In the credit crunch era, the financial plans of everyone - from large corporations to public amenities to individuals - have to be reassessed. But there seems to have been relatively little in the press about how the recession will impact upon students or recent graduates, other than the obvious issue that jobs will be hard to come by when students leave university. Partly, perhaps, this is due to the fact that the recent Research Assessment Exercise has captured the attention of universities wondering how much they will receive for research, and so universities and press have been less focused on the other side of the research-teaching coin.

So, with the substantial disclaimer that I am by no means an expert on this subject, here are some of my own thoughts on how the recession might affect higher education. Most of these points are particular for England or the United Kingdom, but may apply elsewhere also.

• The first, and most empirically certain thing to note, is that student loans have their interest rates for each year tied to the Retail Price Index as it stands in March. Over recent years, this has hovered around 3 percent. However, as of December 2008, this fell below 1 percent, with the downward trend set to continue. It is likely that come March, interest rates on student loans will be minimal, allowing those students who are in well-paid jobs to repay their loans at a faster rate. However, if RPI falls below zero, so that we have deflation in March, does this mean that the Student Loans Company will start actually paying students loans off? The terms and conditions of the loans state only that "the Government has to keep the value of what is owed in line with the general rate of inflation. They do this by working out the rate of inflation each year as defined by the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and fixing the interest charged to that rate...The new interest rate is based on the Retail Price Index for the previous March." There is no indication of what happens when the RPI falls below zero - something probably not imagined in the heady days of the economic boom when loans were introduced - and there are probably some worried faces running around the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills trying to find a loophole to ensure students repay loans at some positive rate of interest.


• In a recession, one might expect students to hold off from incurring large debts, and favour finding immediate jobs ahead of further study. However, the reverse appears to be the case. With lower-skilled jobs on the decline in a recession (jobs in manufacturing or retail, for example), it is best for students leaving school to head to university in the hopes that economic prospects will have improved in three years, and knowing that at least the student loans offer a guaranteed (if minimal!) level of financial support. The Times Higher Education reports today that the government's restriction on university numbers is limiting the number of places available for increasing numbers of applicants.


• The flip side to this is fewer foreign students will apply to universities abroad. The Higher Education Policy Institute recently warned that if China were to fall into recession, the effect on this vital funding stream would be "cataclysmic." Though the drying up of foreign students will affect universities globally, Britain may oddly see the recession work in its favour to offset the losses, because of the plummet in the value of the pound. However, HEPI suggested that this might mean students opt for one year courses and choose to pay up front, rather than facing the the full three years at uncertain exchange rates.


• More difficult to predict is the effect the recession will have on any plans to lift the cap on top-up fees (set at £3000 plus inflation), and move to a system of full fees. The review on lifting the tution fee cap was due in 2009, but this has now been put off until 2010, after a likely general election. Universities would like the bar to be set at between £6000 to £7000. MP Ian Gibson, former chair of the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, has argued against lifting the cap, saying that this would be incompatible with the Prime Minister's plan to ride out the recession by investing in green science research and skills. It would also surely be contradictory for the government to condemn excessive borrowing whilst allowing a new generation of students to start life owing £20 000 for tuition, plus any additional loans they need to support themselves. Furthermore, assuming the system stays the same with the government paying for students up-front, with students then repaying the loans once in work, the government would be required to put a large amount of capital into higher education, without guarantees that it would be paid back quickly, if the economy continues to run slowly. The stalling of tuition fee rises by the recession is, however, only a short term effect; longer term it is quite clear that UK higher education is moving towards the privatised, full-fee model of the United States, and will eventually do so under a Labour or Conservative government.

So there we have it. The layman's thoughts on how the credit crunch will affect current and future students. Clearly, the sector - like all others - faces a rocky and uncertain time, though if the government does see investment in research and technology as the light at the end of the tunnel of recession, universities might ultimately come out well on the research side of things. The people one has to be most worried about are new graduates. Vacancies for graduates have dropped 17 percent in the six months since summer 2008, particularly (and not surprisingly) in the financial sector. As if it were not already competitive as a result of the expansion of higher education, new graduates can expect to struggle for survival in the harshest economic environment in two decades.


Update 13th February 2008

Following the above post, The Guardian Education has just reported a big rise in undergraduate applications. Applications are up 7.8%, with

signs that the recession is affecting people's choice of degree, breeding a new generation of economists and mathematicians. The number of applications for economics degrees increased by 15.7% to a total of 44,750. Applications for maths rose 10.4% and for politics 16.7%.

There has also been an increase in public sector training degrees, hardly surprising since the public sector offers greater job security and, given the present need for investment from the public purse, probably increasing numbers of jobs also:

Applications for nursing rose by 16.7%, education degrees by 10.7% and teacher training by 3.7%. It is thought that people are opting for "safer" jobs outside business and commerce.

Not surprisingly:

There was a 7.6% decline in applications for building degrees as the construction industry slows, though there were modest rises in business degree applicants.

Labels: credit crunch, higher education, Politics, student loans

I listened to the radio this morning, and heard a BBC correspondent interviewing a Gazan mother who lost nine of her family, four of them her children, in an Israeli air strike. It appears that the munition used was white phosphorous, the use of which is legal on the open battlefield as a smokescreen, but which is not permitted for use as an assault weapon in areas where civilians are likely to be.

The woman, remarkably calm, recounts how each of her children died. I saw him decapitated, she explains of her eldest. Her second died of smoke inhalation. Her youngest, she says, "melted in my arms."

What brutal poetry this phrase conceals. Echoes of Hamlet thinking of death here - "Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve into a due." But, as Adorno said, after the Holocaust poetry becomes impossible. And to perceive any poetry in this phrase seems equally inappropriate. For one is left to imagine - or to try to imagine - what it must be like to be a mother looking at your child in your arms as they simply melt away, vanish, cease to exist, life slipping out as easily as water down a drain.

Of course, these metaphors too are not appropriate. For they do not capture the other sensations that must have surrounded this moment that the woman's phrase eloquently conceals: the smell of charred flesh, the smashing of glass and the crumbling of rubble, white smoke, a chemical agent sticking to the skin and burning white hot and, around, little bits of felt silently fluttering down from the sky, each one a packet containing more lethal fire.

It is hard to know what to say about the Israeli action that has not already been expressed by the media, at least in European newspapers and television (the recent London Review of Books carries elequoent disavowals of the Israeli action, by scores of academics). Whilst news organisations have striven to be impartial, beyond a certain point objectivity has to tip into compassion and anger on the Palestinian and Israeli sides of the border. When 1200 Palestinians (about a third of them children) die in response to a dozen Israeli deaths, the dynamics of the war as one of retaliation - as Israel sees it - simply does not work. Israel, the world's fourth largest military power, has lost the moral conflict.

The use of white phosphorous, the shells of which bear the stamps of the American factories in which they were produced, has become iconic of this new mood. Given that the Gaza strip is one of the most densely populated regions on Earth, it is pretty clear that it should not have been used. Now that Israel has admitted use of the munition, there will, of course, be an investigation by the army, who will no doubt find some middle-ranking officer to use as a scapegoat, whilst keeping Olmert and his generals free from blame for planning to use such a weapon. There will, of course, be more impartial investigations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the United Nations, the findings of which will be breezily dismissed, whilst the shells still make their way from Lockheed and Boeing factories in the States to land in the homes of civilian women melting children (future terrorists!) out of existence.

Cynicism aside, one is left with just one hope. This is that another, balance has tipped, one which has its long end half a century ago, and which has ensured that no matter how Israel levered its military might, the balance of international opinion would never tip into condemnation. Previous Israeli actions, from the 1967 war to the recent Lebanon conflict have, been conducted under the cloud of the Holocaust. For every Hamas rocket attack on Israel, the rest of the world could not attack Israeli policies because it was still assailed by the guilt of World War Two. Now, however, opinion seems, perhaps, to have shifted. The repressed has returned for the last time, so perhaps now for the first time, it is possible to be anti-Israeli without this having the faint whiff of anti-Semitism. We must now be willing to stand defiant and say of Israel that, whilst terrorism is something to which they have the right to respond, we have the right to say: "enough."

Labels: Gaza, Israel, Politics

I have noticed quite a few US-based commenters on various message boards (see here, here, and here) lamenting the way in which the European media have been biased in their coverage of the US election; in particular, they criticise the BBC for leering across the Atlantic with a typical leftist lean. Now I suspect that over the course of the election it has probably been true that Obama has received more coverage than his Republican rival (though a Google News search for stories containing Obama and McCain shows the latter outweighing the former by 181 to 824 occurrences over the last month). What I object to is the way in which the word "bias" is used here in a pejorative sense, as if we should expect the European media to offer impartial coverage of an election in a foreign country. I am not at all sure that the onus should be placed on them to do this; indeed, the reasons for any bias seem to me to be so comprehensible that it is hard to imagine what a more "objective" European media would look like. Further, I would argue that where any bias does exist, it is not so much the fault of European-based broadcasters as the failure of the American right to make itself understood to the world.

The term "bias" raises that old fallacy that objective and impartial reporting means giving fifty percent of the coverage to each side in any bipartisan contest or debate. But we would not expect the BBC to dedicate half of its coverage of climate change to those 5% of scientists who disagreed with the anthropocentric global warming hypothesis in the IPCC report, even though this too is essentially a binary position (either global warming is happening, or it is not).

In practice, in and between UK elections the BBC's public service remit generally does lead it to fairly represent to the two major parties, with proportional representation of the views of minority parties on appropriate issues (the Green Party in relation to environmental politics) and at pertinent times (during the Liberal Democrat convention, for example). But even here, the coverage is not quantitatively divided. Naturally, the incumbent party will receive more airtime than the opposition, and naturally at certain times - during terrorist crises, for example - the broad rallying of the opposition behind the government means that it is pointless to repeat the same opinions simply because they are voiced by the other side. The aim here is not so much that the BBC represents every single voice in a noisy democracy, but rather that the BBC avoids swaying UK voters, allowing them to make up their own minds based on the evidence of the manifestos and personalities in the political arena as a whole over an extended period.

With the US election, the aim of an organisation like the BBC is surely different. Whilst undoubtedly the outcome of the US election will have huge foreign and economic policy implications, because UK voters do not have any direct say in the result, the need to report stories that will be of interest to the public becomes more significant than the need to report stories that may be intrinsically dull (NHS waiting lists, for example) but that are still a significant factor in deciding who to vote for.

In the case of the US election, it is personalities, not politics or manifestos, which are of dominant interest. And which personality is the more interesting? The folksy "ordinary" white guy who waves his arms around a lot (I mean McCain, not Bush), or the charismatic candidate who might well become the first coloured President of any major Western power, let alone a United States in which half a century before he would have been ineligible even to vote? Quite clearly, the public interest in historical terms lies in covering the American election through the prism of Obama.

Secondly - and the most significant contributing factor to any Democratic bias in the European media - is that it has become increasingly evident since the first election of George Bush that there is simply no political bloc or ideological grouping in Europe that compares to American Republicanism. It is very difficult for the European mind to conceptualise the dynamic relationships of evangelism, subscription to the myth of the self-made American, and geography, that ensures that the poor Southern white voter is most likely to cast in favour of the pro-life and low-tax Republicans even though that party is the least likely to improve their socio-economic status.

The Republican party have claimed that Obama will bring with him a "European-style Socialism," as if this politics ranks there with Islamic fundamentalism and Cold War Communism as an alien to be kept out of American life. With this statement, it becomes clear that the low voter turnout in Europe as compared to America does not indicate in any strong sense the failure of democracy, but the broad convergence of politics to a centre-left position such that neither side has much to say that is different from another. Though it is clear with the credit crunch that liberal Blairite economics is by no means the best way of macromanaging an economy, France, Germany and Italy all share New Labour's (failed) ambition that although the state should allow business to run itself it needs also to ensure that welfare support is provided at the very base of society. The state is responsible for ensuring both that wealth is allowed to accumulate at the top, but also that it is redistributed to the bottom.

It is, for example, inconceivable that any future Conservative government would abolish the National Health Service, whereas for a time during the 1980s and early 1990s that establishment seemed to be destined to fade into privatisation. Today, the only significant difference between New Labour and Cameron's Conservatives is where they decide to draw the bottom line: New Labour drew it through the lower-middle classes who provided their supporter base, whilst the Conservatives would suggest support should be provided only for the very severely underprivileged, and would appeal to that class by being strong on issues such as immigration. In America, by contrast, the lower it digs through the social strata the more Republicanism finds voter-rich seams of support. And it is difficult for the secular, European political mind to comprehend what drives this bloc. What commingling of ideology, religion and history leads Republican voters to believe not only that business and corporations at the top should not be pulled down by the state, but that they themselves should not be helped up?

In spite of the valiant efforts of the BBC's bloggers and correspondents (such as Justin Webb) to get among the trailer parks and into the minds of this community, they remain ideological others, taking over from the coloured minority who previously assumed that role in American culture. And so, I would contend, it is not any deliberate strategy but the sheer incomprehensibility of the Republicans that leads organisations like the BBC to any bias in their coverage. I am not suggesting this is a good thing. If Bush's foreign policy has been immoral because he has refused to attempt to understand the very sincere beliefs that drive terrorists to commit atrocities, at a time of global financial crisis it is vital that we try to understand what motivates Republicans genuinely to feel they are doing the right thing even if that seems so different to European politics. Simply castigating them as Others will not help. But I would argue that when right-wing commenters condemn the BBC for its bias, these Republican complainants ought to be a little more self-reflexive. The real problem is that they need to make themselves known and understood to the world. A world which, until that time, will continue to cast an overwhelming preference for the Democratic model, even without the obvious anti-Republican catalysts of the Iraq war and the Wall Street credit crunch.

Labels: BBC bias, Politics, Republicanism

So, the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange has just claimed in their report, Cities Unlimited, that cities in northern England, such as Liverpool, Sunderland and Bradford, are "beyond revival"; once wealthy as shipping and industrial centres, they have now "lost much of their raison d'etre" and have "little prospect of offering their residents the standard of living to which they aspire." Their residents, the report claims, should move south to the leafy suburbs of expanding cities like Cambridge, Oxford and London.

Now I have the north-east in my genes and, though my formative years were spent as a Janus-faced character in the Midlands, as my photo map attests I have lived in in the North East for the past decade. And, like Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle who put up a staunch defence of his area on this morning's Today programme, my first instinct was to condemn the report's authors for treating people like pounds, to be moved around at whim.

Policy Exchange's argument that present policies have failed to improve "the quality of life for those people who, for whatever reason, cannot or will not move" misses the point. People in the north fail to move not simply because of a poverty trap, but because in addition to money they value the sense of community cohesion that still exists here, in a way it does not generally, in my experience, in the south. Football teams, strong regional accents and a pride in landscape lend credence to the tourist development agency's slogan, Passionate People, Passionate Places. Many of my friends are highly skilled and mobile graduates, who could work for corporations in London but choose to remain in their branches in Leeds or Newcastle. I know families who still live in houses that their parents and grandparents occupied, and this is less a mark of the financial constraints that prevent them from moving, and more an indication of their desire to keep children and parents in close proximity, so that the latter can be cared for in old age rather than outsourced to the nearest home.

All these things I muttered at the radio as I tried not to choke on my cornflakes. But having just had a chance to scan through the original report, I realise that I was attacking a straw man. The report is so badly written and riddled with evidential holes that it effectively self-implodes anyway.

Just to focus on Sunderland, with which I am most familiar. The authors announce that "Sunderland suffers from poor economic geography. It is a long way from most places." Now a statement like this might be fine in the French oral exam of a ten year old ("I live in Sunderland. Sunderland is a city. It is a long way from most places."), but is unacceptable for a piece of allegedly rigorous research. It may be a long way from London, but London is not "most places" -Sunderland is, however, closer to Newcastle, Durham, Leeds, York and Edinburgh than the capital. It is also just an hour's drive from the Lake District, Northumberland and the Yorkshire Dales. Is it possible to reach further than Clapham in the same time from Parliament Square?

Their choice of evidence is as unsound as the language in which it is couched. Is Roy Keane's grumble that it's hard to attract decent footballers to the city really objective evidence of its economic poverty? Given that he made these comments before the start of a season in which most pundits predicted their relegation, could Keane not have been preparing to cover his own back? Could it not perhaps be due to the fact that Sunderland are not quite as good at football as Arsenal, Chelsea or Tottenham against which he compares his own club?

Admittedly, the authors do go on to consider a more reliable evidence base of economic statistics, and it is true that Sunderland is the poor relation of Newcastle when it comes to attracting skilled workers able to contribute to the knowledge economy. But are the report's authors not aware that Sunderland possesses a university which is a world-class centre in some creative industries, such as glass making? Have they not thought that the fact that Sunderland can claim to be founded in relation to one of the oldest sites of learning in Europe, Bede's monastery at Jarrow, might be a source of pride that compensates to a degree for any current shortcomings in its redevelopment? Do they see absolutely no reason for optimism in the fact that Sunderland hosts the most productive car plant (Nissan) in Europe?

I could go on, but I'd only start to rant. There is no doubt that the north does have real issues with economic development in comparison to the powerhouse of London. But there is also the human factor that these report's authors have failed to perceive, so bedazzled have they been by the bright lights of capital in the Capital. And it is this London focus that leads me to suspect an ulterior motive. Although the Conservatives have distanced themselves from the report, the Policy Exchange body was set up by Nicholas Bowles, who is now esconced in the City Hall as Boris Johnson's chief of staff. The report concludes that:

London also offers Britain a great opportunity and one that is almost unique in Europe: the opportunity to expand a global city capable of generating large numbers of high quality jobs. There is every reason to think that London is currently below its optimal size and if the capital expanded by attracting people from our regeneration cities, then it could transform their lives.

Policy Exchange may ultimately be aiming not so much to denigrate the northern cities, as to ensure that the regeneration gold sent to their chilly climes is relocated back where it belongs, to the cozy coffers of the capital.

I remain utterly unmagnetised by London. Every time I head for the city, I feel suffocated by the atmosphere, the pressure waves of urban heat and, more intensely, of people driving mentally and physically to make money, losing sense of the qualitative values of family life, leisure time, and living as part of a community. Like commuting on the tube or the M25, London offers a vicious circle in which if you will be left behind if you fail to join in the race. So it is always a relief to escape back to my home in the north, where I can live in a country cottage for rent of £45 a week, and where I am not afraid to ask my neighbour for a bag of sugar for fear of being stabbed. It's a good job for me, then, that the excellent railway system that connects Newcastle to London means I can nip to the capital within 3 hours, but be back within the day.

Labels: Cities Unlimited, North East, Policy Exchange, Politics

Amnesty International's report on China, The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises includes the pessimistic conclusion that in four areas related to the core Olympic values of "universal fundamental ethical principles" and "human dignity," China's human rights record has failed to come up to the mark. It suggests that, rather than improving the situation, the build up to the Olympics has seen the increased persecution of human rights activists, detention without trial, censorship and the continuation of the death penalty for unwarrented offences.

The great thing about Amnesty, though, is that whilst it may often make pretty grim judgements on political behaviour, their motto that "It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness" gives individuals the belief that exercising pressure on institutions to make a change, no matter how small, can have a positive effect in the long run. For most ordinary supporters, like myself, this takes the form of writing letters to embassies and presidents in far-flung corners of the globe. Given the timing of Amnesty's recent report, I thought I would copy below the text of my most recent letter to the Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China. This concerns the case of Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught lawyer who has helped villagers to take legal action against the Linyi city authorities, who had allegedly been forcing women to have abortions so as to meet birth quotas set by central government.

Your Excellency,

On 24th August 2006, following a one-day trial, Chen Guangcheng was imprisoned for four years and three months for "damaging public property and gathering people to block traffic." Whilst in prison, Chen Guangcheng was beaten on the orders of prison guards, for refusing to have his head shaved.

In this year when China plays host to the Olympics, I urge you to consider the core Olympic values of "universal fundamental ethical principles" and "human dignity" in relation to the judicial system in China. In relation to this case in particular, I ask you to guarantee that Chen Guangcheng will not be subjected to further torture and ill-treatment whilst in detention, and to initiate a full and impartial investigation into his treatment in Linyi prison.

Chen Guangcheng was imprisoned for campaigning against the forced sterilisation and abortions the local authority was enacting in pursuit of birth quotas. Chen Guangcheng was making a legitimate argument for human rights to be respected in China. I ask you to ensure that all human rights defenders, such as Chen Guangcheng, are able to carry out their peaceful activities without fear of harassment or imprisonment.

I thank you for your time in reading this letter, and look forward to your positive response to these matters. I also wish you every success in hosting the Olympic Games in 2008.

Labels: Amnesty International, Chen Guangcheng, China, human rights, Politics

I remember during the run up to war on Iraq watching a Question Time special, in which Tony Blair fielded (or evaded) questions from a live audience. Having by this point moved his justificatory position away from the suspect "45 minute" claim, towards the humanitarian one, I fumed at the television. Admitting that the war would cost around £4 billion (around $8 billion), but proclaiming that it would liberate the 30 million population of Iraq, I wanted to play Blair at his own game of numbers, trading off financial costs with humanitarian benefits.

For my bargaining chips I chose HIV. According to the later UN 2004 report on AIDS, 5 million people are in need of AIDs treatment worldwide, with the annual cost of treatment in the Third World around $300. For $8 billion you could have treated 26 million AIDs victims; that is, for the UK's involvement in Iraq, we could have treated every current sufferer in the world for the next five years. So pretty much the same as the number of Iraqis who would be liberated from authoritarianism, but without the inestimable risk, inestimable moral cost and inestimable future impact of fighting in this field of the War on Terror.

But if I was angered by Blair's refusal to take his moral relativism to the obvious conclusion that the war was relatively (and now objectively) bad value, at least I cannot grumble too much now about his financial estimates: the current cost of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan has been a mere four times the estimates, £8 billion ($16 billion). Compare this to the case in the US, as exemplified on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week of a couple of weeks ago. This includes an interview with Joseph Stiglitz about his controversial new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the War in Iraq. Unwittingly, the discussion is hilarious, because the ultimate stakes are so serious.

At the outset, the US contribution to the War in Iraq was supposed to cost $50-$60 billion (one economist at the time dared to claim it would cost $100-200 billion...but he was fired). The cost today is estimated in Stiglitz's new book to exceed $2 trillion.

Marr then asks, "so that's a mistake of around 20 times as much?" to which Stieglitz replies, "Probably more than that. it's of that order of mistake. It's huge." Marr continues for a moment, before Stieglitz interjects, "No, no, it's actually 200, because remember 60...10 times would be $600 billion, and, er so" - remember, this is a Nobel prize-winning economist - "we're talking about, er...more than that." Masterfully, Marr concludes, "Well I can't even get the order of the mistake right!"

But this is paradoxically hilarious, because of course the stakes, financial (not to mention those less easy to quantify), are so enormous; one simply cannot do other than laugh at the whole, elephantine error of it all. It has its own bleak humour, because one can only imagine that it is the result of a sleepily casual theorising conducted over coffee and croissants in the White House a few weeks before the invasion:

So, Dick [Cheney], how much is this expedition gonna cost?
Well, Mr. President, I'm pleased to say that we have a special offer on all our Middle East invasion range, yours for just - well, sir, for you, just $60 billion. No, $50 billion (what's $1 000 000 000 between friends?)
Oh, mmm [mouth full of buttery pastry] I'll take one of those, and throw in a couple of insurgencies while you're at it.

One could, of course, contest Stiglitz's estimates, which rely on extrapolating the indirect costs such as increased oil prices and future health care. But the government's own facts about the direct costs in the present speak for themselves: they are investing $12 billion per month on the war. Compare that to $5 billion given in aid to Africa each year. That budget represents just ten days fighting in Iraq. Or, to use my original comparison, for one month in Iraq the world's AIDS victims could have been treated for the next decade. Stiglitz's hesitancy was apt: the whole thing does not add up.

Labels: Politics, The Three Trillion Dollar War, War in Iraq

Question: Which literary character is a Collatorised Debt Obligation (CDO)? Obvious answer: Faustus. Listening to a recent Radio 4 documentary on the crisis in the international banking markets, the Mephistopheles of the recent Credit Crunch is the financier who has concocted clever ways of wrapping up essentially bad or high risk debts into attractive packages, and selling them to a banking system lusting not for anything so beautiful as Helen of Troy, more that end of year bonus and swanky basement conversion to their house in the suburbs. Whispering in the ear of bankers in the bars of the city, the economist has proposed:

But now thou must bequeath it solemnly,
And write a deed of gift with thine own blood;
For that security craves Lucifer.

Unfortunately, that "security," or CDO seems to have been not so safe after all. As several bankers in the programme rued, we have been here several times before since the 1930s, and failed to learn from each crash, always believing "this time, we're cleverer than the previous lot. Except, of course, we're not." The burning of books (or the run on the bank) ensues.

Our Chorus for the complexities of the money market is John Lanchester, who in a brilliant explanation of "Cityphilia" in the London Review of Books allows us "to wonder at unlawful" (well, almost) "things":

A well run bank is a machine for making money...Imagine, for the purpose of keeping things simple, a country with only one bank. A customer goes into the bank and deposits £200. Now the bank has £200 to invest, so it goes out and buys some shares with the money: not the full £200, but the amount minus the percentage which it deems prudent to keep in cash, just in case any depositors come and make a withdrawal. That amount, called the ‘cash ratio’, is set by government: in this example let’s say it’s 20 per cent. So our bank goes out and buys £160 of shares from, say, LRB Ltd. Then LRB goes and deposits its £160 in the bank; the bank now has £360 of deposits, of which it needs to keep only 20 per cent – £72 – in cash. So now it can go out and buy another £128 of shares in LRB, raising its total holding in LRB Ltd to £288. Once again, LRB Ltd goes and deposits the money in the bank, which goes out again and buys more shares, and so on the process goes. The only thing imposing a limit is the need to keep 20 per cent in cash, so the depositing-and-buying cycle ends when the bank has £200 in cash – all the cash there is – and £800 in LRB shares; it also has £1000 of customer deposits, the initial £200 plus all the money from the share transactions. The initial £200 has generated a balance sheet of £1000 in assets and £1000 in liabilities. Magic! In real life, it’s even better: the UK cash ratio is 0.15 per cent, so that initial £200 would generate £133,333 on both sides of the balance sheet.

I though I had a handle on the way the stock markets work, but it appears not. Enter, yours truly, the clown. Having recently acquired some inheritance, I decide to invest rather than paying off my student loan, and trot into the Co-Operative bank, they being the most ethical of a pretty bad bunch. The happy consultant grasps my hand, and thrusts in my face a series of graphs and charts that flow inevitably upwards towards monetary heaven, promising a 10 - nay 20 percent - return on my investment, staggered to receive greatest tax benefits, risk spread - like a low fat version - across different environmental and ethical funds. I turn to leave with a guide tucked under my arm, and swear as I do that the consultant is secretly congratulating himself on another sale:

when thou took'st the book
To view the Scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves,
And led thine eye.

Luckily, I am not so blind as to fail to read the small print. Wherein I discover how banks, even the nicer ones like the Co-Operative, make so much money. Thank you for your deposit, Mr. Faustus. Now, we'd just like to chip off 1.5% here (a management fee, you understand); oh, and we'll take 3% of whatever you gain; and how about 0.1% (just for the hell of it). So if I invest £3000, by the end of the first year I will have lost about £285, and over five years for every pound of my money I risk, and assuming I do gain with an upturn in the markets, the bank will get themselves the same amount again.

Count me out of this opportunity (yes, that's right, the markets being so low and volatile at the moment, this is a great time to invest, Sir!). This scholar wags his philosophical finger, and heads over to National Savings and Investments.

Labels: collatorised debt obligation, credit crunch, Politics, stock market

This week's (stylishly revamped) Times Higher has an extended article by Matthew Reisz on what a university is for. Is it for pursuing knowledge for the sake of it? For engaging with business and the demands of the economy? For promoting social mobility? My own impression, and the implication of Reisz's survey of opinions, is that universities are blank slates upon which, although (or because) relatively free from state control, the government can impress its broader ideological and social abstractions. In the current climate, this is the use of private finance for the improvement of public services. In part, then, universities are simultaneously where the state of the culture is writ large, as well as where that culture can be modified by new research and technologies. This is why the question "What is a university?" is also a question about "What is society?" and so far from being a peripheral issue to be discussed behind closed doors at university senates, it should be of concern to all, whether readers of the Times Higher or not.

One aspect of Reisz's article struck me in particular, which is that one of Cardinal Newman's original principles in The Idea of a University was that a university should bring academics and students into proximity, not necessarily in terms of their ideas but physically, as a community living over an extended period under one (or several) roofs. However, with the expansion of higher education, halls of residence have become distributed (where they still exist at all), and the commendable open-access policies that inform institutions like the Open University suggest that geographical centredness is not itself central to the idea of a modern university.

Two anecdotes occur here to suggest that, in this particular aspect of his argument, Newman may have been short sighted (as Reisz shows, it is surprising how many other aspects remain pertinent today). According to these two, universities are really functions of action rather than place.

The first is from Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind. He imagines a prospective student touring a university. He or she sees the library, the labs, the sports arena, but then asks the tour guide, "But where is the university?" According to Ryle, the mistake made by the student is a failure to realize that "university" and "library" are terms that belong to different logical categories. (The analogy signifies Descartes' mistaken assumption that there is a ghost inside us that works a merely mechanical body, without understanding that mind labels a behaviour, which - like the university building - is a different category to things, including the brain that may give rise to mind). In the advertisements section of the same issue of the Times Higher, a university campus in Croatia is listed as being for sale or rent. The buildings may exist, but this particular university is no more; likewise, just because we have the infrastructure of universities in the UK does not mean that - whether in Russell red brick or Million+ concrete - they exist unchanging and for all time. Much of New Labour's secondary education policy seems to have been directed at changing the architecture and nomenclature of schools, building glassy new academies - and they may be right that in this case changing the physical form of education for the better will also improve its chances of success with those who are involved in it. But, though that new physics lab or supercomputer may provide for a glossy photo opportunity, this rule does not hold true of a university in general.

The second anecdote comes from the U.S. When Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia University in the 1950s, he was introduced to senior faculty. He remarked how pleased he was to meet with the employees of the university. He was interrupted by the physicist I.I. Rabi: "Mr. President. We are not the employees of the university. We are the university!" (Thanks to Heinz R. Pagel's The Dreams of Reason for this).

Labels: Politics, the idea of a university

When fascists come to power, their first act is to stifle free speech such that their one-dimensional view is all that can be heard in the new political climate. But a healthy democracy also exercises censorship - in the self-reflexive form. Whilst theoretically preserving the right of anyone in a democracy to speak out, in practice we are made through our free press and our right to vote hyper-sensitive to extremism, such that the immoral voices that are the inevitable tributaries of an all-encompassing political system rarely flow into the mainstream.

There is consequently a fine line between the shape of censorship from above, which is the hallmark of fascism, and the result of censorship from below, which is the mark of a democracy. It is a line which was drawn - not finely, but in the mass of two opposing crowds - outside the Oxford Union last night, and one that those protesting against the debate started to cross. Naturally I deplore David Irving, and am aware that his writing is opinion masquerading as "history"; the facts of the Holocaust simply do not sustain Holocaust denial. Likewise, Nick Griffin is a right-wing thug in a pin stripe suit. But to prevent these two from sharing a platform, from exercising their right to speak their misguided minds, shows perhaps the more worrying move in politics than fascism (given that the BNP have no chance of power): the belief that a politically correct society which maintains a monoculture of opinion equates to a politically healthy one.

It does not. A democratically robust society is one in which Griffin and Irving are permitted to raise their voices, so that the majority of us - supported by the proof of the factual errors of Holocaust denial and our historical knowledge of where the right wing has the potential to lead us - can censor them through the evidence alone, allowing the facts to speak for themselves on our behalf. As it is, the chants outside the windows of the Union building were - inadvertently, naively - ringing out for the central censorship Griffin himself would probably like to exercise. Were this debate to have taken place outside a mosque in Bradford or a Synagogue in Israel, I would have some sympathy with the protesters, presuming them to be driven by personal anxiety rather than a misguided reason (and it is true that when the BNP comes to town, racist incidents increase). As it is, for such scenes to occur in that great secular cathedral of supposedly enlightened and rational debate, the University of Oxford, is deeply depressing. At least one of the newest universities, East Anglia, is leading the way by rejecting the NUS policy on "no platform for fascists."

Labels: David Irving, Nick Griffin, no platform for fascists, Oxford Union, Politics

Driving through flood and storm to get there, we went to the Ludlow Festival this week to see A Comedy of Errors. The play is Shakespeare's most farcical, and there was a real pantomime feel to it (particularly when the trousers of the lead actor fell down in the final tumultuous scene). I suspect it would probably be difficult to act this play badly, and the performance was assured and colourful, though it may not be particularly memorable or distinguished, since the Comedy is not as deeply provocative as Shakespeare's later comedies with their darker undertones.

But, problematically for a play that is so plot-driven (twists of fate, mistaken identities), I could not concentrate on the first quarter of an hour or so. This was because myself and Helen did not stand for the collective singing of the national anthem which preceded the play, in response to which the gentleman behind, in a plummy voice, turned to his wife and said, deliberately loud so I would overhear, "Such a shame. Clearly they're not British." It frustrates me still that I did not turn around and make eye contact, as I would have loved to have justified myself in argument with him. As it was, I spent the first part of the performance running a response through my head, and hence not following the play. But, partly in the vain hope that that patriot may come across this blog, and mainly to get my rhetorical rehearsal out of my head and onto the public stage, I want to share my justifications here.

Firstly, I am British - it says so on my passport. But whilst I feel privileged to be a resident in a country with such a landscape, cultural heritage (not least Shakespeare), and democratic standards, I do not see how my failing to sing the national anthem suddenly makes me "not British." Indeed, since I justify my refusal on the basis of my independently held attitudes, and the thought police (posh gents excepted) will not arrest me for my refusal, in many ways my sitting down is a greater endorsement of the United Kingdom's principles of intellectual imagination, and its accommodation of independence of spirit.

Indeed, A Comedy of Errors in part is a comic deconstruction of too rigid social mores. There is a certain irony in witnessing hundreds of people rise unthinkingly to their feet to sing, before watching a play which condemns petty nationalism divorced from independent moral judgement. In the first scene, Solinus, Duke of Epheus, tries to act with clemency towards Aegeon of Syracuse:

Now, trust me, were it not against our laws,
Against my crown, my oath, my dignity,
Which princes, would they, may not disannul,
My soul should sue as advocate for thee.

I do not sing, because I am not subject to such intransigent laws of crown and oath, and because I want to exert the independence of my personal ethics, as Solinus wishes he could, but cannot under monarchical system.

And, according to the personal politics of my individual soul, I have no reason to sing. I am ashamed to be living in one of the world's smaller islands that nevertheless somehow has the world's fourth richest economy. I am ashamed that in reaching that position that economy has put money before environmental or ethical concerns. An atheist in a multicultural world, I do not see why it is a positive to plead for religious help for a secular democracy. But, most of all, I cannot maintain a pride in my country when it is engaged in an illegal, illegitimate, and immoral conflict with another.

I first stopped being British, stopped standing for the anthem at the festival, in 2003, when we had just entered Iraq. There is surely something hypocritical in calling on God to save the Queen, the head of our armed forces, when that army is engaged in a war which is, so we are told, for democracy, not against Islam and its different breed of god. Though not sung, in the full version the second verse runs:

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!

Though we may not sing this verse, since the anthem receives its prestige precisely from the history of its usage, these meanings also must lurk beneath the explicit words. The evident irrationality of pleading to God to "confound their politics," when our attempt to "export" our own democratic politics through force has been such an admitted failure, adds weight to my argument against singing the opening verse.

Finally, there is the fact that to sing the anthem implies my support for the queen. I am not necessarily a Republican, but I do think the case for constitutional monarchy rather than elected presidency needs to be argued (and, to be fair, the monarchy has become much more transparent in its accountability), and that the monarchy needs to provide more than a tamely acquiescent voice in government, and to express individual opinions - with which I may or may not agree. Prince Charles has done this with his views on farming (which I support) and architecture (opinions I would challenge), and so I will hold my revolutionary calls until he takes the throne. But as I wait for this transition, for me to unhesitatingly and wholeheartedley sing to the queen would be a personal contradiction.

Whenever that happens, though, I will still feel, in a political sense, more European than British. In an age of ethnic and economic globalisation, I believe in working beyond the confines of the nation state; in my travels across Europe, I found more in common with the young of my age of every country - liberal, positive about Europe, anti-war - than I do with many of my parent's generation back home. Verse four of "God Save the Queen" expresses many of these sentiments:

Not in this land alone,
But be God's mercies known,
From shore to shore!
Lord make the nations see,
That men should brothers be,
And form one family,
The wide world over.

An anthem that transcends insular nationalism would see me on my feet. Alternatively, and with great irony since it is an invective against British political and economic forces and a plea for the restoration of landscape, I might just sing Jerusalem. It also has the better tune.

Labels: God Save the Queen, national anthem, Politics

In relation to religion, I tend to get riled very easily, partly because of the effect of fundamentalism exercised in the name of democracy, and partly because of the abuse and misunderstanding of science perpetrated by proponents of Intelligent Design. So the short fuse of my indignation was lit quite quickly by a couple of issues in the news last week.

Firstly, there was the case of Exeter Students' Guild being taken to court because it had suspended Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union from the student body. The guild decided on the measures because the religious group asked members to sign a statement of religious belief; the union argued that"as students fund our societies and as our Equal Opportunities Policy states, all activities should be open to all students. The Evangelical Christian Union is the only society identified that has barriers to entry - both for membership of the society and to be on the committee of the society." As barrister Schona Jolly analysed, this is a tricky case now being tested under the Human Rights Act, and "is about a clash of competing equalities." On the one hand is the right to have the freedom to maintain and assert a religious faith, and on the other is the right of all minorities to have equal access to any publically funded group. I hope that the courts find for the Students' Union, since they represent the majority of non-evangelical students at the university: there are probably more people of other faiths, or of unorthodox sexual orientations who might potentially be excluded from joining the single Christian group, than there are fervent Christians who are going to be excluded from the rights and funding other societies receive from the University.

Nevertheless, the case is a difficult one to judge, and I await the outcome with interest. Less ambiguous is the moral issue surrounding Christian protests against the new Gay Rights bill. This piece of legislation would prevent discrimination in the provision of goods, services and employment on the basis of sexual orientation; it thus provides similar legal protection as the sexual, racial and disability discrimination acts afford. At the rally, however, Michael Reid, the leader of a pentecostal church in Essex complained that:

I believe in freedom of conscience, and when anyone starts imposing views that are against freedom of religion, then we are moving into a state that I think is evil

But is it not equally possible to substitute "sexuality" where "religion" appears in the quote? Because there is no finite scale against which "evil" can be measured, then one can equally well say that to impose views against freedom of sexuality is wrong. The United Kingdom is not a theocracy but a democracy, and if religious people feel against this bill - and I can understand why under some interpretations of the Bible they might well do - then they are more than welcome to exercise the freedom of conscience they enjoy in such a state, and vote against the government. But, as it is, we have a government which, in accordance with the Human Rights Act, has decided to protect a sexual minority, just as it protects the minority of Christians (and it is now a minority, according to one pre-Christmas poll) from abuse and prejudice. Can you imagine the headlines if a gay rights group decided to exclude all Christians?

Tobias Jones, who has written a new book exploring religious communes, notes that, "religion is like a swimming pool: all the noise is at the shallow end, and that is the only end people see." I agree. To me, the great failure of religion in the modern age has been its failure to separate its ethics from its theology. As I said before in my comments on the Eagleton vs. Dawkins debate, a religion does not last for two thousand years without having something of moral value to assert, and our culture, secular though it may be in a popular and political sense, is still saturated with the morality of Christian faith. However, too often the Biblical position is taken as a absolute prescription for resolving contemporary issues, rather than the Biblical text being taken as a general foundation for ethics; thus for an atheist, with the Bible and ethics remaining closely tied, it becomes hard to acknowledge the reason of the Christian speaker, because that reason is so inextricably linked to a text I simply don't believe, except as an historical narrative.

However, just as I start to get cynical and sarcastic about these shallow religious voices at their end of the swimming pool, I hear a more considered voice as I munch on my cornflakes one morning, a voice which reminds me (even chastises me) that I risk becoming prejudiced against a Christian stereotype I construct for myself. Speaking on Radio 4's "Thought for the Day," the Bishop of Putney, Reverend Dr. Giles Fraser, explains why he thinks the law on sexual discrimination should be accepted by the Christian community as a whole. Judging by the comments on the BBC message board, he caused many non-liberal Christians to splutter into their breakfast bowls. He caused this atheist, however, to pause, and to take a more objective stance on what threatened to become, for me, two more pieces of black-and-white evidence of the dangers of religion.

Labels: Christianity, Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union, Gay Rights bill, Politics

Another year turns, and it's time for John Brockman, editor of the influential "Third Culture" forum, Edge, to pose his annual question to a range of cultural commentators, scientists and philosophers. Previous questions have either been highly open-ended - "What Now?" "What's Your Law?" - or implicitly directed at a particular contemporary issue. The question for 2005, "What do You Believe is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?" was aimed to provoke religious or scientific fundamentalists, and the resultant book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty provides a fascinating snapshot of the boundaries of the age-old contest as it is played in the early twenty-first century.

This year, however, rather than looking to the present or to the abstract, Brockman looks forwards, asking: "What Are You Optimistic About? Why?" Although, oddly, I was not invited to contribute, my answer would have been: not much. War burns in the Middle East; the promises of the campaign to eliminate poverty, made so loudly above the riffs of guitars at Live 8 this summer, now seem little more than a whisper in the dark. There are hints that environmental issues are becoming more prominent in politics and business: if you had told me last year that the Terminator was going green I would have thought it a joke. But faced with this most global of catastrophes, we need to move the world with the levers of technology and lifestyle revolution, and when Blair or Arnie wiggle their fingers from a podium, they may as well do nothing at all.

And yet, and yet. In the flurry of retrospective analyses of 2006 and the predictions for 2007 that fill the glossy pages of magazines and newspaper supplements, I see a common theme emerge that may be, just maybe, a reason to be optimistic. Time magazine's "Person of the Year" is - who? - me. By writing these very words, and publishing them online to be read around the world (at least by the few visitors the site actually gets) I am participating in the creation of a new form of culture, one not driven by great men:

It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

It is also a story about, predominantly, the young, the tech-savvy, collaborating freely and in fun to produce the arts and news outside the boundaries of the conventional, ideological establishment. Later, on the BBC's Start the Week, Andrew Marr asks his guests for their surprising predictions for 2007. One of them suggests that this will see the increasing influence of the younger generation. On a news programme, I hear a Labour politician suggest that, as politics seems to have alienated so many, new forms of political activism, enabled by the internet, will take shape, and the younger generation will be its catalytic force. At my sister's twenty-first birthday, my dad makes a brief speech at which he observes that the older generation, represented by my ninety-year-old grandfather, got us out of the most intractable mess during World War Two, and that my father's generation have done a pretty good job of messing things up again. It was to the younger generation, myself, my sister, our friends, that my father raised his glass.

In the Western world, if you look beyond the sleek plastic veneers of their I-pods and laptops, the young are suffering as a result of the lifestyles of their parents. In the United Kingdom, with house prices at record levels, the number of first time buyers is rapidly decreasing. I have little doubt that the economy must head for a fall: if house prices are increasing at 10% a year and wage inflation is running at around 3%, you do not have to be a mathematician to realise that things fundamentally don't add up, and that the gap has been filled, temporarily, by the mockery of cheap credit. However, with my generation priced out of the housing market now, we will have little to celebrate when the inevitable crash occurs, though we may have time to feel a hint of schadenfreude before recession hits. When it comes to the environment, we are the ones who are going to be choking on the smoke of our parents, whilst they are rotting beneath our feet, feeding the natural cycles they have violated. And in our education system, our parent's generation refuses to subsides university degrees, and we are forced to enter work with huge debts.

And yet, and yet. That financial debt is one being accumulated in return for an education which is better and more widespread than at any time before. In spite of all the hyperbole about the liberating power of the internet (try telling the 94% of Africans who have never used the web how wonderful it is that Wikipedia is democratising encyclopaedias), I do believe that we possess a tool unprecedented in human history to spread knowledge, ideas and moral values. If we can direct our skills in technology, our liberal education, and, above all, our anger at the world we have inherited from our fathers, we might just start to change it.

Labels: Politics, the Edge Question

Not that it will do the slightest good, if the Iraq war is anything to go by, but the government has just launched a new e-petitions service, whereby people can submit petitions to Tony Blair online. Organisations such as Amnesty International and Live 8 have been running these sorts of online systems for a couple of years, but going direct through Number 10 feels a little more satisfying (although I cannot imagine Tony Blair glued to his monitor, anxiously watching as the numbers of angry voters clock up before his soon-retiring eyes). Among others currently running are a petition to not replace the Trident nuclear deterrent and a petition to tax horrendously inefficient and antiquated incandescent light bulbs.

I have signed up to both of these; it has only taken two minutes, and it makes me feel a little more moral, even if its practical impact will be nil. However, I do worry that this new system will do away with those quaint local news clips, in which angry-young-mum or fed-up-of-Milton-Keynes trots up the steps of Number 10 and hands a wedge of paper to the bemused police officer, who passes it on to a hassled civil servant, to add to the pile on Blair's in-tray.

Update: At 12.07pm today, according to my Statcounter, this blog entry was tracked by someone at gateway-101.energis.gsi.gov.uk. Who is watching the watchers?!

Labels: e-petitions, Politics

On the day our Prime Minister gives evidence to the Iraq Study Group, I hear on the radio Emily Dickinson's poem, "Success is Counted Sweetest."

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of Victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

Labels: poetry, Politics

Having difficulty trying to see beyond the number's game in relation to the conflict in Lebanon and Israel, I come up with an analogy. It seems from my perspective that Israel's incursions are equivalent to what might have happened in a parallel universe twenty years ago, if at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict the UK government had sent Tornadoes across from RAF Lossiemouth to blitz North and West Belfast where IRA support was at its strongest. If such a blanket atrocity had happened, it is hard to imagine peace having come about today; equally, it is certain that without an intense military and intelligence operation taking place on the ground rather than from 30 000 feet, terrorist activity would have been far worse than it ever was in reality.

But recognising how the analogy does not quite fit the current conflict in the Middle East balances my impulse to condemn Israel outright. In the Northern Ireland situation, the IRA and Sinn Fein were like Siamese twins: respectively terrorist and political organistions conjoined physically and ideologically, yet in some sense recognisible as separate entitities. The UK government and Unionist parties could never have sat round the Stormont table with the IRA, but with Sinn Fein as their representatives a solution was workable, albeit uneasy. Back in Lebanon, and Hezbollah have been, rightly, condemned for using civilian areas as their base for militaristic operations. But by far the more dangerous merging of civilian and terrorist lies in the fact that Hezbollah is simultaneously a party in democratic politics and armed conflict. Negotiating a settlement through peaceful means is therefore going to be all the harder, many times more so than the resolution to the Northern Ireland conflict was.

Labels: Middle East, Politics

In my essay "Online Text Databases and the Literary Canon," I noted that "the popular proclamation that the texts found on the Internet (either within academic databases or in informal online publications) democratically represent, or are equally accessible to, the body of global authors and readers, is a fallacy. The "democracy" of the web and the "accessibility" of the Internet are rhetorical phrases commonly proclaimed by the media and political institutions to describe the globalisation of information; however, these claims, when used in a literal sense, are not endorsed statistically: fewer people worldwide can access the internet, with its online books, than have access to paper media through public libraries."

With a similar demythologising intent, though with greater import, the Irrepressible.Info campaign run by Amnesty International and The Observer is designed to highlight the fact that governments around the world, often in collusion with IT companies, are repressing online content, censoring information, seizing equipment and arresting people who use the internet to challenge official politics. As part of the campaign the group is offering web publishers in free countries the opportunity to undermine censorship by publishing previously censored material on their own sites. With a brilliant irony, through this system the more content is repressed, the more distributed it might become. I am smugly happy that from today, in the sidebar to the right of this blog, the information some one doesn't want people to read is now displayed to the 10 000 or so visitors who access this site each year.

Labels: Amnesty International, Irrepressible.info, Politics

Listening to a radio debate on the current Middle East crisis, one of the panellists for the Israeli position condemned what she called "the game of ratios." This is the use by pro-Palestinian (and now Lebanese) groups of the ratio of civilians killed by Israel in comparison to their own side. In both cases, Israel, with the world's fourth largest army, invariably wins by about 6:1 over terrorists.

In both figures, of course, the proportion of civilians as opposed to legitimate targets killed is probably relatively the same. And this is why this number's game presents too simple a case of the situation in the Middle East. If it were 6 civilians killed on the Palestinian side to 1 Israeli military target assaulted on the other, then the figures would immediately illegitimate Israel's response. But, of course, neither suicide bombers nor military planners who factor in collatoral damages stand on such morally elevated ground.

And yet, in spite of my efforts to read a respectable newspaper, to listen to the Today programme, I find it impossible to avoid looking at the numbers behind this reportage. The political context that underlies the mathematics is so turbulent and densely intertwined with thousands of years of historical contest that the ratios of death are the only thing that, to this naive observer, seem to make any form of comprehensible sense in a conflict of which the successes and aims of both sides are otherwise starkly unclear.

Labels: Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics

Although I am no great fan of Tony Blair, I am totally behind him on the hard stance he is taking on Europe's need for economic reform. It is not a question of the money - in the grand scheme of things £3 billion is relatively small change. It is about the intrinsic unfairness of a system which rewards those economies with large and cumbersome agricultural sectors, and penalises those with small and efficient systems.

Chirac's home support is at an all time low, and those who can strike on a whim hold the reigns; Blair has just been returned to power (albeit by an electorate still unconvinced by Europe). This is domestic politics played out in Brussels, but ideologically Blair has the high ground. Were countries to be rewarded for what they put in initially, and get out ultimately, from European trade, and if this meant Britain ended with no credit from the EU directly, although increased trade (and hence taxes) Blair would quite rightly be happy. Chirac (and his farmers) would not.

Labels: European Union, Politics

I don't have much to say about what was, as in the previous two, a fairly mundane campaign and a wholly anticipated result. Within the limits always going to be imposed by the farcical British electoral system - in which the Conservatives can gain more votes than Labour but fewer seats, or the Lib Dems have a fifth of the vote but only a tenth of Parliament - the result was very pleasing.

Sitting on the fence, by Stephen Von Der Heyde [From BBC News: In Pictures]The Conservatives did not get in, and thus can not kick those millions (or is it merely thousands?) of immigrants back to where they belong (a war zone on the other side of the globe will do very nicely, thank-you); the Lib Dems achieved their best result in modern political history, and will have learnt the valuable lesson for next time that they need to focus on - and will gain by - splitting not only the Labour vote, but the Conservative vote as well; and with his reduced majority Tony Blair will no longer be able to govern with such presidential style, and those bills which his party disagrees with (perhaps because they are bad bills, TB?) may now get filtered out, regardless of the lashes of the Whips.

Labels: general election, Politics

So, Robert Kilroy Silk has set up a new party dedicated to restoring Britain's proper relationship with the rest of Europe. One presumes, then, that by choosing the name Veritas for the party, it will be following in the footsteps of the first great European integrationist, Julius Caesar, who introduced the word into the English (or rather, that heterogeneous hybrid of French, Saxon, American, Latin, Greek) language in the first place.

Labels: Politics, veritas

Life as a liberal on the newsgroups isn't much fun any more. It is difficult to continue to express doubts about the unstable situation in Iraq without being accused of possessing too many "dollops of mournfulness and a soupcon of shit-did-I-have-to-be-right- schadenfraude"; to continue to condemn Bush for his injudicious actions is equivalent to being a bad loser who believes the vote in the US was rigged; to argue why, objectively, Susan Sontag or Edward Said were not a unintelligent idiots regardless of the "rightness" (or not) of their opinions is to be accused of turning them into "martyrs" of the far left; to suggest that it is wrong for religious groups to be permitted to censor drama in the theatres and television is to be an "arty-farty" who conceals racism behind unthinking protests "in the name of art".

Yet behind the screens of cliche (why are all liberals by definition "arty-farty"; are there no "arty-farty" conservatives?) and accusations of a moral superiority complex, perhaps the sheer level of antagonism does demonstrate something positive. Perhaps, with liberals in the minority in the US, the uncanny ability of crowds to be make the correct judgement of the course of an uncertain future is going to shine through again. There are reasons to be cheerful, and there are genuine reasons liberals may appear out of touch with the times.

For it is surely inconceivable that Bush could take unilateral action against Iran or Syria, on which his sights, following his State of the Union Address, are clearly set. Garnering popular support in the US would be challenging, but not beyond their rhetorical strategies: just ramp up Homeland alert to "red!" But he certainly would not, since Blair and Hoon explicitly denied the possibility of military action against these two states before the Iraq war, find an ally in the UK. And even if America did act without a "coalition of the willing," this would undermine claima that this is a global (for which read, English-speaking) war on terror. Diplomacy must, therefore, be the only feasible way forward. Equally, as the War on Terror extends from a temporary snap reaction, to a campaign and a culture of action, as it is seen to be taking a grip on the international circuits of terrorism, so the courts in the US and the UK can feel increasingly confident of restoring due judicial process, without being accused of undermining national security. Finally, the coincidence of Arafat's death pulls the rug from the grounds of "no deals with terrorists" on which the US and the UK avoided engaging with the Middle East peace process.

So, for the next six months, liberalism's on hold. And if Iraq descends into anti-democratic chaos, well, shit happens, and do say I didn't warn you.

Labels: Iraq, liberalism, Politics