officials are simply not used to writing correct English and cases where people are not suited to a job which requires them to write documents.

Back to Walter Scott

I think it was last August when Perry Anderson wrote about the historical novel in LRB. Anderson took Lukacs as one point of reference including the attention to Scott in The Historical Novel. In the letters section there was some criticism of Anderson for ignoring recent historical novelists such as Hilary Mantel although no one could accuse Anderson of Eurocentrism. There was also a negative response to attention on Scott who was after all a Tory. Yes, but so was T.S. Eliot and one would hardly disqualify Eliot from consideration on that ground. It is true judging by Sutherland’s article in LRB for May 17 2012 that Scott is now largely ignored with few of his novels in print. In fact I have downloaded most of them to Kindle at little or no cost. I decided back in August last year to read Scott. Now some ten months later I’m on my tenth Scott novel. I certainly have enjoyed some more than others so far. I plan to read sufficient to be able to read and respond to all the texts Lukacs uses in his study. So reading Quentin Durward is a bit of a struggle. Old Mortality, Rob Roy, and particularly The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermuir we’re well worth attention.

Sutherland discusses the memorialisation of Scott through street names and of course the Scott monument in Edinburgh. Should Scott command attention today? I think there is a case to be made for Old Mortality and the Heart of Midlothian at least. I should and wil read more Scott anyway. But what Old Mortality gives us is a portrayal of fundamentalism ahead of the Act of Union and a set of characters who are largely nondescript, often indecisive. Edward Waverley is a case in point but so too is Francis Osbaldistone. But back in old Mortality we see the playing out of conflicts between a doomed and irrelevant feudal border aristocracy and a possible bourgeois alternative. We are not offered anything quite as unhelpful as the current anti-production, pro financial exploitation of the UK coalition government but the potential hand of a Thatcherite attack on working communities is never far away.

But perhaps just important is some of the verve of Scott’s writing. That verve is there in Heart of Midlothian although it is only a whisper in Quentin Durward. Characters such as Saddletree, Davie Deans make up for the whimsy of Effie Deans while the attack on Porteous is as good as anything else. So let’s re-read, or in my case read Scott and see how we can draw on him today.

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Failure of the Lib Dems

Each day brings a further instance of failure by the junior coalition partner in the current UK government. Since helpiing to form the government in 2010  the Lib Dems have accepted, possibly through gritted teeth in some cases, a raft of policies. First up we had the Lib Dem capitulation on university tuition fees. While this is significant it is not as serious as the ready acceptancce of Michael Gove‘s academy schools – a strong move towards the privatisation of schooling.

We now have the Lib Dem acceptance of the health reforms which again are intended to privatise the health service. Of course for the next few years there will be signs in hospitals and doctors’ waiting rooms to say the health provision is free. But then why do we have a private provider (Virgin) in Surrey? Did people in Surrey vote to accept Virgin as a health provider? Were they consulted? There may be some confusion in the mind of anyone attending a Virgin sponsored clinic if there is one but not as much confusion as there will be in a few years time for everyone in the county when cost factors determine what is available and for whom?

So education and health are fields that see the Lib Dems simply following Dave the spiv‘s commands. They didn’t do much to counter conservative response on the August riots in 2011 either. Yes the riots were unacceptable and public order was at risk. But you do not work with people in a disenfranchised community by simply permitting  conservative party rhetoric. What else have we had? Well, of course there was the budget of last month which neatly improved the position of the already very wealthy. I know we have the rhetoric from Lib Dems on raising the tax threhold to £10,000 – very welcome and indeed good but it is paid for by savage cuts in benefits, poor management of the ‘granny tax’. Relatively few people will see a real differenc eonce you take the benefit cuts into account.  I am not saying there should be no benefit changes. There are people claiming who sahoul should not be allowed to make claims. But even this is a relatively small issue in comparison with the scale of reducation for so many people.

The very rich  are mighty pleased with this government’s performance so they give Dave the spiv a reminder now and then to ‘lay off the bankers’. But they know the Lib Dems will cause no diffiuclties for them.

Oh yes, I forgot! One topic the Lib Dems did get round to making a response – ‘snooper’s charter’. I don’t like the snooper’s charter either but for quite different reasons from those advanced by Lib Dems. Yes, there is an issue over civil liberties. But once a government, any government, has the powers that the possible legislation will provide then some very dirty tricks will happen. Spiv Dave knows there will come a time when his government  runs out of potential electability. It has happened to most previous prime ministers. That’s the time to call in the effects of this charter – increase the terrorist dimension etc etc. I am not diminishing the real threat from terrorists. But with a police force as tainted as the metropolitan police force already is I dont give much hope for fair policing or fair trial but I do think that with the help of his allies the spiv could outlast his sell by date quite easily.

So, the Lib Dem worm may have begun a half turn on this one issue but only after it has accepted the largest wholesale attack on ordinary people’s livelihood. Therer are beneficiaries of the present government approach. They are not a large group but they are powerful! No, a labour government would be little better. The antics of the last Labour government was embarrassing at times. But we will only start on an effective politics when the Lib Dems remember what a modern liberalism might be, build bridges with others including socialist parties and start looking to see how we can get rid of a conservative-led government whose policies and politics are those of spiv, chancer and the downright dishonest.

Why read Sir Walter Scott in the early 21st Century?

First, thanks to people who commented or noticed my blog entry yesterday on getting back into reading. As said there here goes with Sir Walter Scott. I have to start with an admission, I have not read enough of Sir Walter’s novels or his poetry to give a reasonable answer to this question. Treat this as a work in progress and one to which I will return as I read more Scott. My goal is to read sufficient to engage with Lukacs’s’ study of the historical novel. But I also want to find out if many people read Scott today and why they feel he is a rewarding writer for readers today.

Anyhow my starting points are these: to comment first on how I felt about some of Scott’s earlier novels which I read this summer, and secondly, in subsequent blogs, to comment on the negative remarks about Scott’s politics which followed Perry Anderson’s review of the historical novel published in LRB back in August 2011.

So for now let’s just ask what it is like to meet Scott’s work for the first time in 2011/12. I think the first thing a non-Scottish reader might ask is what does that bit mean while pointing to pages of Scottish dialect. Of course much is in dialect and of course much belongs to Scott’s own time and from the material he collected. The language is not a barrier. You simply need to read some of the passages aloud. If we can all enjoy the poetry of Burns then Scott’s prose is not a barrier. That said, the writing is ponderous in places.

Some of the characters are more cardboard cut out than living, breathing humans. At least that was my response to several of the characters in Waverley and Guy Mannering. I felt that about Edward Waverley himself and also several people in Guy Mannering. In The Antiquary, a better novel in my view, I found Lovell difficult to relate to. I could not care very much about what he did or what happened to him. In that novel the antiquary himself, Jonathan Oldbuck, is much more approachable. We see him irritated sometimes, happy, likely to overwhelm others with his enthusiasms, but also aware of his own pomposity. The language shows this and it is not just what he says and does but how it is expressed. The villain of the piece Dousterswivel is deliberate caricature while the scene in the graveyard is pure Gothic. Dousterswivel, Sir Arthur are simply ciphers and there is no character development. Oldbuck and Eddie Ochiltree are different.

In Rob Roy we have reasonably well developed characters. But we reach this through memories of the interesting characters in earlier novels – particularly Meg Merrirlies and Eddie Ochiltree. What both Meg and Eddie bring is a walking history which brings alive the conflicts between landholder and tenant including gypsies and beggars. But they also bring in ways of recalling conflicts over religion and practice from the 17^th century as well as the bitter wars over succession and the conflicts of 1715 and 1745. One lesson I took from this – read more about Scottish history.

In Rob Roy where Rob himself and Ballie Nichol Jarvie were well developed characters who carried a lowland/highland history. They carry different senses of exclusion. Rob Roy himself is excluded from most society but the significance of this is not delivered by him – it comes through the staging, cumbersome as it is, of the scenes of his wife, Helen, fighting the English. The Baillie is presented as a figure of fun certainly but as a shrewd capitalist using the Glasgow markets as they expand. This is also where the circulation of capital is seen to work. The  Ballie and others use the markets but Jarvie combines a level of learning, perhaps below that of Mr Oldbuck, but perfectly serviceable in both the accumulation and use of profit. Scott shows us how production is used for different ends. This is where the novel moves beyond The Antiquary because the learning has both a social and a moral purpose. In the earlier novel the learning served little social purpose and it was only Oldbuck’s own intuition which carried it through. The scene where he takes the lead for Steenie’s funeral is an example.

So Scott is not perhaps an easy read today. The books seem episodic with few characters fully developed. But Scott takes risks. Thus Rob Roy only makes his first official appearance half way through the novel. His presence abounds in the second half even though he is not always personally present.

For me what Scott did achieve was a new tradition and one that may seem outdated today. It is a bringing together of different traditions, contrasting political cycles with the people on the land. Unfortunately the cardboard cut out effects mean it loses some purpose. We certainly do not have the strengths of later 19^th century novels, but so what? We have a vibrant tradition established here and one that certainly informed Balzac’s work.

Next time I will think a bit more about Perry Anderson’s discussion. In the meantime while he may be dated and certainly have a strong Tory politics that hardly seems to be a reason to disqualify Scott. T.S. Eliot was as Tory as they come. I think Scott achieved more than simple political statement and idea. I’ll comment on that next time.