Foul-mouthed Tory apologist
(certified drunk)
derides clinical depression
as "pill-pushing" -- official

Full story here. Sphere: Related Content

An ageing* blogger proposes ...

Why do this thing?

Possibly because, this apart, the years of retirement amount to saying less and less about more and more to fewer and fewer for longer and longer.
_____________________________________________

* Or, if you were brought up on Webster's Dictionary, or tied forgot to change the preferences on your spellcheck program, "aging".

Sphere: Related Content

An overdue apology

Malcolm interferes, but in the case of the lay-out of his blog, clearly not enough.

For an obvious example, he fails to acknowledge the other blogs he reads, and enjoys.

One such is Diamond Geezer, a prolific, thoughtful and lively commentator on the London (mainly East London) scene and beyond. He is clearly one with his heart in the right place (though not politically, it seems). Well recommended (though not as a model of paragraphing, perhaps).

So, with apologies for not doing so long ago, and prompted in a circuitous way by the previous post here,Diamond Geezer is added to the Blogroll. Sphere: Related Content

Cyber-reflections (nothing original here)

In a sentence, a late-evening quickie, here's a true, first-person story:

Malcolm's American son-in-law, over for the Christmas vacation, expressed interest in Number 3 daughter's iPhone. [New readers start here: she otherwise is the Pert Young Piece.]

This, to say the least, involved a leap of the imagination:

• Redfellow Hovel is an all-Mac household.
• The Noo Joisey affiliation is not ... or rather, was not, until Number 1 daughter suddenly acquired a 17-inch MacPro. Obviously, things were happening.
• The American son-in-law was, until lately, a dyed-in-the-wool corporation man: standard combat-issue Dell lap-top and Blackberry.

So why the change of view? Well, there's this:


That's two definite front-runners, a couple of also-rans, and the MS empire nowhere.

Meanwhile, over at macobserver.com, Malcolm finds Bryan Chaffin rubbing salt into the gaping wound:

In a few short years, the company has gone from being a scary-ass giant that seemed certain to drown the tech world in a sea of mediocrity to an embarrassing old uncle with lots of money and dreams of faded glory shambling along in a pantomime of his past accomplishments.

Big Redmond -- and that analogy to IBM and its age of dominance no longer seems as apt as it once did -- is still dominant in PC operating systems, but who cares? The world, including Microsoft, follows what Apple is doing, leaving the company in the driver's seat in the PC world, even with its tiny, but growing, market share.

Microsoft is a bit player in the world of online music downloads and digital media devices, and is increasingly becoming a has-been in smartphones, despite (or maybe because of) having been an early player in that space. The Xbox platform is doing well, though, so rock on there. I think the company may even be close to making back all the money it has spent on that project.

Bing may turn out OK, though I strongly doubt it will unseat Google as the search king. Indeed, I'll be surprised if Bing can become even a strong second to Google in that arena.

That's an extreme, even partial view; but there are germs of truth therein:

• Windows 7 had to succeed, at least in numerical sales, because Vista had been such a dog. Corporations face a stark choice: stick with MS Windows 7 or commit to a huge re-equipment investment. In the present economic state, for most that was a no-brainer (those smaller, more agile companies who thought twice probably went Linux or Open Source at some point).
• When a Microsoft executive, even one in the 51st State, mutters about Office 7 seeking to imitate MacOs 1.6, he is not mis-speaking. The MacOs desktop is the experience others want.
• MacOS Leopard and Snow Leopard are mature, reliable, stable platforms. MacOS has transferred painlessly (well, painlessly for the end-user) to the iPhone, and (let us see) to the hypothetical iSlate. As the graph above shows, not many would say the same of the portings of MS Windows to mobile devices. Nor should we mention those appalling Tablets that were discounted and dumped wholesale on schools.
  
• Apple has nailed the whole marketing operation to a degree that others must copy in the hope of emulation. The iTunes and iApps on-line phenomenon is quite staggering in its success, and the speed of its success. With it lies the opportunity to generate a whole on-demand provision of electronic content: news, films and entertainment, education, anything and everything that can be codified, pushed, transmitted, fed to a point of presence. The implications are staggering: at a single blow, the whole network of media come together in one potentiality. Only two corporations (Apple and Google) seem to have that sussed.
  

This is not the end of cyber-history:

All human things are subject to decay,
And when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

Thus John Dryden, putting the boot into a poetic rival around 1682-4. As IBM, and Microsoft, so, in due course, these present Colossi which bestride the world.

For the moment, though, Malcolm wishes he had sold all his earthly possessions and bought Apple stock at $13. Sphere: Related Content

Hello! back here? But why, Malcolm?

Because, over the last three days, half a dozen great thoughts have disappeared into the Wordpress ether, never to be seen again. Sphere: Related Content

Reminder ...

For any immediate future, after 717 posts over more than three years here, Malcolm Redfellow has taken his trade to Wordpress.

So redirect to:

http://redfellow.wordpress.com

His latest over there include:

• a piece on a 16th-century ancestor, Sir Jacques Granado;
• a mediatation on Tory tide timetables; and

coming up

• thoughts on Belgian beers to die for.

Meanwhile, a thought for the coming holiday season:

Bah! Humbug!

Sphere: Related Content

Losing the wheels ... and the will

Yesterday's Guardian Technology supplement did a timely review of the 100 essential websites. Yeah, yeah: the old stand-by when copy is short. But still ...

There was this:

Blogger Fast way to start blogging; training wheels for Wordpress.

Which, in a way, struck a chord with Malcolm (left).

He has become increasingly frustrated by running two parallel blogs: here on Blogger with Malcolm Redfellow's World Service and there on Wordpress with Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service. Increasingly it has come to be an itch analogous to the chicken-pox in Sheldon Harnick's acerbic The Ballad of the Shape of Things:

They say he died from the chicken pox,
In part I must agree: one chick too many had he!

Malcolm prefers the archly-innocent version Blossom Dearie did at Ronnie Scott's club. She also did it for her 1979 Needlepoint Magic album (and if you can find one of those, bank it).

Whitney Lyon Balliett, who had tenure as jazz critic at the New Yorker for some forty years, wrote of Blossom's voice:

without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll's house

The better-known rendering by the Kingston Trio, more burlesque travesty than Blossom's cabaret chanson, is on a YouTube clip:



Onward, Malcolm! To the point!

So perhaps the time has come to switch off the lights, let it all rest, and go away.

Let's admit that Malcolm Redfellow's World Service has served its purpose. It kept the oul' fella out of mischief, and the Alzheimer's at bay for the last three years. It started as a political/historical stream of consciousness, and lapsed into unconscious tics of incidental semi-thoughts.

So, until some future time,

• when he has something to say,
• when he re-fits the wheels,
• and his voice reaches the second floor of the long-term Lady in his Life's doll's-house,

And finally ...



Thank you for that rendition, Ms von Kappelhoff.

Thank you, the handful who occasionally visit here, for your time and trouble.

Good bye. Sphere: Related Content

Just because they're paranoid ...

... doesn't mean they're entirely wrong

Malcolm followed the frothings and maunderings on the Tory web-sites, defending or bemoaning Cameron's U-turn over the Lisbon Treaty. It became v-e-r-y repetitive and v-e-r-y boring. Even so, it had its moments of provocation.

It obliged him to re-appraise his own assumptions.

The level of mindless abuse

First and foremost, the sound and fury was proof positive that there are many angry people out there. Most of them are window-lickers (© Paul Staines). They see the EU as the natural successor to the Whore of Babylon, and all her sisters in terror.

Malcolm may think they're sadly misguided. Even so, he concedes that he himself is a reformed anti: he came round to being, at best, ambivalent over Europe after full embroilment in the early '60s in Dublin, and campigning in the 1975 British Referendum. There are those who suggest all that was a long while ago: poor old Malcolm's eyesight, hearing and hair all testify to that. Yet Malcolm recognises similarities between 1975 and now: the antis of 1975 were acutely aware and warned then, as Brutus does in Julius Caesar:

Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities:
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.

That's a specious argument, and Shakespeare intended it to be heard as such; but it has its superficial merits.

The great British public saw through such claims; and voted two-to-one against the antis' warnings.

Nuff said.

Malcolm, though, had the wit to recognise that the argument against the EEC had been well-and-truly trounced. Since when, while never being a whole-hearted Euro-fanatic, he has warmed to the notion.

Were one to believe the vitriol of Tory loyalists on the Tory websites (such as Iain Dale's), those who argue still from a hard-line anti- perspective are "trolls" or "NuLiebor stooges". Abuse, and hackneyed and concocted insults are the norm in such dark corners. It's pot-and-kettle stuff, with very little light. Clearly, those using such terms do not comprehend what "trolling" involves (and, ahem! Malcolm in his cups will quietly admit to have done his bit under at least three pseudonyms.) Nor are they exclusively UKIPpers.

Something has gone sadly, badly, madly wrong in the relationship between the great British public and the EU when so many misrepresentations and misconceptions are prevalent. The EU has a vast budget to expend on its own image: but the message does not get through. Instead we have the bar-room fantasies of straight cucumbers, unbent bananas and EU-standard condoms. That is largely because the Murdoch machine and its fellow travellers have been so successful in distorting and disseminating their black propaganda.

Anti-Labour hysteria

One does not have to venture too far into the undergrowth of Europhobic monomania to be told it's all a plot: Gordon (inevitably "Gorgon") Brown is a paid-up member of the Illuminati, who fixes the ballot boxes while decent folk are a-bed. Or some such.

The present Government, for all its faults, is no where near being a guilty party. Everything that has occurred in the long and involved (and occasionally honourable) relationship of Britain and the EU is a natural consequence of such developments as:

• What we knowingly endorsed in 1975. By that time, it should be remembered, the ERM, proposed in 1970, created in 1972, was already in place.
• The recognition that we couldn't continue to pump out mega-tonnes of acid rain to poison Scandinavian forests, nor hoover the seas of all marine life. The "Green Agenda' took time to evolve; but the basic concepts have been there a while.
  
• The establishment of democratic regimes, first in Iberia and Greece, and then in Eastern Europe needed to be supported, sustained -- and kept democratic and honest. This implied implied European-wide "rights" and obligations. Similarly, Article 9 of that German Basic Law, which Cameron and Hague now hail as a model, derives from the benefits that British TUC-men, such as George Woodcock and Vic Feather, despatched by Walter Cirine and Ernie Bevin, invented for the de-nazified West German trades unions. Such rights became demanded -- quite properly -- by the workers of other nations. There is some irony that only the British Tories wish to cop out of the deal.
  
• The Single European Act of 1986 was one of the achievements for which Margaret Thatcher, despite having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, deserves credit. What the British Tories wanted was full and free access to the wider European marketplace. What they didn't fully appreciate is that our EC fellow-members expected a level-playing field, which meant full harmonisation of all operating practices.
  
• This led on to Maastricht in 1992, creating the EU, with the UK giving assurances on currency, foreign and security policy, justice and internal affairs. Again, the hang-up for the Tories was not just over "sensitive" matters of defence and foreign policy, but that the "social chapter" (another part of that harmonisation) granted rights to British employees. That was the issue on which Labour and Liberal MPs (with the held of anti-EEC Tories) broke the Major government.
  

So, by the time of the present Labour Government, with the EU at 25 (and then at 27) members, consolidation was overdue: which is where Lisbon comes in.

In the immediate future the entry of Croatia and FYR Macedonia will need to be settled. An educated guess is that will happen in the life-time of the next Parliament; but not involve a Referendum, come what may. One might equally assume, too, that any UK Government will make cooing noises about Turkish entry; but be none too energetic in pressing it.

Any sane person, with any breadth of vision, should feel that what we've got here, now, is, on balance, better than the alternatives. Those who sweat buckets over "ever-closer union" might care to look back beyond the last couple of decades or so, when "ever-wider disunion" was the only game in town.

"A cast-iron promise"

When Cameron gave his "cast-iron" promise, he was in a corner. His polling figures put him not far off the electoral ropes. He and his Svengali, Andy Coulson, were set on wooing Murdoch. That meant paying Danegeld and surrendering a large degree of control over European policy to Wapping. Hence Cameron's "cast-iron promise" and the recent negotiations to wriggle out from under it. The full story of that will, doubtless, provide a chapter in somebody's memoirs at a later date.

Probably Cameron (or was it Coulson, holding his writing hand?) went a bit further than second-thoughts might have suggested. If so, Cameron was either:

• presuming he would not have to deliver. In which case he was being casuistical and equivocating: not an unusual characteristic (or even a cardinal sin) in a politician;

or

• assuming that the Irish, the Poles, the Czechs or A.N.Other would already have rubbished Lisbon before he had to honour the "cast-iron promise". In which case he was being calculating: again, not necessarily unknown among political minds.

Neither implies a cuddly, endearing personality: both are the norms in the trade, however.

It transcends human understanding that Cameron would have wanted to be in the position of leading a newly-elected UK Government into the rôle of wrecker of the present European settlement. Or that he genuinely wanted a full-blown referendum on EU membership (which, undoubtedly, is what he would have been expected to offer). The natural support of the Tory Party, in the City and business, could not countenance the UK leaving the EU -- especially when "Exit" is clearly, even invitingly, sign-posted for the first time in the Lisbon Treaty.

These, then, are the measures of Cameron's weaknesses:

• At the time the "cast-iron" promise was put together, he prostrated himself before the Great God Rupert.
• He then had to seek a pontifical pardon and absolution from the Great God Rupert (as The Sun tacitly and smugly recognised) before he could withdraw the promise, address his Parliamentary Party (where the Whips and loyalists were dragooned into orchestrating the applause), and then go before the cynical Press. That is a most peculiar order of business for a "leader".
  
• His reconstructed assurances to the Tory Party have to promise more than he has just withdrawn, to attempt to gloss over his present moment of apparent self-contradiction. At the key moment of that Press conference Malcolm heard in Cameron the impotent Lear:

I will do such things,--
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.

All in all: A Mad World, My Masters.

Sphere: Related Content

It's the rottweilers again ...

Malcolm has commented on this before. He's even, in extremis, exploited it (though, on that occasion, to make sure, he included Ms Blackman's cleavage).

For some inexplicable reason, any mention of rottweilers means an up-tick in the number of hits to his two blogs.

This started when he referred to a well-known UK broadcaster as the "Splott Rottweiler". Not just assonance: true by manner; true to origin.

Yet, he hasn't mentioned the breed for some while. So, he wondered, why the sudden up-tick in interest?

It took a bit of Googling, but Malcolm thinks he now knows the source. Well, well, thank you, New York Times, for the sympathetic magic. You can afford those hits, after all. Sphere: Related Content

Twitter ye not!

Malcolm signed up for Twitter: not because he has the slightest intention of using the damn thing, but to make sure his name was name taken in vain.

He has neither twittered nor tweeted.

Yet emails from the twitter mob say he already has followers.

Let's hope they aren't too put off by waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Sphere: Related Content

Once only!

Any reader, aware of Malcolm's prejudices, may take fright from this image (the one below: not the metaphor to the right!):
When Malcolm was slapped on the back by one of the few who know his real persona, he was confused:

• not by his position (number 94, for heaven's sake!), but by being there at all;
• in any event, by position 94, there couldn't be many alternatives available;
• a quick scrute of some of the preceding 93 makes Malcolm speculate on how banal, how badly written, how inconsequential those doomed to position 95 and below must be.

To clarify:

• Dale's Total Politics (financed, apparently, by "Lord" Ashcroft) is no such thing. Based on the couple of issues that Malcolm has flicked through, it seems to be substantially politics as the cult-of-personality. Malcolm found its worse efforts brash and trivial: as remote from The Speccie or New Statesman -- let alone Political Analysis, -- as Hello! is from the DNB.
• Total Politics went about these blog listings as a cynical marketing operation. There seemed to be some kind of pre-registration: to be considered a blog required registering. Neither of Malcolm's blogs was. Then each blogger was urged to drum up support by publicising the competition, and thereby Total Politics, to its readerships. Again, Malcolm didn't.

All of which is fair enough. No complaints there.

Some conclusions, however:

• Malcolm Redfellow started three years back as a knee-jerk to retired unemployment. Its original incarnation was reflection on things Anglo-Irish: an English-born, Dublin-educated ranter who had married into Ulster Unionism. Beyond that there were two other idealistic "givens": egalitarian republicanism and blood-and-guts socialism.
• Malcolm Redfellow revivus evolved into two separate blogs: this World Service (on Blogger) and Home Service (on Wordpress). That was mainly because Malcolm was having problems with Blogger (its editing facility -- especially with the automatic save -- has since considerably improved) and fancied a go at Wordpress.
• At one stage, Malcolm imagined that the World Service would be more reflective and literary, while the Home Service would be gossipy and polemic. It hasn't worked out that way, though the Home Service more obviously meets Iain Dale's idea of a "Labour" site (and seems to have better "stat-porn" than the cited World Service). In all reason, the two should be recombined as a single on-going stream-of-consciousness.
• When he makes the effort, Malcolm hopes some of the writing on Malcolm Redfellow is, at least, worthy (it's those semi-colons, you know). At its best, it gives satisfaction to its author and even to a small circle of web-friends. Whenever sheer despair takes over, and the act of sitting down and composing becomes a chore, his alter-ego considers Malcolm's self-elimination. Then a new burst takes over. It's like Malcolm's annual reading-block cycle: over-indulgence, lassitude, a course of tranquillisers (such as the recent frolic through Lindsey Davis's Falco series), and back on the treadmill.
• Malcolm notices that the balance of his maunderings changes over time. It has become less "political" (and, certainly, less partisan), more based on reading and travel. There always has been a thread of history in the mix, especially Malcolm's interests in the nooks-and-corners of malfeasance and mayhem, modern and medieval.
• Finally, there is the schizoid nature of "Malcolm". He is a construct, albeit a fairly transparent one: several correspondents have proudly identified the onlie true begetter. Nich Starling, that estimable Norfolk Blogger, recently declared:

For me there is nothing like the dishonesty of a pseudonym.

Which is a valid point. On the other hand, a lot depends on the purpose of the blog. Starling is still an active politician: he briefly considered (and blogged it) throwing his hat in the ring for the LibDem nomination in Norwich North. Obviously he works in an understanding school: the English-teacher in Malcolm had to be meticulous, even confessional, in separating his ideology from his lit. crit. Nich, though, is explicitly a partisan blogger: with that, as with Iain Dale, goes an element of self-promotion. Malcolm and the reality behind him would see that as a constraint on a symbiotic partnership, wherein each can challenge the other's prejudices.

That's enough navel-gazing for one session. Normal service is resumed. Sphere: Related Content

Totally screwed!

In a moment of abject self-pity, reviewing the dismal "statporn" (© Iain Dale) of Malcolm Redfellow's World Service , Malcolm made an even more depressing discovery.

His top "hits" of all-time involved:

• a piece on the BNP membership list;
• a reference, accessed by soon-disappointed dog-lovers from everywhere, describing John Humphrys, the BBC broadcaster, as the Splott Rottweiler;

and

• misinterpretations of words such as "tits" and "cock".

A lexical malfunction

All those hundreds of thousands of well-honed words, dozens of thoughtful postings, the wry comments on the Not so Great and Not so Good: all wasted. The cyber-world wants only an easy laugh and a cheap thrill.

So Malcolm felt a frisson of recognition when he discovered that the iPhone dictionary is equally open to mockery:

The spirit of Thomas Bowdler lives on at Apple. The increasingly bizarre nature of the approval process for the iTunes App Store has reached new levels of eccentricity with the revelation that a dictionary app was blocked because it contained “objectionable content”.

The story is that a developer, Matchstick, submitted an application, Ninjawords, to the iTunes App Store. It was rejected because of "objectionable content".

Yeah, yeah. All the old favourites were there:

Consequently Ninjawords was forced to bowdlerise the dictionary in order to get it onto the Apple devices. The list of omitted words includes ass, snatch, pussy, cock and screw, but Apple still displays a 17+ age rating and the accompanying warning that the app may contain objectionable material.

Well, says Malcolm, I object!

It's all those niggling frustrations that the blue-noses build in.

He remembers first encountering it at Wells, from the Norfolk County Library Service. There comes a moment in a young man's life when he moves on from Biggles, crosses the aisle, and investigates the adult fiction shelves. There he found T.H.White's The Once and Future King. When Malcolm presented this to the issuing desk, he was quizzed as to its suitability, and whether his parents would approve.

The experience was, at the time, unpleasant. In retrospect, it's hard to see any objection to the book (except for White's politics). Yet it had a lasting product -- a continuing fascination for fiction in all forms. That is why, when he hears someone decrying the young modern male's distaste for reading, Malcolm suggests the quickest remedy is to ban the whole corpus of literature for a decade. Then they'll all want some.

Pursuit of the missing couplet

There was the moment, around the age of fifteen, Malcolm was preparing for GCE Eng Lit Those, of course, were the days when, as Michael Gove maintains, exams were truly testing. More to the point, the books studied were real literature: none of yer modern rubbish. From the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales this turned up:

For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,
No wonder is a lewed man to ruste;
......................................................
......................................................
Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,
By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.

Today, of course, a quick flick to that hotlinked source will give the missing couplet. In those, pre-electronic days, it involved a hike to a main library or, as Malcolm did it, hoicking after school to Dawson Street, and Hodges Figgis (now a Waterstone's, by any other name, and opposite its original site), to check it out. Forbidden fruit!

And so it goes on.

Today, school networks have to be protected by all kinds of firewalls and safeguards. Since the kids are infinitely more cyber-savvy than the staff and technicians, this rarely works for long.

Such nannying has consequences. For example, it is virtually impossible, in most schools, to access Shakespeare texts. Early on in the download, the built-in Bowdler cuts in and the text cuts out. Did David Blukett know just how filthy and corrupting Romeo and Juliet is, when he approved it for Key Stage 3?

So, how can one teach technology if "screw" is verboten? Sphere: Related Content

A way with words

Is it something in the (potable if rather unpleasant) water? Or does it come with the donning of a gaudy Hawaiian beach shirt?

Item:

The conscience of the sunshine State, the magnificent and, doubtless, mean and moody, but unfailingly marvellously-readable Carl Hiaasen starts his latest column thus:

Unlike Sarah Palin, Charlie Crist has chosen not to quit his governorship early. Florida's own one-term wonder is using his remaining time to ingratiate himself with as many deep-pocket interest groups as possible.

The governor's unseemly burst of groveling is directly connected to his upcoming run for the U.S. Senate. Sucking up to the National Rifle Association and the Christian right, Crist last week declared his opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose confirmation is already a done deal.

Many of Crist's longtime supporters were surprised, but they shouldn't have been. Charlie has no problem with timely pandering.

That is the prelude to a characteristic toccata and full-blown fugue on Hiaasen's favourite topic, the on-going rape of southern Florida by property interests.

Item:

Here's Fred Grimm warming up, on line today, for the Miami Herald:

I noticed an inert bio-mass, approximately 13 years old, parked on the couch, working the remote control like a virtuoso.

"When I was your age,'' I told her, embarking on a Dostoyevskian tragedy from the Eisenhower era, "I had to stand up and walk across the room to change the channel.''

My daughter and her contemporaries can text like Olympic athletes -- their thumbs moving with dazzling speed and incredible endurance, far into the night. The other digits? Not so athletic.

That, believe it or not, is the intro to a piece on child obesity and exercise regimes.

• Whatever potation provides it (please let it be something with an alcohol content),
• whatever ridiculous costume one has to wear to get it,
• Malcolm wants some.
  

Sphere: Related Content

Such men are dangerous ...

Only on Sunday, posting to Slugger O'Toole (Jun 28, 2009 @ 06:13 PM), Malcolm drew attention to the neo-cons of the Henry Jackson Society. Then he was referring to:

that well-known lefty (no, strike that one: this is now) neo-con, Paul Bew.

Well, as several lyricists have noted, here it comes again.

This time in a very scary article by Neil Clarke, on The First Post.

Inevitably Clarke eventually probes the sleazy mire that has been the single focus of British politics these last weeks: one neo-con (the Hon. Ed Vaizey, Tory Shadow for "Culture") bought antique furniture from the mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Astor, of another (David Cameron), and charged it to parliamentary expenses.

Before that, Clarke clocks in with a remarkable interpretation: that Cameron's enstoolment as Tory leader was engineered to defeat the anti-war elements in the Tory Party:

... the neocon faction within the party started to champion the cause of a young, relatively little known MP for Witney, promoting him as the man who would 'modernise' the party and lead it back to power. The strategy worked a treat, and the little known MP - David Cameron - pulled off a surprise victory.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.

Furthermore:

Cameron has been closely protective of this leadership cadre:

Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who was described by the Daily Mail's political commentator Peter Oborne as "one of the most notorious milkers of the expenses system", for spending thousands furnishing his London home before 'flipping' to a new property and claiming £13,000 in moving costs, came under no pressure from Cameron to stand down. He is likely to play a major role in the next Conservative government.

So too will fellow flipper George Osborne ...

Well, that states the case clearly enough.

There are two possible interpretations here.

One is that Clarke has a hopelessly bee-infested barnet. Malcolm instantly suspects anyone with a publicly-declared penchant for horse-racing may be a snaffle short in the tack-room.

Alternatively, even allowing for a distant rustle of men in white coats, Clarke is on to something.

Putting one's name on a list of sponsors, or signing up to a statement of principles, as these adherents of the Henry Jackson Society have done, invites guilt-by-association. Yet, the connection also merits due consideration.

The prime motive of the HJS is the spreading of a single political agenda world-wide (which, of itself, smacks of being repressive, colonialist, even one-size-fits-all imperialist):

…that liberal democracy should be spread across the world; that as the world's most powerful democracies, the United States and the European Union—under British leadership—must shape the world more actively by intervention and example; that such leadership requires political will. a commitment to universal human rights and the maintenance of a strong military with global expeditionary reach; and that too few of our leaders in Britain and the rest of Europe today are ready to play a role in the world that matches our strength.

Doncha just lurve that "under British leadership" bit? And the blatant Jingoism of "a strong military" with a "global expeditionary reach"?

The HJS, it has to be admitted, has several marks of the nut-house.

A recent posting on the HJS website saw Hillary Clinton in the context of A vast left-wing conspiracy. Another, Guns 'n' Ammo, lamented that:

a pastor in the state of Kentucky has asked his congregation to bring their handguns to the Sunday services in an effort to promote gun safety.

This was misguided simply because:

episodes like this will only serve to deepen suspicion of religious institutions and alienate the gun-bearing demographic from mainstream society.

Oh, and Israel was bang-on bombing the hell out of Gaza: a one-tonne bomb on an apartment building, slaughtering eleven children, is Israel's right, arguably a duty.

Somewhere in there, we are not surprised, was an article assuming that the "mission" in the Middle East would not be complete without Iran being:

compelled by an unrelenting international community to act in accordance with international law and diplomatic norms.

Those are Malcolm's emphases: the previous paragraph had demanded that

Europe and the U.S. need to make much clearer ... that Iran has a choice in this matter. It can continue on its path of self-isolation and belligerence ... or it can cooperate and engage to its benefit... Lax responses from the leaders of the free world only work to facilitate these pursuits; they leave the West with nothing with which to hold over Iran’s head to force compliance with international law and diplomatic norms.

In other words, send the gun-boats. Or the gun-ships. Or the B2 bombers (Jackson, the "whore for Boeing" would approve of that). Dammit: send the lot. It's all in the interests of "world peace"; and, in this misguided, introverted demi-monde, it's not a great distance from Tacitus' thing about desert/peace to Jackson's "The best politics is no politics".

Here's another gem from the HJS which Malcolm cannot resist:

Simply because DDT is a close cousin of Agent Orange does not make it dangerous any more than the air we breathe is harmful because it contains oxygen, which alone is lethal.

Which, of course, is just another fault to be laid at the door of those lefty wimps, who haven't sprayed DDT across the African continent:

... if healthcare is such a worldwide concern, shouldn’t that rising tide lift all boats? When will Barack Obama decide to become his half-brother’s keeper?

Let's bring in one more clown: any chance those "liberal democrats"of the HJS might ponder the origins of their Irish associate? Anthony Mcintyre was a Provo, eighteen years in the Kesh, and resigned only when Sinn Féin signed up to the Good Friday Agreement. With friends like that ...

Noble Romans and well-given?

Malcolm's header for this piece is from Julius Caesar's speech to Antony in Act I, scene ii. It concludes with:

Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous...
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
And tell me truly what thou think'st of him.

Notice: "on my right hand".

The HJS, too, is largely deaf on the other.

Moreover, Caesar is proven correct.
Antony. shrugging off the threat, gets it spectacularly wrong. Sphere: Related Content

Of sokes, wapentakes and hundreds

Here's "englandism.co.uk" @ 20:19 responding to a thread on conservativehome:

I am a 'nationalist'. My nationality is English with a footprint back to the Wapentake of Domesday and beyond. I am more Anglo-Saxon than a Saxon bloke from Angloshire with a really big shield saying Battle of Senlac Hill Home Match 1066.

A namesake died in the Charge of the Light Brigade and my family fought for Cromwell as part of a Leveller regiment.

But I would sooner vote BNP than pot roast my genitals not because I think that the BNP is the personification of Neo-Nazi Evil but because they play to hate not to hope.

When Malcolm unscrambled that (it seems to be missing a negative and a pair of helpful quoatation marks), he:

• quite enjoyed the touch of humour;
• recognised the sentiments; and
• felt a pang of envy.

For he has been looking for an opportunity properly to use (and he is less than certain that it is used quite correctly there) words like "wapentake" and "wayzgoose".
Wapentake

When Malcolm's dear old Dad lived and voted in the Claro Ward of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, the locality took its name from such a wapentake. Cue the OED:

A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties.

The shires which had divisions so termed were Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire; in all of which the Danish element in the population was large. In Derbyshire there was latterly only one wapentake (that of Wirksworth), the other divisions of the shire being termed ‘hundreds’. In Lincolnshire most of the county divisions were ‘wapentakes’, but a few were called ‘hundreds’ and ‘sokes’. Traces of the existence of the term remained in popular use in other counties, as Cheshire and Cumberland into the 20th cent.

Now, there's Malcolm's point of issue with "englandism.co.uk". The word derives from Old Norse, and would literally mean "weapon-taking". The assumption is that the assembly approved of a decision by a show of weapons, just as later generations would agree a vote by a show of hands. Yes, we are that close to our distant ancestors.

Yet, it is a term which belongs specifically to those parts of (take your historical pick):

Ænglaland, Anglaland, Englalond, Ængleland, Englaland, Englæland, Engleland, Aenglelond, Englalande, Englelond, Englelonde, Anglenelonde, Engleneloande, Englenelond, Englenelonde, Ængeland, Eangelond, Engelande, Engelond, Engelonde, Enguelonde, Enkelonde, Ingelond, Ingelonde, Inglond, Inglonde, Yngelond, Englond, Englonde, Ingeland, Ynglond, Englande, Ingland, England, Eingland, Eyngland, Yngellond, Inglant, Englone, Engelande, Englande, Englonde, Ingland, Inglande, Yngland, Ynglande, Ynglond, England

where, following the Treaty of Wedmore (AD878), Danelaw applied. That is, the area north and east of Watling Street, where the law of the Danes (rather than the code of the Saxons) applied. Which suggests that "englandism.co.uk" might have a touch of the fjords about him, and not the true, the pure, the undefiled Anglo-Saxon.

As if it mattered

What this does remind Malcolm is the essential fallacy of that "British" thing, so beloved of the BNP and other weirdo extremists. So, let's resort yet again to the OED:

Briton (noun and adjective):
A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, before and during the Roman occupation.

Got that? You're not a true Brit (and "Brett" and "Britt" have some two millenia of usage behind them) unless you have impeccable Celtic ancestry. Ironically, then, all those Ulsterfolk, of both persuasions, are more likely to be entitled to call themselves "British" than the mere Anglo-Saxons of the Home Counties. That, of course, ignores the recent DNA evidence that the genetic make-up of English, Scots and Irish is remarkably similar: only in the Orkneys and Shetlands does the Norse line run more true.

A good night out?

Now all Malcolm requires is a congenial group of journeymen-printers, well financed by their Master, for a booze-up around St Bartholomew's Day (August 24th). Then he could report here on a wayzgoose (or, as the OED suggests, more properly a "way-goose").

He might be hung-over; but he would have fulfilled the ambition to employ that word.

And on a different topic

Prompted by that passing mention of Bartholomewtide, Malcolm hastens to add a bit of reading.

Last Saturday, deserted by his lovely lady, Malcolm betook himself to Highgate for a solitary pint (or two). Never one willingly to pass a book-shop, he entered the Oxfam shop on the High Street. All the usual stuff, with a few titillating exceptions.

Since Malcolm already had Patterson on The Lough Swilly Railway (albeit, now a very tattered copy), he passed up on that.

Now, what's this from the fiction shelves?

It's a Hunter Steele: The Lords of Montplaisir, in a Scottish publication (which, presumably, came before the Macmillan edition).

Steele is a year or three younger than Malcolm, and did some good work in the late 70s (The Wishdoctor's Song) and 80s. Look out for a delightful variation on the usual in Lord Hamlet's Castle.

This one comes from late in that period. It's big, but not cumbersome, plays games with time sequences, has a (nearly) predictable love-interest plot, melodramatic villains, roistering sexuality, and a thoroughly-researched background in sixteenth-century France. Dumas would have been prepared to adopt it as a racier and more readable addition to his own oeuvre. Since one of the grim bits involves the St Balthomomew's Day massacre of the Huguenots, that's the connection with "wayzgoose".

Now that's on its way to join the other Steele novels on the fiction shelves of Redfellow Hovel, Malcolm reckons that was a good two-quid's worth. Sphere: Related Content

Ladeez and gen'le-men ...

Twitter ye not!

For the second time in two days Malcolm has received an invitation to join this daft Twittering nonsense.

Let it be understood:

Malcolm does not Twitter.

His reasons were adequately explained by this last week's Doonesbury strip:

Sphere: Related Content

The joys of Airport Extreme

Reconsidering that previous post caused Malcolm to review his own activities and practices:

• He was sat, with iBook, in dining-room (front of the house).
• Daughter three, with MacBook, was in kitchen (back of the house).
• Daughter two, with MacBook, was in Yorkshire (two hundred miles away).
• Daughter one, with MacBook Pro 17 inch (for which all others despise her, out of envy), was in from New Jersey, on couch in sitting room (back of house) and adjacent to:
• Wife, with MacBook, at desk in sitting room.

All were communicating by broadband and wi-fi, using mac.com and me.com addresses.

So, rather than a shout from room to room (or even sitting in the same space), e-mails were winging from North London to Cupertino (or wherever) and back again.

Bizarre.

And they said it would be television that killed the art of conversation. Sphere: Related Content

Of blogs and bosoms

Hear me now, oh, the bleak and unbearable world:
Thou art base and debauched as can be
And a knight with his banner all bravely unfurled
Now hurls down his gauntlet to thee!

His nearest-and-dearest mock him for it. Even the most "successful" (that is: brash, pushy, meretricious and mercenary) of the local blog-artists have taken the time vulgarly to abuse him for it.

He ploughs his solitary furrow regardless.

He has never, even to himself, fully described what he aims to do.

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go.

To dream, in hope of doing: that is the point. Entirely and only to his own satisfaction, for he is his own most demanding critic.

Then he sees an example and expostulates, as his sixth-form history-teacher would to a correct answer, like an Archimedes brought to Dublin: "That's it! That's it!".

And all is, for the moment, made clear.

Thus Malcolm, through a the end of a bottle of burgundy, darkly.

Item: Stanley Fish

Stanley has been at, with, and through half the American Universities of worth (sometimes, it seems, simultaneously): UPenn, Yale, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Chicago, to arrive at FIU. He is one of those scholars that other wannabes now write their theses about.

He has pulpits in half the liberal trendy publications of North America; but, for Malcolm, chiefly via the New York Times.

Today, Stanley is lauding the great sex-symbols of his youth:

... two of the most erotic moments one can find on film feature no nudity and bodies just touching.

They are:

• the 1951 A Place in the Sun, [which] pairs a ravishing 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor with Montgomery Clift

and

• 1955’s Picnic, [where] the sparks fly between Kim Novak, then 22, and William Holden.

Steady, Stanley!

Let's clear up any ... err ... ambiguities here:

• A 30-odd year old bisexual (to be generous), hitting on teenage Liz?
• A 37-year old Holden, who had been Ronnie Reagan's best man, appreciating Kim's impressive cleavage?

Yeah: well.

The rest of this worthy essay is a defence of Novak as an actress and zeitgeist. Fish's conclusion is:

“that kind of image” — of the inwardly fragile beauty dependent on the men who wish only to possess her — was no longer what the movie-going public was looking for after the early ‘60s, and that model of female behavior has not come into favor again (although Scarlett Johansson comes close to reviving it in some of her movies, especially Woody Allen’s “Match Point”). But however retrograde it may be, that role was performed to perfection by Kim Novak, who, after all these years, can still break your heart.

Ahem ... say no more.

Malcolm found this piece a fair example of what he, himself, would like regularly to achieve: a piece of candy-floss spun into something of substance. Here we have a good holiday frisk for a mid-August frolic, but with a hard edge to it.

Allowing for Stanley's more advanced age, Malcolm's own prejudice might tend to embrace those great Thespians, Tuesday Weld and the late Sandra Dee (which adjective makes Malcolm feel antique).

Oh dear, a preference for blondes.

Still, let's not tell Malcolm's dark lady of all these years.

There is a serious point lurking somewhere here.

A large number of our prejudices are formed very early in our lives, and that's not merely the (attributed) Jesuit dogma.

Our sporting allegiance is certainly likely to be cemented in our early teens (hence Malcolm's regular Sunday morning rendezvous with the doings of Norwich City). The fantasy female (or whatever way one wags) follows soon after.

So, where do we acquire our social idealism?

And the world will be better for this
That one man scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star.

Sphere: Related Content

Failing to offend Norm

Norman Geras does a nice personal blog: civilised, intelligent, clean in its presentation, full of delicious eccentricity, and well the right side of literacy. That makes it better than most on at least five counts.

Doubtless to celebrate the country's imminent return, after eight years of usurpation, to a fit and decent condition of democracy, he has currently set himself the task of locating songs that belong to each of the Fifty States:

The rules of the series, as decided on by me, specify that a song is eligible for the list for any given state when the name of that state figures in either the song's title or in its lyric or both. The state may be used adjectivally, as in 'South Texas Girl'. But reference to rivers, where their names coincide with the names of states (Colorado, Mississippi, Ohio), doesn't count. Rivers run on and cannot be tied down so. And reference to some place in the state, like a city or a geographical feature, also doesn't count, unless the name of the place includes the name of the state adjectivally.

The fifty States, of course, each have their State song, along with their State bird, State flower, State flag, State tree, even State dinosaurs and fossils (including States where the rocks do not belong to the Mesozoic era). Most of those "official" State songs are pretty dire stuff:

I love your redwood forests - love your fields of yellow grain,
I love your summer breezes, and I love your winter rain,
I love you, land of flowers; land of honey, fruit and wine,
I love you, California; you have won this heart of mine.

Far better are some of the "unofficial" State songs. In the case of California, they have the Dead Kennedys' California Über Alles:

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president...

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Führer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

[Chorus:]
California Über Alles
California Über Alles
Über Alles California
Uber Alles California

Now, wikipedia (despite its new-found and thoroughly-boring policy of eschewing trivia) has already done a lot of Norm's work for him. So Malcolm, pettishly, pointed this out in an e-mail:

Sorry to disappoint you, but wikipedia got there before you:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_about_Alabama
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_about_California

etc

Now, for a real treat, do the States wikipedia hasn't got to.

Professor Norm, however, is a scholar and a gentleman; and didn't return Malcolm the rollicking he deserved.

Second thoughts are better thoughts

Later, fed and lubricated with his five units from an M&S green bottle, Malcolm reflected. He realised that one element behind any pique he might have felt was that he once had a similar notion; but failed to execute it, because he singularly lacked the patience and enterprise Norm is applying.

Malcolm's moment of inspiration came from two sources:

• One is a scrambled shelf of various travel books and guides. Among them is Jamie Jensen's Road Trip USA. The accompanying website is almost as good, but you can't easily read it on the bog or in the bath.
• iTunes throwing up in coincidental succession two appropriate songs.

One of Jensen's routes is the "Great Northern", coast-to-coast along US Highway 2:

Though many come close, no other cross-country route takes in the variety and extremity of landscape that US-2 does. Dubbed the Great Northern in memory of the pioneer railroad that parallels the western half of the route, US-2 is truly the most stunning and unforgettable, not to mention longest, of all the great transcontinental road trips.

That's a traipse across ten States as well as a fair stint through Ontario and Québec

The iTunes coincidence was the juxtaposing of:

Third box-car, midnight train,
Destination: Bangor, Maine --

immediately followed by Loretta Lynn (from the Van Lear Rose album):

Well, Portland Oregon and sloe-gin fizz:
If that ain't love, then tell me what is.
Well, I lost my heart, it didn't take no time,
But that ain't all: I lost my mind in Oregon.

A sentimental journey

The notion, then, was to build a chain of association, in lyrics and verse, from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. Since Loretta had done the honours for the finishing post (where Malcolm sourced his stylish titfer, from John Helmer's natty hattery) he now needed an anchorage for the other end.

An immediately-obvious candidate would be Schooner Fair doing Portland Town. Malcolm assumed that since it was the group came from Maine, they had to be singing about the right Portland:

I see the light across the bay,
I see the light not far away;
And I hear the music all around,
I'm gettin' closer to Portland Town.
So, Mother, won't you make my bed,
I see the light off Portland Head;
I see the light, I'm comin' 'round,
I'm comin' home to Portland Town

Now that Malcolm had his the start and finish points, all I had to do was fill in the 3220 miles in between, helped only by a 2004 Rand McNally road atlas.

He set himself a by-law not to use the North American version of Hank Snow's/Geoff Mack's I've Been Everywhere:

I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
'Cross the deserts bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel, I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere.

Not, in fact that it would have helped a great deal on this trek. Indeed, Malcolm's original imaginary expedition petered out, somewhere in the Mid-West, with huge gaps still to fill.

So, perhaps this is the time to resume the effort.

Meanwhile, all hail to Norm's attempt to hymn, chant, moan and psalm the States of the Union. He may need a bit of help with Li'l Rhody, though. Sphere: Related Content

Core values ...

Thursday evening, Malcolm trots to the Maynard Arms in fashionable Crouch End, there to join the Labour Party's Audience with Dennis Skinner, MP.

Now, Dennis is not so much "Old Labour" (and rightly proud of it) as totally primeval. Malcolm, however, largely approves of the old shell-back: Skinner says what he means, with a sly and devious humour, and means what he says. He comes from the same stock and locality as Malcolm's paternal line. He is transparently straight and honest.

What interested Malcolm was how the audience reacted to Skinner's traditional stump-speech. The applause and chortles came when Skinner went for royalty and the Press, and mildly suggested that the railways might work better nationalized. This, let it be recorded, before a mixed (age, gender, background), largely professional, and wholly sophisticated group. Scratch a Labour Party and find a Labourite.

The Press we deserve

So Malcolm addresses, today, just one of those items.

What he also finds surprising is that so many others whom he encounters share a similar view of the British Meejah.

As a generalisation, politics, and the business of governance are treated as a sub-genre of soap-opera. Each new day needs a new episode, a new and predictable crisis, a new face or two. At the moment, the universal will of our newspapers and television seems to be a yearning for a wholesale replacement of characters, the introduction of new giants whose feet will, in short order, be revealed to be made of clay.

Dennis Skinner, and many others like him, see in this an inherent anti-Labour bias: they may have reason. Whatever: we saw it in, first, the demand for an autumn election, and, then, in the subsequent rubbishing of Gordon Brown for not thereby filling columns for the next six weeks. Skinner sees the remedy in Labour reclaiming the agenda: again, he may well be correct. Malcolm, however, suspects that the knee-jerking of the print and electronic journos would misrepresent any such attempt, just out of habit.

Rocking the boat

Malcolm reaches for a way of giving an example.

He takes one on which Skinner repeatedly touched: Northern Rock.

This continuing saga is being depicted as one of governmental failure, because Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling consistently fail to take the ever-changing advice and prescriptions (swallowed wholesale by the pundits) of the Opposition.

Despite this, the bank still survives; the British banking system has not been brought tumbling down; the burden of debt has not (yet) been taken on by the tax-payer; the British economy continues to expand. Yes, in the face of the trans-atlantic crisis, the British economy will grow
and grow faster than any other G8 country over the coming year:

In its Winter forecast released on Monday the ITEM Club, sponsored by Ernst & Young, showed that the UK economic growth will ease in 2008. The economic growth is expected to slow to 1.8% in 2008 from 3.1% in 2007. The think tank believes that the abrupt reversal in the credit markets in 2007 could result in a sharp decline in economic growth.

Chief Economic Advisor to the Ernst & Young ITEM Club Peter Spencer said: ... "As the Bank of England's interest rate cuts begin to take effect, the economy should pick up. With the money markets begin to thaw out we can be a bit more optimistic. So, touching wood, 2008 should not be such a bad year after all. Then I expect GDP growth to move back up to 2.5% in 2009."

Not so dusty, then. But, hark! what is this other rusting in the undergrowth?

Questions have been raised over the effects on the markets of the rogue trader who lost 4.9bn euros ($7.1bn; £3.7bn) at Société Générale.
Analysts are trying to assess whether the trader's actions contributed to the stock market turmoil and the Fed decision to cut interest rates.

Malcolm's reading of that goes like this: a £3.7bn default at a French bank had serious international implications, because it was so badly handled. The British Government and the Bank of England are successfully managing an apparent soft-landing for a potentially far bigger (by perhaps a multiple of twenty) debacle. No kudos from the Meejah lizards, only brickbats and abuse.

Don't stand too close to me

And there is one further dimension that irritates Malcolm.

Unlike the US, British bloggers are cajoled into following the mainstream media line. Not, of course, the small-timers (like Malcolm), but those half-dozen big-hitters who hog the local cybersphere's limelight.

These "stars" of the broadband have, effectively, been bought and bought out by the mainstream outlets.

Iain Dale (claimed to have the biggest single presence on the UK blog-scene) is on the pay-roll of the Daily Telegraph, and has a working relationship with both the Independent and the Guardian (to the extent of having his own by-line, right). There is, therein, a direct link from the Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party, via an important blog-site, to the bowels of the Daily Beast.

Guido Fawkes, a.k.a. Paul Staines, had maintained a hands-off honesty until, last year, he, too, sold out to the BBC Newsnight. Staines took the perfectly-proper view which Malcolm is trying to expound here, that the Press was too close to the politicos. His derivative interview with Michael White was a failure, as Staines himself recognised. That went a long way, in Malcolm's mind, to redeeming himself, except that Staines (along with Dale) market their offerings in a crudely commercial way:

The country's top political blogs Guido Fawkes, ConservativeHome.com and Iain Dale have partnered with four other political websites to launch online advertising sales service MessageSpace.

The company aims to get advertisers wanting to appeal directly to the political classes and opinion formers in Whitehall and Westminster.

Alex Hilton, the editor of Labourhome.org and Recess Monkey, who runs ad sales company EOS Online Media, is behind the venture...

Opinion sites from across the political divide have become partners in the service with Labourhome, Political Betting, Recess Monkey and LibDem Blogs joining the big three to offer exposure to more than a million readers every month.

Malcolm reads that again, very carefully, and very cynically. It seems that this aggregation of "top" political bloggers, what tamounts to the critical mass in the local political blogosphere, are blatant in selling themselves to "the political classes and opinion formers in Whitehall and Westminster".

At which point Malcolm is heard muttering after Jonathan Swift:

The Vermin only teaze and pinch
Their Foes superior by an Inch.
So Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Even Malcolm's place of regular resort, Slugger O'Toole, is less than totally "independent". Any resort thereto has been loud with an intrusive advertisement for the webcast "18 Doughty Street" (which was another vehicle for Iain Dale and his right-wing cronies, but sheds personnel like autumn leaves in Paradise Lost I.302). And Slugger's main ornament and progenitor, Mick Fealty, formerly an associate of The Guardian, now props up the Telegraph's Brassneck -- indeed the ad and the hotlink for that leads the Slugger web-page.

What price independence?

The blogosphere gives all of us a degree of independence. Here we can exercise First Amendment rights in a way never before experienced. The nearest equivalent is the explosion of pamphleteering at the start of the seventeenth century. George Orwell, a connoisseur of the pamphlet as a medium, described it thus:

The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘high-brow’ than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’ All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

Malcolm accepts that in toto, if demurring seriously over the word "short". But he hesitates, too, over the ambiguity of "unbound".

• Can the likes of Dale, Staines and Fealty then be, in all truth, "unbound"?
• Why, apart from enjoying the revenue, should a "free" medium like this be "bound" by advertising?
• What, by the acceptance of an ad, becomes verboten?
• What inhibitions flow therefrom?
• Why is the relationship between these bloggers and the traditional media so cosy?

That is why Malcolm resolves, in future, to eschew all those polls and mutual-backscratchings that the cybersphere seems to revel in.

Prometheus Unbound?

So, back to Dennis Skinner.

Skinner is a Labour man through-and-through. He knows viscerally whom to care for, and whom to hate. What he may lack in "ideology", he more than compensates in gut-feeling. And in that he is correct.

His loyalty to the Labour Movement is total, yet he has an honourable record of failing to obey the Party Whip. And that, too, is proper and correct. Like the legend of Prometheus, he brings fire to humankind, and for that is punished by the gods of the Media. Better that than to be a supine creature of the Politinform system that bedevils our democracy.

Nobody, except his own keen appreciation of his constituency, dictates to him. He cannot be bought. He comes, as his Parliamentary declaration shows, without sponsorship or advertisement:

SKINNER, Dennis (Bolsover)

Nil.

Which, in Malcolm's book, qualifies him to speak and be heard. Compare that, as Skinner himself did, to the parallel entry by William Hague, over a page in length, and listing swathes of after-dinner speeches, all made at £10-20,000 a time. When one is proffering that amount of moolah, does one expect to be chastised or confronted with unpleasantness? What "freedom of speech" is being exercised there?

Dennis Skinner talks in a different accent, but a similar mode to Tony Benn :

Democracy is the most revolutionary idea in the world, nobody in power likes it.

The democratic, free blogger aspires to just that uncomfortable and discomforting posture:

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!

Sphere: Related Content