Forgotten, but not gone

“By the way, death rumours are the worst chat in the world – for anybody, even really stupid people.” Calvin Harris

Not that he is around anymore to appreciate it, but it must be a bugger to be a recluse for so long that certain people (such as myself) thought JD Salinger was already dead, until they saw some tweets indicating otherwise this evening.

But trusting Twitter when it comes to obituaries can be problematic.  Contrary to popular Twitter belief, Jeff Goldblum, Johnny Depp, Rick Astley and Kayne West are not dead.  The miscommunication of information that social networking sites, especially Twitter, generate has created a glut of such memes, in part powered by the odd and untimely actual celebrity death, such as Michael Jackson’s demise.

But this is not a new phenomenon.  When I was younger, my Dad told me the reason Lt Col Henry Blake was written out of M*A*S*H was because McLean Stevenson had died in a plane crash during filming in 1975.  The reality was the cast of M*A*S*H were not told the storyline of Henry’s death (a plane disappearing over the Sea of Japan) until the day of filming, to give a genuine emotional reaction on film.  McLean Stevenson died of a heart attack in 1996.  (The day before Roger Bowen, who played Henry in the M*A*S*H movie, also died of a heart attack.  At least according to Wikipedia.  Who knows what source you can trust…)

My Dad and I also debated on whether Paul Samuelson, whose economics textbook both of us – thirty years apart – studied at university, was still alive.  Professor Samuelson concluded the debate when he died just before Christmas.  And my partner had a stand up argument with a Labour colleague that Jim Callaghan was dead on 25 March 2005, the day before… you guessed it.

It would seem the only way to tackle such ignorance is by using the same webtools that generate it (and for everyone wondering why I didn’t just google to check on the health of Paul Samuelson and McLean Stevenson… I’m wondering that too).  If you’re lucky enough to be able to watch the Colbert Report online, watch this one, with Jeff Goldblum interrupting Stephen Colbert’s report on the death of Jeff Goldblum.

All Objects

Dryden, about a century too early for The Guardian this week, wrote ‘All objects lose by too familiar a view’, but I am occupied by two explorations of unfamiliar objects this evening.

The first is a video camera, held in the hands of chimpanzees in Edinburgh. Premiering tonight on BBC 2 is the world’s first film shot entirely by the chimpanzees of the Budongo Trail at Edinburgh Zoo. The Chimpcam Project was ‘directed’ by Betsy Herrelko, who is studying for a PhD in primate behaviour at the University of Stirling, and could offer a new insight into how chimpanzees view the world.

The second set of objects are perhaps too precious to be involved in primate behavioural studies, but they do chart one primate’s developing relationship with time and place.  For BBC Radio 4’s A History of the World the Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, will narrate 100 programmes to retell our history through the objects we have made. The series spans two million years through objects in the British Museum’s collection to tell a history of the world, from the earliest times to the present day.

So, two explorations of unfamiliar objects, but perhaps only one, the one announced today, to covet…

A Simples Game

“Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.” Bill Shankly

The Scottish Football Association made £1 million in discretionary payments to clubs at the end of 2009 to assist during the current financial climate.  Nonetheless, according to BBC News the SFA is expected in the next few days to block moves to sell the naming rights for football teams.

The apparent reason?  Organizers of the Buy Stirling Albion campaign team, struggling to fundraise to support a team with £1.5m debt and two winding up orders, have met with Compare the Market. The comparison website firm are one of three companies who have expressed an interest in sponsoring Stirling Albion, with a package reportedly worth £250,000.  Including gaining the naming rights, thus creating the possibility of Stirling Albion Meerkats playing in the Scottish second division.

Car insurance.  Football.  Meerkats.  Three very different things.  But given the SFA seems happy for fast food and lager to sponsor community and international football respectively, not to mention the apparent irony of Specsavers as the main sponsors of referees, it seems a bit po-faced for them to start bandying about concerns regarding the ‘integrity of the game’ when Aleksandr Orlov expresses an interest.  Unless they have learnt their lesson from previous takeover attempts made by Russian tycoons.

The Premier League remains relatively well cushioned against the credit crunch.  Although Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United’s combined debts of £1.5Bn dwarfs Stirling Albion’s liabilities, the broadcasting, merchandise and sponsorship deals the biggest teams in Britain enjoy leaves smaller clubs across the country in an ever-perilous state with only dwindling gate receipts to rely upon.  The Scottish Football Association might want to reflect on Stirling Albion Meerkats being better than no Stirling Albion at all.

Prometheus Bound

In practical politics, ideas are all to often merely a luxury between the voter counts and leaflets and door-knocking that you start because of your ideals and continue in spite of yourself. Many times have I made a derisory snort in the pub after door-knocking, usually along the lines of ‘When was the last time you saw a Fabian out leafleting?’ Which always got a laugh, until the Armchair Socialist reminded me that we need to put more stuff than just pictures on our leaflets. Touché.

Last weekend, Ed Miliband and James Purnell each wrote a column regarding the need for the Labour Party to win the battle of ideas against the Tories at the forthcoming general election. There are notable similarities between both columns. In The Observer last Sunday, Miliband starts with ‘as our manifesto will, with what the country needs in the coming five years’. With the debate between Labour and the Conservatives going to the ‘political fundamentals’, Miliband recognises:

‘The difference in vision is not just about who should get certain benefits but how we succeed as a country. We all do better when we look after each other and enable people to succeed rather than leaving people to sink or swim. This country has a progressive majority that shares this vision of a society where self-interest and shared interest go hand in hand. And we will never fall for the Tory trap that says the aspirations and interests of different parts of our coalition are in contradiction.’

Purnell, writing in The Guardian the next day, also recognises the need for our manifesto ‘to be full of passion, of confidence, a movement for change’. As Miliband posits the existences of ‘ideological unity within our party’, Purnell too recognises:

‘While there are deep conservative elements in the Labour tradition, and we should honour them – particularly in relation to the ethics of work, loyalty and love of place, family solidarity and a respect for the moral contribution of faith – we do not accept the distribution of assets as they are, we do not accept that inherited mega-wealth is deserved, and we do not accept that our rulers are always other people.’

So far, so New Labour beige. For the many, not the few – check. Big Tent politics – check. But the real differences between Miliband and Purnell’s arguments reveals a potential schism, far greater than the Cabinet falling out with Brown, which could cost Labour the Election.

Miliband argues that ‘the need for government to protect people from risk, and enhance opportunity, goes well beyond a minority’.

‘The last thing Britain needs is a government that thinks its only role is to get out of the way’, whether on nurturing new industry, tackling climate change, improving education, tackling crime and caring for the elderly. Miliband’s vision is of a ‘government that spreads opportunity and provides protection to the majority, where we advance together and where we see aspiration as about being more than the material’.

Purnell’s response is both opposite, and apposite: ‘The state cannot do this. It can and should distribute resources. It can help make individuals more powerful. But it cannot replace society’.

Rather than Miliband’s vision of Labour in government as the ends alone, Purnell recognises it as only the means. ‘There has to be a method, not just a wish. The powerless need to take their power’. Purnell analyses the last twelve years of Labour policy: on finance, economics, public services and democracy, and concludes ‘the root cause of our predicament lies firmly in the half-lessons of the third-way paradigm and in our lack of confidence in our traditions’.

‘It brings home the nature of Labour’s present predicament, which is that while things would have been worse without us, the principle of vitality and vision that must animate a Labour government is on life support. The words are managerial, the values administrative and the vision technocratic.’

Miliband’s vision is stuck within the same paradigm. The Labour Party, and the Labour Party in power, is only the means to tackling inequality, not the end itself. We need more engagement than just delivering leaflets to people, that only tells them what we will do in government, if we are to succeed.

Attempt to set a precedent?

Like jelly, precedents are tricky things to set. Whether Hoon and Hewitt truly thought their call for a Labour Party leadership ballot would create the ‘opportunity’ for other Labour MPs to brandish their knives, they overlooked the fact that no Labour leader has ever been deposed in a putsch.

The post of Leader of the Labour Party was created in 1922.

Gordon Brown is the incumbent. Two have died in office – John Smith in 1994 and Hugh Gaitskell in 1963 – and two have been elevated from the Deputy Leadership to cover following these deaths until a new Leader was elected: Margaret Beckett and George Brown (both of whom stood for Leader and lost).

Four have resigned after losing an election: Neil Kinnock in 1992, Michael Foot in 1983, James Callaghan in 1979 and the unfortunate Arthur Henderson in 1932, who lost not only an election but also his seat.

Harold Wilson retired in 1976, as did Clement Attlee in December 1955, after losing the 1950 and May 1955 elections.

Tony Blair resigned of his own volition in 2007: although there were Brownite attempts to force him out, he chose his own day to go.

George Lansbury felt compelled to resign after Ernest Bevin launched a devasting attack on his pacifism, at odds with the party’s foreign policy against German rearmament, at the 1935 conference. The PLP was reluctant for Lansbury to resign, voting 38 to 7, with 5 abstentions, not to accept his resignation, but he insisted on stepping down.

This leaves the expulsion of Ramsay MacDonald from the party after forming the National Government in 1931 as the closest the Labour Party has come to ejecting its leader.

So without the ruthlessness of the 1922 Committee, and with at most five months to go to the General Election, Brown appears to have history on his side in terms of staying Leader, notwithstanding Hoon and Hewitt’s rather wobbly attempt to get rid of him.

Latitude 55.8212°N Longitude 2.865°W…

… is the location of Soutra Hill,  on the border of Midlothian and the Scottish Borders. The A68 trunk road ascends Soutra on its route south into Lauder, and so do I most nights, had the inclement conditions not been keeping me in Edinburgh since New Year. 

The home of Soutra Aisle, a medieval hospital situated between the Border abbeys and Edinburgh, and the Dun Law wind farm, which apparently provides ‘the cheapest wind power in the world’ – useful when it is this cold!

Just Keeps Coming Back

I’m delighted that Lord Mandelson’s department BERR has published a guide for parents of recent graduates who have returned to the family home, just in time for me to resume my blog from the comfort of my Mum and Dad’s house.

I joined the boomerang generation six months ago, after I graduated and started a new job in Edinburgh (and ceased blogging), joining the 1.7 million people aged between 22 and 29 who now live at home with their parents. Neil has also moved back in with his Mum and Dad, adding to the 24.5% of men aged between 25 and 29 living back home.

The BERR guide, authored by Denise Taylor, is geared towards helping graduates who are out of work, and offers advice on how to ‘motivate, not alienate’ young people. Employing tough love, but not nagging, appears to be the key message.

David Willets, the Shadow Skills Secretary, says “Young people are driven back home after university out of financial necessity” (and an inability to change lightbulbs on their own). The combination of an inaccessible housing market, student debt, and graduate unemployment or underemployment merits more response from Government than a mere pamphlet.

We are both back home to save up for a mortgage: maybe encouraging state-owned banks to lend without the ludicrous and almost-unachievable size of deposits would help.

Mandelson has proposed shortening the length of degrees. After boring myself with only twenty weeks contact time every year for four years, and working during term-time as well as the holidays, I would have loved to have studied the same course over a much shorter period, saving on the debt incurred. However, without the support of the Russell Group, two-year degrees will never hold the same academic status as the long, drawn out, first-year-doesn’t-count current crop, widening the gulf between British universities further.

And as for graduate unemployment, it is crucial for more internships to be outwith the south of England, for more ‘white-collar’ apprenticeships to be introduced and for universities to encourage students to work while studying, rather than pretending being able to write an essay on the October Revolution has real relevance to today’s job market.

So thanks Peter, for letting my Mum know that allowing me to stay at home while harbouring ambitions to be a screenwriter may not be the best use of my talents. But maybe get on to the list above in the New Year as well?

What’s Occurring?

Ah, blogging about blogging. Always a way to get warmed up.

As both my readers know, I’ve had a little holiday from blogging since the European Election.  Not because Bread and Roses was a ploy to get elected (not a very good one – I was still 400,000 votes off), but because I’ve started a new job, not spent a lot of time in Glasgow, and graduated: logging into facebook or twitter alone has been a bit of an effort in the last month.

But an excellent post by Will Patterson, in which my modest efforts as a blogger really does not merit a mention, has sent me back to the keyboard.  Will’s post on the perils of blogging, particularly in the case of former SNP Glasgow North East candidate Grant Thoms, provides a deft analysis of the hazard blogging can pose to a political career.

Dorothea Brande, in her seminal work Becoming a Writer, described the writer as a dual personality: one childlike, sensitive, spontaneous; the other adult, discriminating, critical.  Too much of one, and no work gets done; too much of the other and fluency is paralyzed.

Although Brande wrote in 1934, the principle remains.  Engaging brain before mouth, or keyboard, is always a good idea. Calculating the political impact on your career of every word you utter is a bit sad.  Having to calculate the political impact in the first place is worse.

Thoms is unfortunate as a candidate in having faced a by-election rather than a General Election.  By-elections are nasty, scrappy, necessary evils: short, over-heated, over-scrutinized messy things with too many people working too hard, making it too easy to seek easy hits.  Like the contents of a candidate’s blog. 

There isn’t a solution, other than trying to find the balance above, between writing something interesting, and making a t*t of yourself.  The idea that what someone has committed in writing isn’t going to be reported on or (mis)used isn’t credible, but neither is the anodyne reposting of propaganda. 

So, no answers to this conundrum (it’s my first post back, gies a break), but enough of blogging about blogging.  I appear to have missed a few important events in the last few weeks. It seems the fashion to analyze Scottish politics through the medium of the West Wing (I can think of at least three researchers on the Labour floor attempting the Josh Lyman look: stress on attempting) I thought I would summarize some of what I’ve missed via, sotto voce, a far superior piece of television.

 Expenses finally published – ‘I won’t lie to you Stace’

 Expenses reaction – “Everyone was laughing at me. And not just because I fell over.”

 The Tories reacting to Bercow elected Speaker – probably much like the restaurant toilet in Caprichos  at the start of season two.

 Iraq Inquiry – “Ooh, I’m going to fall out with you today!”

 Calman Commission – “Listen Gav, no-one wants this marriage to fail more than I do.”

Michael Jackson – “At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, d’ya know what I mean.”

Tidy.  Just a shame there’s no opportunity to mention John Prescott.

Vote early…

There are so many things happening this week which I would like to write about – not just British politics this week, but also Kitty’s comment on my last post, monkey babies, Britain’s Got Talent …

But today and tomorrow I’m knocking a lot of doors, and Bread and Roses will have to wait until Friday at the earliest.  

Even with the last 27 days of revelations from the Telegraph and the sets of dominos it has set tumbling, I still believe elected politics remains the best way to make a contribution to our society, to engage in public service with others of differing views to work to make the changes we need.  Even with the resignations and sleaze, there are still hundreds of politicians and activists who are spending their time and money and shoe-leather this week to make sure their views and their candidates are heard.

I hope you vote.  I hope you vote Labour – especially for Europe in Scotland where I think we are putting forward a dedicated, hardworking, experienced, and diverse team of candidates.  But most of all I hope you vote so that the stain of hatred of the BNP doesn’t slip through our ballot boxes and into Brussels.   

I’ll be back soon, blisters and all.

Hustings, Hogarth, and Human Rights

With one week to go until polling day, last night was the last hustings I am scheduled to do for the campaign – a gigantic ten party panel hosted by the Public and Commercial Services Union in Glasgow. 

Hogarth's 'The Polling'

Although now somewhat more sedate affairs than Hogarth’s depictions of drunken and corrupt cacophonies of public nomination, hustings remain perhaps the most fun aspect of running for election, together with doorstep canvassing.  Both are equal parts unpredictable and useful.

The most interesting question I have been asked so far at a hustings was at Strathclyde University Union, regarding the right to free movement in the EU for LGBT people. 

Directive 2004/38 grants EU citizens and their family members the right to move and reside freely within the territory of the member states and gives to EU citizens and their families a right of permanent residence after five years of residence in the host member state.  However, by the end of 2008, 14 EU member states – Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Malta, Cyprus, Ireland, Germany, Austria, France, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia – still did not give full residence and entry rights to gay and lesbian couples.  While I was aware some of the newer entrants to the EU are less than progressive on this matter, which was the focus of the original question, I was surprised the number of older member states who also perpetuate this injustice. 

There should be ambitious EU legislation to deliver equality and there should be equal and mutual recognition of same-sex partnerships across Europe.  The unequal treatment of gay and lesbian coupes in rights of residence and entry is one of many areas of discrimination the European Union needs to take action on.  I have signed the ILGA-Europe’s 2009 pledge to promote equality and to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, and I hope many of my fellow candidates will do likewise.

So, useful and unpredictable.  And I’m sure the rest of the doors I’ll spend the week chapping will generate more.