@campbellclaret is vintage english gentleman

Yep.  It's true.  Alastair Campbell is a consummate storyteller and an extraordinarily ordinary person.

I went to Chester Racecourse this evening and spent two and a half hours in his company.  The hall was packed out, the inevitable knockabout stuff was good-natured - and his honesty, even when coded, was refreshing.  His ability to turn a question around was manifest, as was his penchant for sometimes ignoring the latter half of a hostile question.  Lesson learned by at least some of those in attendance: never ask two parts to a question if there is one you'd far rather the answer to.

At one point, he said he was fully in favour of social media.  The organisers' request for all mobile phones to be switched off before he started speaking didn't quite embrace this enthusiasm but, nevertheless, he argued his case well.  Essentially, he said that tools such as Twitter and Facebook would allow us to create our own media landscapes, thus breaking down the power of the existing mainstream media, newspaper barons and communications empires.

I can see the virtues of this argument but still wonder if the obvious dichotomy between mainstream and social media won't become stronger and more apparent as readers and consumers of the latter create and solidify their own contra-versions of reality and slew evermore away from the traditional media constructs and their consumers.

What will hold us together when the power of the big-time editors gives way to the multiplicities of the community?

Poblish.org's logo competition

There's a fascinating logo competition going on over at 99 Designs at the moment.  My dear colleague Andrew Regan is asking for a graphical definition of his blogging tool www.Poblish.org.  Early entries can currently be found here.  The brief can be found here.

I ignored the brief and got a one for my pains am now duly eliminated!

Thanks mate.

:-)

Why we will become strangers in our own country

Whilst I watch the television news this evening, and see valuable minutes spent on showing us people going through security checks at airports and top-flight politicians disagreeing via soundbites on the issue of housing benefit caps, Twitter has the following video tweeting round the ether.



Almost to the very penny, it would appear that Vodafone has extracted concessions from HMRC which - had they not been extracted - would have meant the Coalition government might have needed to look for some other convincing excuse to implement its savage cuts programme.

Meanwhile, I just wonder what the long-term implications of such a disjunction between mainstream and social media will be.

I suspect they will be serious: as the cuts bite, we will see a firm compact of non-social media users - newspaper readers, radio listeners, Sky+ consumers - continuing in blithe ignorance of such memes.  On the other hand, evermore savvy and knowledgeable Twitter, Facebook and blogging aficionados will build up a fund of assumptions and ways of seeing that will bind them together in absolute identification.

Thus it will come to pass that these two groups of citizens will become strangers to each other in their own country.

This is the how.

And this manifest lack of public coincidence leads me to contemplate what is likely to become a perplexing and possibly terrifying future.  Modern Western civilisations have to date prided themselves on their ability to sustain a cohesive sense of what society means.  This would now appear to be something we must doubt and can no longer rely or depend on.

Our perception of reality - as mediated via the media we most comprehensively trust - determines how we see each other.

Those of us who follow, employ and participate in the production of social media see each other differently - more democratically perhaps, less hierarchically certainly - than those who use what I have seen John Naughton call steam media.  This affects how we understand and deposit in others the confidence and trust that makes civilisations function.

Inevitably, a gap will open up between us to such an extent that even those with the best of intentions will find it impossible to comprehend the other.  If I am right, it would be fair to say that this process has already started - in the media we use, through the cuts this awfully top-down government imposes and via the Internet and its immensely liberating freedoms.

All contradictory forces.

All leading us in different directions.

So it is that the growing inability we have to put ourselves in another's shoes means there will come the day when it will not be your words I find resistible but simply the sound of your voice.

And that is not only how but also why we will all be strangers in our own country.

George Osborne mad as a hatter four times in the same interview

George Osborne is going off his rocker.  This man is leading the country into rack and ruin and all he can think of doing is repeating himself four times in one interview - to four different questions.

I'd also like to add that George Osborne is going round the twist.  This man is pushing the country towards its worst recession in living history and all he can think of doing is saying the same thing four times in one interview - to four different questions.

What's more, George Osborne is well on his way to being certified (just look at how those beady eyes reprise Tony Blair's piercing royal blueness).  This man is driving the country towards the edge of an economic and social precipice and all he can think of doing is blurting out the same message four times in one interview - to four different questions.

And incidentally, George Osborne is ...

Yikes.

No.

I can't do it, I'm afraid.

Osborne must be far madder than I ever was.

Just watch this and see what I mean.  (All via Liberal Conspiracy and assorted crew members.)

www.thecutswontwork.co.uk and how we can beat TINA

Here's a splendid idea, complete with Facebook page and T-shirt.  As their tagline runs:

Five alternatives to deep cuts:

CUT LATER
CUT LESS
CUT DIFFERENT
TAX BETTER
INVEST IN GOOD STUFF

All approaches which deserve our most fulsome support.
____________________

Further reading: Paul with some more background to the delightful T-shirt in question.  :-)

Maybe they don't know that they don't know what they're doing!

This sort of story - and there seem to be rather a lot of them beginning to appear at the moment - just makes me wonder a little more.  The Coalition really does want to go the whole way - whatever that might mean and wherever they may end up going.  And it doesn't seem to care what it says any more, just so long as it makes people unsure of its true intentions for long enough to get away with what it really intends to do.

I can't work out whether:

1. they know what they're doing and won't let on, or
2. they don't know what they're doing and won't let on, or
3. they don't know that they don't know what they're doing and, of course, don't know that they need to let on

Whatever the situation, we're probably stuffed.  As Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling points out, self-deception is an awful state for leaders to find themselves in - not perhaps exactly for themselves but, certainly, for the rest of us:

The general phenomenon here is simply illusory superiority. Everyone likes to think they are better than average, and it is always easy to believe in things it is comfortable to believe. Self-interest breeds self-deception.
Among the likes of Clegg, though, I suspect there are two specific forms this takes.
One is a belief that one can offset one's privilege by doing good works; noblesse oblige. This is not wholly unreasonable; the Tory lady doing charitable work is not entirely a mythical figure. In Clegg, however, it takes a warped form. He says he was "propelled forward [into politics] by idealism". He fails to see how convenient it is that his particular form of idealism brings with it power and money.
Secondly, there's the perception that one has merit.Toby Young writes:

The aura of privilege that surrounds the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister shouldn’t be mistaken for aristocratic hauteur. Their sense of entitlement doesn’t stem from good breeding, but from their conviction that they’re meritocrats. And in a sense they are. After all, admission to Britain’s top public schools, as well as Oxford and Cambridge, is at least partly based on merit.

This is, of course, laughable. But that's the point. Self-deception is hugely powerful.

How have we arrived at such a frightening situation?  Our leaders generally embrace self-deception after their second term in office - not six months into their first.  So have these leaders really embraced it already?  Do they already believe they are bigger than the events they juggle so mercilessly?

Do they already believe they have the right to put theory before people?  Do they already believe they have the obligation to put an experiment before the interests of the subject?

These governors of ours are truly children of Blair.  Pressing buttons, making robotic the relationships between such alleged servants of the state and the served themselves, controlling the mass media with promises of corporate endowment ... yes, the morality is non-existent.

They are in it for themselves and yet, I am sure (in some way sincerely), believe this is not so.

If only this were not the case.  If only it were quite otherwise.
____________________

Further reading: this, from John Naughton the other day, would have made interesting reading and viewing.  A little like Wallander interviewing Blair - in the nicest possible way.  At least, this is what I think John led us to believe.  I made a mental note of the link and went back to the story today to watch and learn.

I was ready to warm to Blair even as I knew I shouldn't.

And then I discover that where the revealing video should've been, all we had was a black screen.  Fortunately, a bit of digging around the Internet uncovered the following code - which should now work.  Let me know if it goes offline again and I'll do my best to update.

Patience, goodness, a moral high ground and political efficiency

Kate makes an impassioned appeal for common sense and coherence over at Hangbitch, published yesterday.  Meanwhile, the Guardian publishes this opinion poll today:

A majority of voters are convinced that the consequences of spending cuts will be unfair, according to a Guardian/ICM poll.

But the poll suggests there is no full-scale revolt against the coalition measures after last week's comprehensive spending review, with Labour slipping behind the Conservatives for the first time in the Guardian polling series since July.

The Conservatives have turned a two-point deficit in the Guardian's last ICM poll into a three-point lead, 39% to 36%. The government also retains a strong lead on economic competence.

That will come as a relief to ministers who feared the immediate political impact of the massive cuts in spending could be far worse.

Two things are clear: firstly, Britain is not France and secondly, the French will always surpass the British in their passionate expression and experience of political engagement.  We on the left may be right about what we say: the recent spending review may be the most regressive tool to have hit this country for decades, the financial services sector is taking us all for an almighty ride and the poor will suffer - as they always do - disproportionately the consequences of the errors of the rich. But being right is not enough.

Nor will it win the public over.

Winning the public over means dialogue and understanding.  It means trust.  It means engagement.

None of which a boycott of the 35 companies Kate mentions in her piece will ever achieve.

When Stuart Rose intervened in the last general election by signing a similar letter (Vince Cable apparently found the intervention "nauseating" at the time), I suggested to my wife that we should stop buying in Marks & Spencer.  Her reaction was interesting.  She idly wondered if I wasn't heading for another nervous breakdown like the one I suffered during the lead-up to the Iraq War seven years ago.

For simply suggesting that I might wish to disengage with a corporate behemoth in a structured way, I was giving off signs of being on the verge of mental collapse.  The implications are astonishing.  But, to be honest, if today I dared to suggest a similar boycott to my work colleagues, or, indeed, to my apolitical friends and family, I can't see the reaction being all that different.

I'm not sure exactly what's happening, but what I suggest might be taking place is a process of normalisation, of internalisation, of a taking on board of the terrors of our time.  It would seem that certain boundaries are being moved by the regressive nature of the spending review.

Its awfulness will take time to kick in for people who do not work directly in the public sector, whilst anyone who is immediately affected will - I fear - tend to blame the economy in general and not the Coalition in particular for their condition.

Or if they blame the Coalition, they will not have the media support to allow them to voice that opinion.

The Coalition, especially the Tory part of the Coalition, have understood for a while that whilst it is absolutely essential to fight over the centre ground of British politics, it is not entirely impossible to move that centre ground to where you may feel more comfortable and at home.

I know some of you may have been unhappy with my references to the Nazis yesterday, but this process of normalisation which I fear may be on the point of happening - and which the Guardian/ICM poll mentioned above already seems to indicate is taking hold - reminds me most unhappily of that creeping process of becoming accustomed to the unacceptable that Nazi Germany exemplifies most clearly.  The horrors of National Socialism are obviously in a league of their own but this government's penchant for propaganda, for brazenly saying one thing before an election and quite another after, is really not all that different from Herr Goebbels' unhappy achievements in communication.  Blaming ethnic minorities for the miseries of late 1920s Germany is really not all that removed from blaming the poor for being poor in early 21st century Britain.  Especially when the poor are now so very much poorer precisely because of the actions of the rich.  The very rich, that is to say, who managed to so comprehensively mess up the delicate balances in high-rolling finance - and then had to get bailed out by governments which really couldn't afford such benevolences.

Thus it is we have to accept that in the midst of all this horror, we didn't keep our eye on the ball at all.  As Paul so rightly says:

The wider conservative milieu conducted an incredibly successful assault on the legitimacy of representative democracy in the closing years of the last government. One that Labour were unable to resist because it didn't occur to many of them that it was happening. And the results have been stunning.

As a twenty-year old ultra-Thatcherite Bullingdon Club member, Osborne could never in his wildest dreams have believed that he would achieve everything he went into politics for within six months of taking office. And he would have thought you were mad if you told him he wouldn't even need to win an election to do it!

Legitimacy.

Yep.  That's what we need more of.

Patience, goodness, a moral high ground and political efficiency.  That is the mix we need.

In Britain, conversational politics must always be our most violent weapon.  It's the only way to win over the British in the end.  Being so savagely unlike them never worked.  Not long-term.

Propaganda, life in Britain and modern technocracy at its best

These two posts - here and here - are worth reading in their entirety, if you're looking to get a feel for what's happening to our once verdant and prosperous land.  As someone just tweeted, the following opening paragraph from the second link above puts everything in perspective:

What better way to wind down after a difficult week at the office, in which you’ve sacked 500,000 people, slashed public spending, made the poor poorer and seen your party sink in the polls, than to close your eyes, dream you’re on a far-away island (I don’t know, maybe Belize, the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands – I hear some of Clegg’s Tory chums can fill him in on that) and spin some discs…

Life in Britain can only get worse, can't it?

It makes you think this is what it must've been like living under Nazi rule in a Jewish ghetto in the 1930s.  Not - I hasten to add - because I believe this government is Nazi-like in its instincts to propagandise our public discourse or document our every communication.  Whilst proposing the liquidation of 500,000 public sector jobs over a period of four years is simply an example of modern technocracy at its best - this is, after all, a duly (well, partly) elected coalition of common interests operating with the interests of everyone in the country.

No historical parallel there then.

No.  The reason I mention the ghettos (and I fervently hope that this does not make you believe I am either trivialising the awful nature of the situation then or exaggerating the government's penchant for unkindness now) is because this fever we are beginning to labour under where we assume there will come a time when things do not get any worse - or cannot get any worse - means we are already deluding ourselves as to the full extent of the changes planned.

Cuts from above, handed down by people who only focus on high-level detail and leave the dirty dirty for their ministers and underlings to work out, are not examples of consensual politics at all.

Meanwhile, this excuse sounds familiar: the situation is so grave that uncontemplatable things suddenly become contemplatable:

Britain’s Coalition has managed the trick of blaming everything on Gordon Brown’s Government. The facts – that debt, interest rates and unemployment were low before the crash – are ignored. The themes are profligacy, fairness, inevitability and overdue reform of the public sector. Each claim is belied by the evidence, but the Coalition is undaunted. The tactic is to repeat its assertions relentlessly until, like the best of fibs, they are believed.

Mr Osborne had one. Britain, he said more than once in the Commons, was on the verge of bankruptcy before he took action. That’s not even remotely true: Britain, like most developed countries defrauded by the banks, has an uncomfortably large debt interest bill and a structural deficit. Bad enough, but not apocalyptic.

The cuts, though, are fair, they insist. Hence Nick Clegg’s remarkable claim, in an interview published yesterday, that it is “complete nonsense” to measure fairness only through the tax and benefits system. Yet he did so while arguing that the tax and benefit changes are, of course, fair.

Mr Clegg justified this fib, disputed by the non-party Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), by stating that “the richest are paying the most”. The LibDem said: “Those who say otherwise are not being very straight with people and, frankly, they are frightening people.”

By “most” he did not mean actual sums of money, of course. That would be silly. He meant that the top of the top decile, perhaps 2% of taxpayers, will surrender a larger proportion of their income than the lowest group. He forgot to say that this is only the case, among a group accustomed to ingenious tax arrangements, thanks to Labour’s imposition of a 50% rate, a move opposed vehemently by Mr Clegg’s new Conservative friends.

This other penchant for propaganda and doublespeak is really so familiar.  I wonder where - and, historically, when - I've heard it all before.

*

Of course, making fun of Nick Clegg must be quite easy at the moment.  And it does make me question if our politics is entirely healthy.

We seem to move in deathly consonance - like a flock of weighty birds - from one (even if hardly hapless) victim to another.  Today, it's Clegg's turn to get the flak; the day before yesterday we had Peter Oborne informing us that Osborne is the really bad guy and in the end Cameron might have to do something about it.

But this is all surely just one more symptom of our unfocussed state of mind.  We are lashing out according to the opportunity this interview or that presents.  We spend our mortal hours fisking the statements and moral quandaries of people who are getting away with murder.

For they are all in it together, for goodness sake.  And we know what happens when people burn their bridges.

I'm not arguing for more tribal politics when I say this.  We have more than enough of that already.  What I am trying to say is that we need to understand how we in politics, on all sides of the political debate, cannot propose leading the people of Britain again where they do not want to go.

If all we can do is spend valuable weeks and months pointing out how wrong they are and yet still find ourselves unable to show where we are right, we will have to kiss goodbye to any chance of recovering the future for an incisive left.

For what we must recognise is that each new political generation is the son and daughter of the previous.   Their envelope of action is defined by what they had to survive.  And in some way, we must accept, as harbingers of a doom we can readily predict but not now avoid (unless we are prepared to take the direct action that nations like the French are happy so to do), that part of the blame for this dreadful mess is ours and ours alone.

The Nazis came about partly because of a wider tolerance in European society to their ideas on race and how relationships between different peoples should be conducted.

We can only really begin to do something about this Coalition government when we understand we are also a part of the problem.  To some extent, they exist today because we were as we were.  Our challenge now is to show the rest of the country we are no longer the same.

There must come a time when we have to stop being so damn clever.

There must come a time when we start being a damn sight more good.
____________________

Further reading: William Keegan in today's Observer writing about possibly the most dangerous chancellor of our lifetime.

On Facebook's algorithms, why they don't connect you with your friends and the sociocultural cocktail we've been drugged with

Not surprisingly it would seem, Facebook's algorithms are there to benefit Facebook.  Read more on the brilliant experiment which uncovers the patterns that connect the content you post to your friends - or not as the case may be:

You might think you've shared those adorable new baby photos or the news of your big promotion with all of your friends. Yet not only does Facebook decide who will and won't see the news, it also keeps the details of its interventions relatively discreet.

All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine "what's important to you" as "what's important to other people."  [...]

Or, indeed, to Facebook.

*

Wikipedia

In fact, if you think about it, the sleight of hand Facebook is performing here is pretty similar, topologically speaking, to the Coalition cuts.  Essentially, what you're doing is setting up a skein of content which claims to be something it isn't.  In the former case, Facebook is supposedly there to connect you with your friends but is in reality a structure to ensure fairly random and trivial Web 2.0 content remains interesting enough to keep you both on site and in sight of all those blessed advertisers.  In the latter case, George Osborne is supposedly aiming to save us from an impending and practically inevitable public bankruptcy but in reality is pushing us towards millions of very private and personal tragedies which will allow those who destroyed us in the first place to punish and blame us for the very crimes they themselves committed (original here):

[...] where, previously, neoliberals had used the crises in other political systems (state socialism, social democracy) as an opportunity to helicopter in their 'reforms', on this occasion they are using a crisis brought about by neoliberal policy itself to try to electro-shock the neoliberal programme back into life. I heard one buffoon on television saying that "we've been in denial for the last ten years". If there's denial, it's happened in the last two years, and on the part of the neoliberals and their friends in the business elite, who - after demanding at gunpoint unprecedented sums of public money - are now brazenly continuing to peddle the story that they are the friend of the taxpayer and that it is welfare claimants, not them, who are the scroungers who have brought the country to the "brink of bankruptcy".

George Osborne is not about saving the country from anything - rather, he is far more interested in inflicting as much pain as he can, where this pain falls on those broad Stakhanovite shoulders he so despises.

Similarly, Facebook is not really about getting people to make friends with each other but, rather, educating us to behave in certain ways that expose us more effectively to those business partners which fund its activities and allow it to generate its billions of dollars of profit.

We'll see through Facebook sooner or later, though - of that I'm sure.

And maybe Facebook will then see how we're seeing through it and adapt in time for it not to die.  That's what large organisations tend to do these days: perpetuate themselves way beyond their initial reason for existing - do anything they need to not expire.

But the really important question is whether we can do anything about Mr Osborne - before, that is, he destroys a whole fragility of interconnected communities. 

Will there come a time when he also prefers to adapt rather than die?  Or is his political ambition so great that it goes way beyond such mortal sense and sensibility?

Here I really have no clear idea at all.

*

There is this other thought which strikes me - and perhaps even strikes fear into me.  Maybe Facebook's virtual worlds still work as well as they do not because they have trained us to behave in certain ways but, instead, because they have been clever enough to replicate the button-pushing instincts of so many political behaviours over the last two decades - political behaviours which have accustomed us to respond, in a quite Pavlovian way, to the petty carrots and sticks of our masters and mistresses in what is arguably a terribly supine way.

In the light of such a perspective and thesis, the virtual world is not changing our real world behaviours at all - rather, more frighteningly, it is simply automating existing behaviours we have had surreptitiously slipped into our sociocultural cocktail over the years, in an almost date-rape-like fashion, by our political leaders and their parties.  As Paul suggests:

Labour's real problems are not of a left-right nature. It's almost a spiritual failing. We're not that much of a good party any more, and we won't succeed until we become one again.

"We're not a good party any more."   There's a lot of truth in that statement.

The Labour Party started out as an organisation to create a better world and has become one of the biggest exponents of communalism.  This is natural in a political organisation.

Facebook started out as a group of friends using technology to have fun and has become an omniscient organisation which uses personal data to generate billions of dollars.  This is natural in a corporation.

George Osborne started out as a man who wanted to make money at other people's expense and now wants to ensure that the issue of money becomes other people's biggest worry.  This is natural in people who acquire power.

In this world, it is clear that intention matters more than anything else.  And the intention this world covets is the intention to do ill to the enemy.

So does no one want to be the good party Paul yearns after?

How Big Society = Big Cuts and Big Brother (II)

Glad to hear this from Peter Oborne yesterday:

[...] George Osborne is in danger of becoming a problem which David Cameron must start to ponder.

And this today:

telegraph's peter oborne on Today: when he saw tory/libdems cheering budget which forecast growing dole queue he felt ashamed he voted tory

We need more of this in times like these.

Why?  Well, possibly because whilst George Osborne might know what he's doing, the rest of the country don't want him to do it.  Perhaps my application of the theory of Gaia to the British body politic is not all that wayward an idea.

*

Further to my recent post on the Big Brother intentions of the current government which drew our attention to the fact that not only does the Coalition plan to dramatically reduce the size of the state, it also intends to dramatically reduce our levels of personal privacy (ie the Big Society = Big Cuts and Big Brother), the following excellent post from Heresy Corner was brought to my attention via Stumbling and Mumbling.

This is, in fact, a serious matter for anyone who believes in conversational politics.  If the government is proposing that our means of communication become part and parcel of their security databases, how on earth can its shakers and movers expect such innovations - where citizens are supposedly empowered by technology - to properly and fairly take off? 

Who'd want to participate in a state which required you not only to volunteer more but also allow your every email, shared link, website and contact to be registered with its snoopers in Whitehall?

I'd just repeat the conclusion of my previous post: there is no point at all in aiming to create a more libertarian-sized state where people have to fend for themselves, even where this is together, if along with such actions you factor in a state which places its subjects under even stricter levels of surveillance than are currently the case.  Firstly, it makes the ideological case even weaker - and encourages one to believe that the whole purpose of the exercise is entirely posited around bringing down the workers, rather than redimensioning the state for what are beginning to look like quite spurious benefits.  Secondly, its political incoherence is manifest - and encourages one to believe that actually George Osborne doesn't know what he is doing.

This is an obvious case of a need to join up government - and join it up fast.

Unless, of course, it's already joined up very nicely, ma'am.  That is to say, the Big Society is designed from the ground up to use innovatory techologies in order to allow government to track what we do with each other rather better.

In which case, it's clearly time to mount as feisty an opposition as possible. 

As soon as possible.
____________________

Further reading: an overview of what's currently being published on the subject of the Big Society on the Office for Public Management's blogsite can be found here.  It's obviously Tory-orientated - but makes interesting reading all the same.