.... something stirs

Malcolm was going to start this item with the metaphor of rustling in the shrubbery becoming too obvious to ignore. He was distinctly narked to find that bloody Wilby in the Old Staggerer had got there first.

So to John Kampfner in Friday's Daily Telegraph, no less. And this from the paper, more than any other, which has trashed David Willetts on selection, and Cameron's handling thereof:

Brown's launch last Friday was marred by the autocue ... , but apart from that one mistake (which they cleverly spun as the first example of "anti-spin") it has been seamless. His trips around the country have received steady coverage, particularly in local media, while his acceptance speech in the City yesterday was accomplished.

But there is a more subtle, and perhaps more enduring, reason for his camp's confidence. Brown has managed to push the agenda on to the issue of "aspiration". This is a nebulous term, but in short it means: "I will be the true defender of the struggling middle classes of Middle Britain." In so doing, Brown is seeking to distance himself not just from the Left but also from the Blairite obsession with the rich.

He is talking about families earning anything from £25,000 to £50,000, mortgaged to the hilt, worried about their choice of school and annoyed that they can't see their GP when they want to. They are not in any way poor, but nor do they consider themselves in any way pampered.

They are politically aware, but not necessarily engaged; increasingly worried by global warming, but not necessarily prepared to make personal sacrifices. These people are more than the floating voter. They are, according to strategists in all the parties, the voter.

That is why David Cameron's intervention on Wednesday's World at One was so telling. The Conservative leader, speaking from the school where he has been helping out, sounded rattled (politicians should always avoid scratchy telephone lines for interviews) when confronted about his party's U-turn on grammar schools.

Malcolm apologises for the undue length of that quotation. He feels it is necessary to get the full flavour.

The first thought is the curiously-touching meeting-of-minds between the editor of the New Statesman and the journal-of-choice of Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells. This is something more than Kautilya's principle of "My enemy's enemy is my friend".

What puzzled Malcolm was the curious symmetry of views, which amounts to:

• the beatification of the late Robin Cook;
• the need for Gordon Brown to realign with the liberal left across the country;
• Brown courting the Daily Mail and Murdoch;
• who wears a tie any more (Alan Johnson and John Prescott do, which proves their working-class credentials; but Blair and Cameron don't, which proves they are toffs).

So, what's going on?

Fortunately the Staggerer's Peter Wilby was able to explain all:

Consider this headline from the Daily Telegraph business section: "The backlash has started against income inequality". Or this, from the Daily Mail leader page: "I deplore the millionaires who contribute so little to Britain." Or this, from the Washington Post: "Free trade's great, but offshoring rattles me." That last one doesn't seem so startling until you know that the article beneath it is written by Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor and former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve. A rough equivalent would be: "God's great, but the Resurrection rattles me."

The essence is that the British middle class has woken up to the chilling fact that they (just like the downtrodden workers) are potentially redundant. It's a long while since Clive Jenkins was fruitily banging on about this, but it could be that even his worst fears are about to be exceeded. Thanks to the web, we can all be replaced by tele-dildonics based somewhere in the developing world:

We'll be richer, and so will India and China. But think of all those programmers and accountants who got themselves educated and trained as they were told to do, and don't find their skills make them any more employable than assembly-line operatives.

This, lest we forget, is the obverse of the "Education, education, education" coin. It is all fine-and-dandy for the high minds of the Economist to preach the virtues of liberalising world markets, but in the short term, the rich get richer, and the middle-class (who buy the broadsheets and mid-weight press) get shafted.

That is what lies behind those headlines in the Mail and the Telegraph, which might have been taken from the New Statesman. The Mail writer notes that "under new Labour, the worth of the 1,000 richest people in the country has soared by 263 per cent" and that many of them are foreigners. The Telegraph columnist complains : "The politically influential middle classes are missing out most. They pay proportionately more in taxes and are failing to benefit from the massive increase in salaries enjoyed by the super-rich."

It's just as well some of us saw this coming, otherwise we would be reduced to Wilby's bleat of a conclusion:

Globalisation and the super-rich: for ten years it has been heresy in new Labour's eyes to resist either. But these issues will shape the next decade, and [Gordon] Brown cannot escape them.

Or, as the pre-adolescent essay-writer (or Dallas script-writer) ends: "... and then I woke up."

Alternatively, there is a more cogent analysis, and it is Meghnad Desai's:

I want to argue that in the triumphant resurgence of capitalism -- and, indeed, its global reach -- the one thinker who is vindicated is Karl Marx. Not only that. The demise of the socialist experiment inaugurated by October 1917 would not distress but cheer Karl Marx if, as an atheist, he occupies any part of Hell, Purgatory or Heaven. Indeed, if it came to a choice between whether the market or the state should rule the economy, modern libertarians would be as shocked as modern socialists (social democrats et al.) to find Marx on the side of the market.

Malcolm feels somewhat discomforted in the presence of member of the Tribune board, a paid-up socialist and secularist, who is also a noble lord. However, Lord Desai's is an optimistic treatise. In its most simplistic form it is proposing that the market's positive end is the elimination of scarcity: after all, the crisis of capitalism is overproduction. In global terms, though, we have underproduction, dearth, poverty and famine. This is because the system is distorted by rich economies deploying huge agricultural subsidies. And our small domestic system is further distorted by the plutocrats and "have-yachts":

... a middle-class couple’s combined income of well into six figures seems to disappear into thin air before either of them has bought even a tube of toothpaste.

... our healthy pay cheques vaporise in a puff of smoke, leaving us prowling Waitrose for food past its sell-by dates and popping into Oxfam to refresh our wardrobes

... you now have to be a hedge fund manager, an oligarch or a private equity magnate at the very least to be able to afford the lifestyle that my parents were able to supply me and my ingrate siblings with three decades ago...

You can’t even be just averagely rich or reasonably well off any longer. A Halifax survey found that only nine professions could afford private school fees in London in 2005, compared with 19 in 2000. Oh, no: you have to be a have or a have-yacht.

Oh, the pain and shame of it!

So this, all agree, is Gordon Brown's opportunity to take or lose. The Cameroonie oven-ready recipe, sooner or later, will be to revert to the Hefferite tv-dog's-dinner. At least Heffer has been consistent:

The battleground of the next [2005] election will be taxation, the public services, immigration and law and order. The Tory party must be as distinct as possible from Labour, and determined not to be influenced by its social vision. So the first thing Mr Howard has to do is get radical with spending. Instead of fearing Labour accusations of cuts, he should boast about those he plans to make — in the non-frontline staff who have been the public sector employment boom of the last seven years. Sadly, Mr Howard is still apparently of the opinion that spending more is good. He has to persuade the public to rediscover the concept of value for money and stop thinking of spending as a good in itself. He needs to tell the country that without sacking a single doctor, nurse, teacher, police officer or carer he can cut the public sector wage bill and, with it, taxation.

Until Cameroon heeds that, and returns sheepishly to the fold, Heffer, the Mail and its ilk will deny him their cupboard love.

This issue was (and may still be) smouldering on conservativehome.com: and long may its lum reek, not just because it is a Tory ailment, but because it addresses the future role and ideology of any Tory Party.

We lefties should not be blind to the seduction of quick-fix tax-cuts. And that is the real challenge for Prime Minister Brown. He has already anticipated the pendulum of opinion, and this is the strategy behind the rhetoric of "aspiration". Public expenditure will not continue to grow at its previous rate. Public services will be more accountable. Once the interest rises of 2007 have worked through the system, the fiscal wind will be tempered to the shorn lambs of suburbia. That should address the domestic agenda. The usual vested interests, denied their recent surfeit, will inevitably have the LibDem soft-shoulder to weep on, and the Staggerer to voice their agony (witness the deprived arts lobby whinge about the cost of social engineering piggybacked onto the 2012 Olympic budget).

Internationally, Brown has the track-record to continue to challenge protectionist policies in the EU and across the world (which should resonate with any US President elected in 2008). And on all this, doubtless, Malcolm will pronounce further at some later date.

Meanwhile, keep an ear tuned to that shrubbery. And hope that Gordon keeps his tie on. Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm's rubbish: an update

A week ago Malcolm posed the question Con or conundrum?

He was querying what the Haringey Borough refuse service would take as either Household waste or recycling (or, in his case, neither).

Last week's leavings by both included a broken wicker basket, a shopping bag, a bag of paper shreddings and foam-plastic camping pallets. Out of common decency, he informed the Borough he was posting here.

In due course, he received a reply:

Dear customer,

Thank you for your enquiry dated 10/5/2007.

Please be advised that your email has been forwarded to Haringey Accord. I have also sent a copy to the recycling department as well. Should you need to contact them directly please email to Call.centre@haringeyaccord.com or recycling@haringey.gov.uk respectively.

If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

Michael Green

Customer Services

Well, here we go for the second helping.

This week the paper shreddings, the plastic shopping bag and the basket were accepted. The camping rolls were again rejected. A bag of polystyrene beads (the kind used in bean-bags) was rejected (curiously, a similar bag was accepted last week). A turned wooden toilet-roll holder was also rejected.

So Michael Green is getting another email.

In the meanwhile, Malcolm has been informed that packaging is not recyclable, even when it bears the recycling logo. Stranger and stranger.

Is this a local problem, peculiar to the London Borough of Haringey? Sphere: Related Content

A post-script to Cactus Jack

Before some other anorak gets in:

Ivan Reitman's 1993 movie Dave has the Veep character, played by Ben Kingsley, as "Vice President Nance". The credited writer is Gary Ross (also credited for Seabiscuit). Sphere: Related Content

The story of Cactus Jack

A name that has trickled into the British public prints of late is that of John Nance Garner, a.k.a. "Cactus Jack". He seems doomed to be remembered only for declaring the Vice-Presidency of the United States is not worth "a bucket of warm spit". By obvious analogy, this description now applies internationally to almost any job a "heart-beat away from" the top spot (and Malcolm wonders if that expression pre-dates Hella Pick's use).

Malcolm traced the recent currency of this bucket-and-spit term (as we shall see, a misquotation) back to last autumn. By another of those coincidences that aren't, it was employed in short order by John Cruddas in The Tribune of 13th October (and recycled for his campaign website) and then by Peter Dobbie in the Mail on Sunday on 27th November.

The effect of this was to focus Malcolm's beady eye on Garner. Malcolm loves a good story, and stories rarely come better than this one.

Garner was born on 22nd November, 1868: that date will be significant later in this story. He grew up in a log cabin at Blossom Prairie in Red River County, where Texas butts against Arkansas and Oklahoma: already reality seems to stretch into myth. He was the son of a Confederate soldier, just three years after the Civil War. The elder Garner went, successfully, into cotton-farming, and local county politics. The son struggled with education, only reaching 4th Grade, then dropped out of College. He played semi-pro baseball. He somehow scraped the Texas bar exam, and set up as a lawyer. He found he had developed TB, so moved to Uvalde, west of San Antonio, at the other end of the State.

It was still the age when Judge Roy Bean was "the law west of the Pecos"; and Garner habitually carried his Colt on his lawyer's rounds. He was frequently paid in kind, mainly in land. Soon he was possessed of thousands of acres and several businesses, including three banks. More significant for his future career: he learned his drinking and poker from Sheriff Pat Garrett (with whom, at the age of 22, he was horse-breeding near Uvalde).

A vacancy as county judge made Garner run as Democratic candidate: a sure-fire endorsement, except that his drinking-and-gambling reputation went before him. It aroused the voiced antagonism of one Mariette "Ettie" Rheiner (Texan women would not be enfranchised until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919). Garner courted and married her in short order.

By 1898 Garner was in the State legislature, and served two terms in the Texas House. This was how he acquired the "Cactus Jack" nickname, when he failed to have the cactus named as the state flower. He was more successful as a member of the Committee on Congressional Districts, carving out a new Fifteenth District, which stretched from Corpus Christi on the Gulf to the Rio Grande and Garner termed "the biggest in Texas". It would be his own base for the next three decades.

And so to Washington DC, with Ettie as his secretary working from a K Street lodging house. He was never the best "constituency man" (with the Democratic dominance of Texas, he didn't need to be), rarely returning to his patch: after four terms in the House, he admitted he had never been to five counties of his District. He made few speeches (and would edit even those from the Congressional Record), introduced no legislation. Instead he devoted himself to committee work and to poker schools (making more from the game than from his Congressional salary). This clubiness meant he rose through the ranks: his critics said this owed more to the obituary column than his own abilities.

The Texas Democrats' usual place of resort was (and is) the "Board of Education" (a name supposedly coined by Garner himself), a room in a less-frequented corridor of the Capitol. Here jokes and strategy, gossip and whiskey, cigars and plots were the usual currency: the ultimate smokey backroom. This is where Vice-President Truman was found on 12 April 1945, to be summoned to the White House, where he found he no longer was Vice-President. Garner's rise owes much to this room and the circle who used it. Here Garner, throughout the years of Prohibition, struck his "blow for liberty" by providing bourbon-and-branchwater.

By 1910 Garner was Democratic Party whip, the third ranking member of the House. He was minority leader after the 1928 Republican surge, and Speaker in 1931.

As Speaker, he was a nationally-recognised figure. He was touted, particularly in his home State, as a Presidential candidate. He won the California Democratic primary (though, of course, California did not have the clout and delegation it does today), and went to the Chicago Convention of 1932 with a lock on a clutch of votes. It needed a two-thirds vote of the Convention to nominate a candidate: the 1924 Convention had gone to 103 ballots. In 1932 the first ballot went FDR with 666 votes, Al Smith 201, Garner with 90 and seven others sharing the remaining 195. After two more ballots, it was still deadlock. The deal that made Garner (advised by William Randolph Hearst: both were opposed to Al Smith) the candidate for Veep was parlayed by Texan Senator Tom Connally and FDR's fixer, James Farley. When Garner released his bloc to FDR, it provoked a stampede of other delegates. The rest is, indeed, history.

Garner went on record to regret surrendering his power base in the House: "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made". Instead he inherited the celebrated "bucket of warm piss" (his opinion to LBJ after 1940). He served two terms as Vice-President before retiring to Uvalde: by then he had broken with FDR over the need for a more balanced budget and the Court Packing Plan. It was FDR's decision to go for a third term (Garner still had ambitions) that was the clincher.

After that, Garner rarely ventured north, even more so after Ettie's death in 1948. He himself outlived his contemporaries. A visit to his cottage in Uvalde became the norm for national leaders visiting Texas. Which brings Malcolm to the last irony.

On the morning of his 95th birthday he received a visit from the President. Garner was delighted: "You're my president and I love you. I hope you stay in there forever." The President then left for an engagement in Dallas. Anyone missing the significance could now refer back to Malcolm's fourth paragraph.

When he died, three weeks short of his 99th birthday, Garner was (and still is) the longest-lived occupant of either major office of State. Quite a life. Quite an odyssey. Sphere: Related Content

Up the poll, again

Malcolm's trusty taxi-load of followers will have noticed the similarity between:

• his posting of 13th May, noting the curious way the Sunday Times inverted the findings of its YouGov poll (as in the expression, famously, "What, Guv, do want the poll to "prove"?)

and

• today's Times, showing its Populus poll putting Labour up 4%:

Labour support is up by four points since mid-April to 33 per cent, while the Conservatives are unchanged on 37 per cent, despite their big gains in the local elections on May 3. The Liberal Democrats have dropped by three points to 17 per cent, with others down one point at 13 per cent.

Of course, knowing the Times, there has to be a worm in the apple, grit in the sandwich, a bluebottle in the Barolo. And here it is:

Gordon Brown ... is seen as a better and stronger leader than David Cameron... But the Conservative leader is well ahead on charisma

Now that word charisma is an interesting one. Until quite recently it only appeared in its Anglicised form "charism", implying a gift of divine grace (which was how it was first imported into the language in the 1640s, when religion sold like hot pornography). Then Max Weber used it to mean

a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader [...] How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.

This dates from 1922 in the original German, and was only translated into English much later. Something else to blame on the bloody sociologists. And here we have the Times showing how a term can be thoroughly bastardised and debased.

Malcolm invites anyone, anyone, to give specific examples of Cameron's (or, not to be partisan, any other contemporary politico's) "supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities". Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-Il and their ilk are, of course, excluded from consideration. Sphere: Related Content

Patella

Today's Telegraph:

When readers of The Daily Telegraph sit down today to tackle the crossword, they will be participating in a small piece of history.

"1 Down - Two girls, one on each knee (7)" - is the two millionth clue published by The Daily Telegraph's Monday compiler, Roger Squires.

OK? Now you're on your own.

Sphere: Related Content

The headlines we didn't get...

How about Labour gets 3% boost?

Or Tories fall back in poll?

Or Labour halve poll deficit?

Every one of those readings of the YouGov Poll for today's Sunday Times is a fair one. So what was the ST's spin?

Poll is grim reading for Brown.

And it was hidden away, well below the fold, on page 13.

... and the ones we nearly did

This week, the ST's further contributes to serious political debate by including:

The pictures Blair secretly ordered MI5 to bury?

with salacious nude "lookalikes" of

Cherie and her lifestyle guru Carole Chaplin sharing a shower while the PM brushes his teeth.

Then there is an even more lubricious:

Blair getting a lesson from George Bush on the golf course.

Bet that one goes straight to the Islamic filth-merchants.

Why doesn't Murdoch come clean, slap a red-top across page one, and called it The Sun on Sunday? Sphere: Related Content

Worrying, very worrying

Malcolm was all of a quiver yesterday evening.

He had ventured into the newly-reopened Red Lion and Sun in Highgate Village. This used to be a favourite resting spot for our eponymous hero. But now?

The Red Lion's main attractions were good beer (Greene King's Abbot Ale), a congregation of the rude, the rough and the ready, an agglomeration of brown paint and woodwork, real jazz-men (Fawkes and Christie for starters). On a good Sunday lunchtime one could trample at least two members of the House of Lords on the way to the Gents.

All gone.

It is now pale-grey paint and the smell of recent decoration. The brown woodwork, the shelves of books one might occasionally actually read, and the clientele have all been given a Portland dockyard make-over. The new manager is the wrong side of forty; and he has little girlies running everywhere, soliciting for food orders.

A quick retreat was in order. From here on it's the Prince of Wales or the Gatehouse.

The local circuit of decent boozers shrinks annually. Sphere: Related Content

Dishing the Nats

Nice that Sir Sean, that great Scottish political thinker, managed to opine, all the way from the Bahamas. Fundamental and diplomatic language (arsehole .. shits ... arse...), too, from one who believes

he has already become a roving ambassador for Scotland.

_______________________________________

Malcolm appreciated much more the sagacity of political-editor Eddie Barnes's Insight piece and an overlapping news-item for today's Scotland on Sunday. This is a check list of the ditched (or about to be) policies of the SNP as it attempts minority government at Holyrood:

• The referendum proposal will never get beyond a Salmond draft "white paper". Trees will die that this pointless exercise proceed directly from printer to shredder.
• The cancellation of student debt will not happen.
• The SNP pledge to reduce class-sizes may depend on slashing other service budgets. Wait for the screams.
• Ditto the SNP policy to freeze council tax (and presumably thereby council budgets) for the next three years.
• Meanwhile, the Labour Party will be reducing Salmond's room for manoeuvre by inserting popular and populist trap-doors into bills: council tax concessions for pensioners and skills and training initiatives for two examples. Can the SNP seriously block either?
• The shift from Council Tax to local income taxes will be torpedoed by the (Westminster) Treasury's refusal of funding.
• The SNP attempt to bleed money away from Edinburgh (by scrapping the proposed rail-link to the airport) is dead already. In fact, the SNP's assault on public transport was already vetoed by the two Green MLAs.

Which all seems like a reworking of Disraeli's recipe for "sound" government: Tartan Tory men and Lib-Lab measures.

So to Eddie Barnes's bottom line:

Indeed, the only area of promised 'consensus' which is so far emerging is over the SNP's plan to cut business rates for small firms, at a cost of £100m a year. SNP sources have already indicated that this plan might well be one of the first things they bring before the Parliament, aware that it at least has a chance of getting through. Apart from that, however, there is precious little else.

And the title of the piece says it all:

Is Alex Salmond destined to become a lame duck?

_______________________________________

Salmond must be regretting pissing on/off the LibDems by referring to them as his "flexible friends". Barnes incorrectly links the slogan with Barclaycard: it was in fact Access, Barclaycard's main rival, that used the slogan. Or, as it quickly became known "Excess": which seems stangely appropriate for both LibDems and SNP. Sphere: Related Content

This time, it's the Greens dishing up

Did Malcolm hear it right?

There is a deal signed, sealed and published between the SNP (47 seats) and the Greens (2 seats):

• The Greens get a committee chair.
• The Greens get a climate change bill and no nukes.
• The SNP get two more votes for their nominated ministers.
• The SNP do not get "confidence and supply".
• The SNP do not get their referendum.

And that's a "deal"?

Greens 1, SNP 0. Sphere: Related Content

The devil in the detail?

It was only when Malcolm caught up with Slugger that he spotted a small detail in the share-out of sweeties at Stormont. He expresses his sorrow that he was watching the man (dirty, Sanchez!) and not the ball.

The scrap of evidence, the straw-in-the-wind, the whisper-on-the-grapevine was that John O'Dowd would be the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Malcolm knew he’d heard a rumbling of this one coming, and even wasted a half-hour of good drinking time trying to locate it.

His long-held assumption had been that the soft, spending ministries (eddicashun and soshal) would be SF’s target, but that the DUP would want to keep a tight grip on the bawbees:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and - and in short you are for ever floored.

And thereby Wilkins Micawber scores for the Paisleyites!

The Stormont Public Accounts Committee (provided it evolves on Westminster lines) is silent-but-deadly. Its chair has/should have enormous clout. It is the enforcer. This is waking to the horse’s-head-in-the-bed stuff. So, who will be “Jack Woltz”? And who will be Khartoum?

Hence Malcolm's discombobulation that it's John O'Dowd for the job. It might seem the job has gone to an SF аппарáтчик [="apparatchik", you ignorant sods]!

But wait! Is he? This guy seems to have served his time in local government, as well as rising through SF internal politics. He topped the poll in Upper Bann in 2007, took 21% in the 2005 Westminster election (when Trimble was tumbled), and leads the SF group on Craigavon Council. This, Malcolm concludes, is a name to watch.

OK, Craigavon Borough Council is not your City of London, but it does have a budget of pushing £16M. O'Dowd's record is:

Council Account Scrutineer ... Policy and Resources Committee and the Development, the Environment and the Public Services Liaison Committees ... Craigavon Local Strategy Partnership body[,] responsible for the distribution of European peace money.

Malcolm wonders if, on this basis, there really is a glimmering of hope that this Stormont thing could actually work.

Sphere: Related Content

The first day of the rest of our lives ... and other clichés

Malcolm recalls the well-known story of the couple with horse-mad (but personality-opposite) twin daughters. For their birthday, the girls were given ponies. Overnight, the couple left the saddle and tack in one bedroom, and a pile of dung in the other.

Next morning, there was gloom in one bedroom, as the pessimistic daughter fingered the traces, bits and leather, trying to figure out what the catch was. The other girl, the optimist, was whooping with glee as she heaved manure around, saying, "With all this crap, there's got to be a pony in here somewhere."

The latter's feelings approximate Malcolm's daily riffle through the Times.

Malcolm is sure every other blog-artist in sight has spotted the chart on page 13:
The alternation of party in power goes across the columns, going back in time over Blair, Thatcher/Major, Wilson/Callaghan, Heath, Wilson, Churchill/Eden/Macmillan/Home and Attlee. The rows down then ask: "More Jobs?" "Fewer Unemployed?" "Better health results?" "Better education results?" "Lower crime?" "Economic growth every quarter?"

The whole graphic appears under the strap headline:

"There is only one Government since 1945 that can say all of the following:
more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results,
lower crime, and economic growth in every quarter — this one"

That, of course comes from Tony Blair's speech. No amount of shilly-shallying (and the Times inevitably fills columns with ordure) can deny that boast.

And, to be fair, though it was not, by any means, a unanimous and rapturous cheer

... even the ranks of Tuscany
Could scarce forbear to cheer.

The Times first (and only! Now, there's class!) leader went the distance:

He has not, even his most uncompromising enemies must acknowledge, been an inconsequential leader. Let history have the time and space to consider him and the Britain he had headed for the past decade. The historian has, after all, the immense advantage of being, as Friedrich von Schlegel correctly observed, “a prophet looking backwards”.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph is predictably vindictive, but Bill Deedes is allowed a more gentle perspective as their resident incarnation of Schlegel:

How few leave 10 Downing Street with laurels, I reflect, as Tony Blair at last starts to pack his bags. Not even Churchill could do it after winning a difficult war. In 1945 he paid the price of being the fourth head of a coalition government with no appeal to the post-war generation.

Most of them in my time have gone, as Blair is going, amid defiant cheers from their remaining admirers, boos from detractors and faint relief from a largely indifferent electorate.

Malcolm senses that the mood of the chattering classes, those "opinion formers", has shifted, and seismically rather than subtly, in the last couple of days. This is Iain Dale, no less:

The next two months will be dominated by one man - Gordon Brown. For the Conservatives, it will be like going back to 1997 when no one, not even their mothers, wanted to hear from them. The media will ignore their every word, no matter how relevant. It's Gordon's time and Conservatives had better get used to it.

It was the latest Sunday Times that was puffing:

Cameron 'on course' for No 10.

Ha! Doubtless, at this point, Malcolm should quote Harold Wilson about political weeks. Instead, he offers this attempt to source the Wilson quotation:

Attributed. quoted in Sayings of the Century, “Prime Ministers: A Word from No. 10,” Nigel Rees (1984). When asked by Rees in 1977, Wilson was unable to remember when or even if he had uttered this dictum always associated with him. Rees suggests the words were probably said in 1964 shortly after Wilson became prime minister. A journalist recalled Wilson saying, “Forty-eight hours is a long time in politics” at a party conference in 1960.

Dale's "two months", though. That's a political lifetime. So, Cameroonies, do not ask for whom the bell tolls ...
Sphere: Related Content

A spokesman whistling in the dark

Malcolm's bile reached critical levels when, thanks to a redirection from Slugger O'Toole, he discovered the crystalline (and outdated) logic of Spokesman for the Opposition:

A political blog highlighting the issues that politicians prefer to dodge, intellectual, humourous [sic], down-to-earth. Spokesman was over 20 years a journalist.

Aaargh! A journalist but never a sub-editor.

Spokesman predicts:

74 seats for Fianna Fail, and 9 seats for Sinn Fein, this adds up to the magic figure of 83 seats - a majority of one seat in Dail Eireann - and they will be backed up by another 8 Independents, so when all is said and done, that's your new government, a Fianna Fail-Sinn Fein coalition.

And this will result in:

the best ever [Government] in the history of Ireland in tackling poverty in Ireland - the most important onjective [sic] of all for any new government.

At this juncture Malcolm's Brooklyn-born son-in-law might well say: "Blow it out your arse!"

Let's change direction for a moment.

When Malcolm was at school, Charles II was supposed to have said “Let sleeping dogs lie”. Only later, Malcolm discovered this was another schoolman's lie: the actual royal utterance was more alliterative: “A stirred turd stinks.”

That ought to be enough to persuade Malcolm to keep stumm on this one.

However ...

1. Any alliance between FF and SF would invite all jobbing cartoonists to parody David Low’s “Rendezvous” cartoon:

2. “[T]he best ever in the history of Ireland in tackling poverty in Ireland...” Heaven help us! That possibility existed at the time of the 13th Dáil, with the coalition of Fine Gael and the progressives in the "First Inter-Party Government" of 1948-51:

The coalition government ... deserves recognition as a reforming administration and not just as the one that presided over the declaration of the Republic, the Mother and Child controversy ... and the internal squabbling of Clann na Poblachta. [Ferriter, page 482]

That government (and all its laudable aims) foundered on the clericalism of Seán MacBride and the opportunism of de Valera. Its lasting achievement amounted to what Liam O'Bríain called:

the arresting of the Führer mentality which had reached such dangerous heights in that section of the Irish people — the infallibility and superhuman quality of Dev. [Ferriter, page 483]

Any fantasist who has not read (for example) Diarmaid Ferriter still cannot be excused from noticing just how badly a decade of FF has been for the under-class. Equally, Sinn Féin has no track record of attaining social improvement. Any incoming Government will be dependent on the volatile votes of the newly-affluent bourgeoisie of the Dublin metropolis, who in turn are dependent on property values, inward investment and a frothy economy. On what grounds can we expect the tiger to change its stripes?

No. Definitely no. The next Irish social revolution is not yet. The next Dáil, whatever the complexion of the government bench, is the recipé as before.

So, Malcolm suggests:

• See tomorrow's Irish Times poll (spoiler at www.irishelection.com). This suggests little movement: FF @ 36%∧; FG @ 28%∨; Labour @ 13%∧; and SF @ 10%=.
• 73 seats for FF? Surely, you're joking!
• Don't expect great shifts on this until the final few days, if then (E&OE).
• Certainly don't expect any bounce for SF from the events up North.
• If total torpor sets in, watch the other radical vote: Labour (if only!) and even the Trots, but not SF much above 10%. Remember, too, this is a young electorate, and beards are not "cool".
  
• Overall, on any basis here, the revolution is postponed.

Sphere: Related Content

Con or conundrum?

What have the following items in common?

• a cardboard box containing unused rolls of wall-paper;
• a broken wicker basket;
• a sack of shredded letter paper;
• a discarded zippered shopping bag;
• rolled foam-plastic camping pallets.

Yep: neither the regular refuse nor the recycling service of Haringey will take them.

Every week there is a ritual. Malcolm collects and sorts the waste, and leaves it out for the weekly collection. In the cold light of dawn the refuse truck collects the contents of the wheelie-bin, usually resulting in it being thrown back down the driveway on its side. There is a lull until later, often much later, the recycling truck comes for the rest. And then begins a selection process, which results in the left-over of either party remaining where Malcolm left it, or (more often) scattered more widely as it was discarded.

Malcolm then has to refill the wheelie bin with the residue, to be collected a week later, or remove it himself to the recycling centre across the Borough. The later option, involving an unnecessary car journey, seems to defeat the whole object.

Clearly there is a mismatch between the Borough's stated aims, the operatives' implementation and Malcolm's understanding thereof. What's to be done? Sphere: Related Content

By their friends you shall know them...

Malcolm, like all old lefties, was rooting for Ségolène Royal. He is less than surprised by the result (though 53-47 is a heck of a lot better than the last outing) and less than staggered by the following piccy:

That's Sarkozy lurking behind the red duster. Only last Sunday he was pledging to be President for all the French people, and preaching his mantra that the French must work harder and make sacrifices.

Back home, the French were indulging in their usual vigorous post-election analysis:

Tuesday night, some 200 cars were burned around France and at least 80 people detained in the third night of post-election violence, Interior Minister Francois Baroin said on France-Info radio Wednesday. That was down from 730 cars burned on Sunday night.

Vandals broke windows at a local headquarters of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement party in Villeurbanne, near Lyon in the southeast. But Baroin insisted the violence was ebbing, and was under control.

Meanwhile Sarko was cruising off Malta, on a floating gin-palace owned by Vincent Bolloré, number 17 on the French Rich List and 451st among Forbes world-wide plutocracy. Bolloré gets his kicks by collecting BDs (French comic books) and corporate raiding:

With his easy manners and sleek good looks, Vincent Bolloré seems the epitome of Gallic gentility. But in clubby French business circles, the 49-year-old industrialist and investor is considered a killer. Bolloré has a habit of shaking up undervalued icons of French business--often family-run companies--then wresting cash and choice industrial morsels from them. Film group Pathé, construction and telecom giant Bouygues, and even venerable merchant bank Lazard Frères Co. all got a taste of his medicine.

He may even have aspirations to go the Berlusconi route by muscling into media, currently by adding the British advertising firm Aegis (in which he currently has a near-30% holding, just below the level at which he must make an all-out bid) to his fiefdom. Aegis is significant because it is:

the world's largest independent media buyer... Havas [which Bolloré already owns] controls an estimated 4 percent of the global media buying market, while Aegis controls approximately 9 percent.

It was refreshing to see that the French opposition press were out of the blocks, and harrying Sarkozy. La Depeche du Midi of Toulouse saw Sarkozy indulging in luxury "in the manner of a newly-rich who had won the lottery." Nîmes-based L'Independent du Midi predicts Sarkozy "will be our first American-style president," because he is a "great admirer of the country where money and luxury are considered as mandatory symbols of success." Sphere: Related Content

Changing the world?

It's May 9th, so that's the June issue of Mojo (published by Emap plc) on the shelf of the newsagent. Headline: "100 records that changed the world":

The most influential singles and albums in history, selected, sorted and saluted by Mojo’s favourite musicians.

Wow! That's original! Or would have been if not for Q magazine (published by Emap plc) in January 2003, sporting the title: "100 songs that changed the world". Oh, and look: here's Rolling Stone doing "40 songs that changed the world".

Malcolm used to buy Mojo occasionally: it filled the torpor of lunchbreaks. He hasn't been near it for a couple of years. And doesn't feel inclined to invest in this issue.

The Q list is still on the Net. Many of those 100 songs may certainly have changed or developed the mood for popular music. A prime example is number 64: Jackie Brenston's Rocket 88 (though Ike Turner, whose band it was, pirated it from Jimmie Liggins). Malcolm suggests only isolated Q readers have actually heard that one (Malcolm keeps it on his back-up hard-drive). Even so, this product of Brentson/Turner/Sam Phillips was mainly significant in retrospect, because the combination of tenor-sax, the drummer's back beat and the fuzz-guitar indicated how and when R&B developed into Rock'n'Roll. To an extent, then, Rocket 88 is a historical marker for 1951, just as Joe Oliver inviting Louis Armstrong to Chicago had been in 1922.

Few songs on this list changed the course of the planet. Leave out the Lennon sentimentality and Malcolm would suggest only a couple even have any political content. Malcolm would note those obvious exceptions as:

• number 6: Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit;
• number 73: Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

One represents a brave attempt to protest against the lynch mob (one of FDR's disreputable moments). The other (particularly in its earlier form, with the edited two verses) is one of the great statements of solidarity, especially when taken along with the rest of Guthrie's work.

For Malcolm, though, the concept of such a list is intriguing. Does popular music merely reflect public mood, or can it be an agency of change? Country Joe Macdonald at Woodstock, belting out Fixin' to Die Rag (which Q scandalously ignored) represents a clear example: was that "changing" or just catching a mood? Sphere: Related Content

European values

Malcolm was hastening to meet his lady for lunch. The pavement was blocked by sixth-formers coming the other way.

Because there is a generation thing about speech volume, Malcolm had fragments of conversation forced on him. He was totally lost by this:

Girl 1: ... like the Holland people.
Girl 2: They're the Danish. Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm discovers relative values

Cousinly thoughts
Some time ago, one of Malcolm's inanities prompted a comment from yourcousin. This came as something of a surprise to our Malc, who is rather precious about his relatives. However, yourcousin is going to be an on-going thread of Malcolm's future bloggery, so we had all better get used to him.

Our American Cousin is a goodish mid-19th century farce with tragic overtones: it was famously the play at Abraham Lincoln was attending on 14th April, 1865. To commemorate that, Malcolm proposes to refer to this source in future, not just as yourcousin, but to Our American Cousin (who, under moments of tension, when fingers fail to keep up with brain, will find himself abbreviated to OAC).

Since that initial comment, a small exchange has continued between Our American Cousin and Malcolm. Malcolm is in debt to Our American Cousin's insights into Northern Irish politics and country music; and if any reader doubts that these will be recycled here, be reassured they will be.

A week ago Our American Cousin's peroration threw in a googly or slurve (notice how Malcolm strives to be bilingual):

I want to note that you and I keep using different labels to deal with the same topic. While I refer to "Ulster-Scots" you refer to"Ulster-prods".

This instantly brought Malcolm to full attention, because it had been his meditation in the sleepless early hours: the identity of those whom Ruth Dudley-Edwards calls The Faithful Tribe and Patrick Griffin as The People With No Name. The topic has been appearing serially in Malcolm's pronouncements here and on Slugger.

Ulsterdom revisited
Once upon a time it was easy. The emigré Lowland Scots who transported and planted themselves (note: it was largely voluntary — they were not passively transported and "planted") across Jacobean Ulster knew themselves as Northern Dissenters. This adequately described their Presbyterian faith, which distinguished them from the "Churchmen" (the Ascendancy class who followed orthodox Anglicanism) and the despised Roman Catholic Irish. They were different in class, too: the Churchmen were the landowners; the Northern Dissenters were largely tenants. What Malcolm had not appreciated, until he started dipping into Griffin, is that originally the Ulster confessional arrangements were also quite distinct:

In 1642, when a Scottish army arrived in Ulster to quash the Irish Catholic rebellion, chaplains and officers encountered Scottish migrants with few Presbyterian institutions. To be sure, settlers had assembled themselves into congregations by erecting meetinghouses at convenient sites throughout the countryside, as they had created sessions in which lay elders resolved disputes within the community, scrutinized church attendance, and dispensed charity and justice. But they had little else.

Only after 1690 was the full Presbyterian structure established across Ulster.

"Ulster Scotch"
The term "Ulster-Scotch" is useful, but suffers from being anachronistic and displaced. It refers specifically to the average 3,500 to 5,000 who emigrated each year from Ulster to the American colonies between 1717 and 1775. These figures are not capable of exact audit. Arthur Young, in his Tour of Ireland [1779] provides an estimate that a quarter of Ulster's manufacturing population went between 1729 and 1750. The other source is to log the departures and arrivals of ships. Leyburn quotes the Gentleman's Magazine of 1774 [XLIV, page 332]:

... asserting that 6,222 immigrants from Ireland had come to America between August 3 and November 29, 1773; while in five years between 1769 and 1774 152 ships with passengers from Londonderry, Belfast, Newry, Larne and Portrush, with a total tonnage of 43,720. The note is added: "the number of emigrants is supposed fully to equal the number of tons of shipping."

Whichever way one totals, it amounts to somewhere each side of a quarter of a million in total. So, sorry OAC, "Ulster-Scotch" or "Scotch-Irish" applies only in America, and mainly to Pennsylvania (the immediate destination of most Ulster emigrants): re-exporting the word to modern Northern Ireland is not appropriate.

The word is also anachronistic. After 1775 it has little relevance. Again Leyburn makes the point. George III's proclamation of 7 October 1763 forbade general settlement west of the Appalachians. That was soon a dead letter:

After 1782, however, it seemed as if a considerable part of America was determined to go west; and in the vanguard of the pioneers were the restless Scotch-Irish ...
Across the mountains began a new phase for American history, for here people of many national backgrounds met and merged as they had never done in the east. From the Appalachians west to the Pacific Ocean the pioneer was simply an American ...

That was then, this is now
That, of course, is not the "end of history" (on which Liam Clarke commented to some effect, in the Sunday Times a couple of Sundays back), any more than yesterday's doings at Stormont were.

So, Malcolm continues to reflect on both.

Despite yourcousin/OAC cited above, Malcolm maintains there is a distinct Ulster Protestant type. And, he concedes, OAC is also right in so far as it is not a homogenised, one-size-fits-all personality.

The main differences are class (see above) and location. Attitudes harden with accent; and none come harder (with some good reasons) than the small farmer from west-of-the-Bann, though his (or her) personality crops up across the whole province: "Not an inch", indeed. The urban warrior, though, seems on the way out — though, in Portadown (which is just over the Bann) on his latest visit, Malcolm noticed the "ours" and "yours" differentiation was still applicable even in choice or adoption of shopping centres.

As for class, the distinction is visible in voting preferences: UUP versus DUP may be a shorthand. If, as seems at least possible, the UUP is in terminal decline, that begs the question of where the bourgeois Unionist vote goes. The NITories offered a desperate and pathetic option, but are not going to make it without some heavy input from London. Notice how Trimble is lost to view already. There is, of course, the Alliance to soak up tender consciences. A third, perhaps more realistic, option is a Peter Robinson-led DUP, with suitable mood-muzac and soft furnishings; though, that will invite another split with hard-line DUPers (led by Donaldson, for example).

An Ulster future?
Where does this take us? Perhaps we should be looking for the future of the "Ulster consciousness" (which is as near as Malcolm has yet reached in defining the state-of-mind that is at the centre of his rumination). To that extent, history has barely reached a comma, despite the apostles and critics alike of Fukuyama:

The other major "contradiction" potentially unresolvable by liberalism is the
one posed by nationalism and other forms of racial and ethic consciousness... Nationalism has been a threat to liberalism historically in Germany, and continues to be one in isolated parts of
"post-historical" Europe life [such as] Northern Ireland.

Hence the edginess common to all the broadsheet editorials today, in reflecting yesterday's events at Stormont. The Times opines:

While sectarianism remains a harsh reality in sections of Belfast and Londonderry, it has been ameliorated elsewhere. The real test for devolution in ten years time therefore, is whether the terms "Unionist" and "nationalist" are less consequential than today.

While one can see where that is going, to Malcolm it reads more E98 1TA than anywhere between BT70 and BT82. And what is the logic for differential capitalisation for "Unionist" and nationalist?

The Guardian is, to put it mildly, guarded:

The peace process is over. The political one is just about to begin...
The task facing Northern Ireland's new rulers is to use yesterday's spirit to better the lives of its people. Their work has only just begun.

Much to Malcolm's disquiet, he finds the Telegraph ["Tha's gotta know wha' t'enemy's thinkin'!" © Cousin Ralph Copley] most closely approaching his own feelings:

The blizzard of back-slapping platitudes that greeted yesterday's re-establishment of a power-sharing government in Stormont could not disguise a profound sense of unease...

If yesterday does mark an end to the vicious tribalism that has disfigured Northern Ireland's politics for decades (and that has to mean an end to the gangsterism into which the paramilitaries have diversified), there will be a big vacuum to fill. We have noted before that the Province has been ill-served by its political classes, not least because they have such little experience of governing. This will be the real test of the new Stormont Assembly. It must resist the temptation to keep glancing over its shoulder at the murderous nihilism of the past.

That has always been the seductive, soft option. The altogether tougher challenge facing the power-sharing administration will be to provide the good governance for which the people of Northern Ireland are crying out. We can only hope they will not be disappointed.

Forward to single-mindedness!
The bottom line, surely, is that the re-occupation of Stormont's limestone halls gives us a breathing space, at best that Six County history can pick up again from the 1890s where it has been stuck. With any degree of luck the "Northern Dissenters" are going to rediscover that lines of communication rather than of demarcation exist between Lurgan and Dundalk, that there are more shared values and interests than divisions. Even the died-in-the-linen Northerner may come to appreciate that Dublin has been rapidly evolving into a post-confessional multi-ethnic community (something that Fianne Fáil may have to learn the hard way soon).

In Malcolm's days as a student, returning to Archbishop McQuaid's Dublin was (as the joke had it about New Zealand): "We are about to land. Turn your watches back thirty years." Today Dublin is cosmopolitan, and more resembles Barcelona or Berlin than it does Belfast: the sooner all Belfast catches the zeitgeist the better.

Cliché alert! "It all comes down to economics"
When Malcolm reads:

There have already been several hints from Martin McGuinness that he expects to see America pitching in with Britain, Ireland, Europe and everyone else to help subsidise our brave new world with its 10 ministries and jobs for everyone

he hears echoes from opinion columns in the Belfast Telegraph, specifically Eric Waugh:

the new state would require bolstering for up to 20 years by the UK, the EU - and possibly the US and even the Republic.

To McGuinness and Waugh alike, will say the various purse-holders (and as Malcolm has recited previously "little chance":

Northern Ireland’s quest for normality should focus on more mundane concerns. Chief among these should be the state of its economy, where development has not matched political progress. Northern Ireland depends too heavily on the public sector. On any measure, it is evident that the private sector is too small, and that the province is less productive than it could be. The government directly employs about one-third of the workforce, and accounts for almost two-thirds of economic output. The proportion of people of working age who are economically inactive is 27.7 per cent – the highest percentage of the 12 UK regions, and well above the UK average of 21.4 per cent.

Whatever the Ulsterman calls himself, pride precludes adopting the tone of poor provincial relative. Whether the model for the Six Counties lies in Dublin or Docklands, it implies a tougher future, with fewer dole-queues (if only because there will be fewer handouts).

Else, for Dissenter or Catholic alike, the only alternative is, once again, that cruel emigrant passage. Sphere: Related Content

Rocking the vote in Meath

Malcolm has been ignoring the elves of late: in fact, there has been rumination about a bulk issue of P45s. Yesterday, though, Malcolm hit upon a huddle of the little buggers twittering over Frank McNally's An Irishman's Diary in the Irish Times.

So, it being spring, moonless night in the Norf of Lunnun, starless and bible-black, Malcolm decided to investigate, and begins at the beginning.

One of the thorns in the flesh of the retiring Fianna Fáil government has been the long-overdue M3 motorway from Dublin into the County Meath. Slap in the middle of the direct route is a hill. Not just any old hill: the Hill of Tara, Teamhair na Rí, no less. Molehills do not come more mountainous than this one.

Heavy brain-bashing by the planners eventually provided no less than ten possible routes in a rainbow of colours. The line of least resistance, designated the "Pink Corridor", ran well north of Tara's Halls, and was given more kudos than the rest. The government, however, winced at the additional cost of such a routing, and ordained a shorter line going south of the village of Skryne, and so much closer to Tara.

All hell broke loose among the chattering classes, involving anyone who had watched more than ten minutes of archaeology on TV.

However, back to elven excitement over Frank McNally's prose.

It seems the latest twist in the saga is The Ark of the Covenant, last seen (one might think) safely tucked away in a US government warehouse. Not at all, at all. In point of supposed fact, the Ark was reburied at Tara. Check it out here.

At the end of the 19th century the British Israelites went digging for it. Máiréad Carew of UCD tried to keep a straight, academic face to write the story of that bit of the farce. Arthur Griffith, WB Yeats, George Moore and Douglas Hyde (a fine team there) tried physically to intervene, to prevent the desecration of a national monument: they were seen off by a gun-waving gent. Maud Gonne's protest involved lighting a bonfire on the Hill of Tara and singing "A Nation Once Again".

Anyone writhing in mirth should pause, recall that British-Israelite nonsense permeates the Orange Order's and the Black Preceptory's mythologies, then redouble the writhing and mirthing.

Yes, Malcolm decided: P45s all round.
Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm's modest proposal:

It seems the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square is up for offers. Channel 4 News speculate that the owners may be looking for a site which is accessible, defensible, out-of-town and (presumably) prestigious.

Malcolm knows of just such a property:
Consider the advantages:

• commanding position;
• no bomb-damage in living memory;
• only one previous owner;
• easy access to city centre and two airports;
• well-maintained with minimal recent use;
  
• a bloody-sight better-looking than that concrete monstrosity in Ballsbridge, D4 (why not double up?);
• the original plans (doubtless still available) include a dome and are "reminiscent of the U.S. Capitol in Washington DC."

The prospective new tenants (who have yet to enter into full occupation) could easily be rehoused in the projected "Titanic Quarter", a.k.a. Ceantar an Titanic. There, at least they could sink or swim, hit the rocks, feel the chill hand of destiny on their shoulders, suffer an icy fate or whatever in appropriate fashion. Sphere: Related Content

Putting his mouth where his money is ...

Malcolm sees that, at 10.55 pm on 14th April, he made a prediction:

Scotland will be going substantially SNP next month. On current form the Nats will be the largest single party, though well short (say high 30s, low 40s) of the 65 seats for an absolute majority. The SNP won’t get its referendum; but the voters will have to be assuaged by additional powers to the Scottish Parliament.

And, here today, the venerable Scotsman is publishing its eve-of-poll prediction:

According to the latest and last Scotsman/ICM opinion poll of this crucial campaign, Labour has made significant progress into the SNP's lead...
The SNP would have 43 seats to Labour's 42, with the Liberal Democrats on 23, the Conservatives on 17, the Greens with one and the others three.

_______________________________

Salmond, desperate to keep the LibDims [sic] in play, has already softened the devolution-referendum commitment:

Alex Salmond has announced he is prepared to compromise on the nature and timing of a referendum on independence.

The SNP leader said he was prepared to do a deal with the Liberal Democrats on a vote on independence if the parties gain enough seats in May's elections to form a new executive...

Until now, Salmond has put a vote on whether Scotland should leave the UK at the heart of his policies.

What makes this even more smoky-and-mirrored, is the referendum was the only firm, definable and bankable commitment that Salmond was prepared to make when Adam Boulton interviewed him, a month ago:

We’re offering Scotland progress, progress in government, in health, education, on the economy in particular where we have got to do a lot more and a lot better and obviously the opportunity for people in Scotland to take the future into their own hands and to vote for independence in an independence referendum which will take place in the second half of our four year term.

And the SNP manifesto laid down, as an essential responsibility of the First Minister:

Publication of a White Paper detailing the concept of Scottish independence in the modern world as part of preparations for offering Scots the opportunity to decide on independence in a referendum, with a likely date of 2010

How often does one witness a party ditch its manifesto in mid-campaign?

In the 1979 Election, after the Winter of Discontent, there was a telling anti-Labour graffito: "Cut out the middle man. Vote TGWU." Let's be brutal here: the SNP were the Tartan Tories, and so they remain. Absent the issue of independence, and their sole function in the Scottish game is an alternative to Labour. Supporters and financiers include former Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir George Mathewson, multi-millionaire Donald MacDonald of the eponymous hotel chain, Tom Farmer of Kwik-Fit, and (most ominous, perhaps) Brian Souter of Stagecoach, Christian fundamentalist and arch-privatiser. Salmond himself was an economist with the RBOS; and his spokesman for economic affairs, Mather, is an accountant and businessman. So an SNP vote looks like a being "anti-socialist under a saltire".

Now, if the SNP is not going to stand by its first and only distinctive policy, what bloody use are they? Why buy Salmond's snake-oil? Where's Billy Wolfe when he's needed? Wolfe had some principles: he needed them to hold his corner against Tam of the Binns. By comparison, Salmond's SNP is an opportunist creature of Edinburgh capitalism.

Money and mouthpieces, indeed. Sphere: Related Content

Malcolm has a quick one on
The great 7/7 panic

Here's the consensus of opinion from today's front pages:
MI5 in the dock as terror trial shows link to suicide bombers - Daily Telegraph
How MI5 missed the links to July 7 suicide bombers - The Guardian
Why didn't MI5 stop July 7th? - Daily Mail
Angry families ask how July 7 bombers got through MI5 net - The Herald
MI5 let the ringleader behind 7/& slip the net - The Press and Journal ("The Voice of the North")
Bomb victim's family hit out at MI5 - South Wales Echo

And that's without going below the headlines.

Ditto Channel 4 News. Ditto the Today Progamme. Etc. Etc.

So now we know whom to blame.

For those with a wider horizon, or a longer memory, here's a thought:

"Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always "
PIRA statement to Thatcher Government after Brighton bomb, 1984.

Sphere: Related Content

... and we thought Hiaasen just made it up

From today's Miami Herald:

A substitute teacher at an Orlando high school could be charged with a felony for a gun he took to work, authorities said.

Orange County sheriff's deputies pulled Joshua Cummings out of class Monday morning after they searched his car and found a 9mm pistol, according to a report.

Malcolm, whose alter ego suffered as a "supply teacher" in London, empathises with Mr Cummings.

A school spokesman said teachers, employees and students are not allowed to bring weapons to school.

Well, that's all right then.

Sphere: Related Content

Good things in small packages

A number of good things come out of Seattle: Hendrix, the Bainbridge Ferry, the B-17 bomber, I-5 south to Portland ... and a decent toilet on most streets in the world simply found by looking for the Starbucks logo (pass up the coffee, though — vide infra). The one that has most changed life for the better is www.amazon.com.

On Sunday evening, Malcolm was wrestling to find a conclusion to a rambling meditation. He was seeking to define the Ulster-Prod mindset, how it adopted "Britishness" and why its descendants around the world seem to have lost contact with the Province. The more he blogged, the less happy he was with the lack of firm conclusions. He realised that he was prejudging the issues, largely because of poor research and reading. His mind went to two books he felt he needed:
The Scotch-Irish: A Social History by James Graham Leyburn;
The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 by Patrick Griffin.

The former appeared back in the earliest '60s, when Malcolm was still a pallid TCD student. The latter is more recent.

Within minutes both had been located on amazon.co.uk, the order registered and acknowledged.

Now comes the magic, the wonder of modern capitalism.

At 7.28 a.m. this fine May Day, just thirty-six hours later, the door-buzzer announced the arrival of the package, and the books were sharing the breakfast table with the marmalade and proper-coffee spills. Now that is service. Some academic libraries in Malcolm's recollection would struggle to match that.

Expect further drivelling from Malcolm on this topic in due course. Sphere: Related Content