Still too busy to blog

But not quite too busy to comment. On Danny Finkelstein’s look at the latest shift in opinion polls. (I reference another recent column of his, which can be found here.)

Move along, nothing to see here

Actually, I’ve got lots going on. Flat-hunting, friend’s-wedding-preparing-for, work work work, and so on. Just none of it productively bloggable. Anyway, it’s sunny. Stop reading this and go out.

Hopefully a bit more normal next week.

(This is good. So’s this.)

This is a local election for local people

I won’t try a proper political post-mortem, particularly as the corpses are still dropping (and some unexpectedly rising from the grave), but here are a few extremely idle thoughts on my local experience:

• I’d forgotten how much I love counts. Even though people’s hopes and dreams are competing to avoid destruction, it’s all very good-natured. Election days generally seems to be the best way of making political opponents get on well. And there really is something mesmerising about watching ballot papers being counted into piles by someone who’s really good at it.


• Although it does seem to take for-bloody-ever to get from a fully counted set of ballots to the announcement of a result.


• A lot of Tories are lovely people. I mean, obviously they’re evil, but they’re quite nice with it. Especially the ones that know full well they’re not even coming anywhere near second place – although that generalises across parties. I like the mindset that takes futility and turns it into a sanguine cheerfulness.


• The Lib Dems have a fair bit of talent. I mean that not in the highbrow political analysis way, but rather in the crude, slack-jawed, objectifying way. Sorry. Doubtless they’re lovely people too, and with fine ideas on transport policy.


• Respect activists, or Left List or Listing Leftovers or whatever the faction that does and/or doesn’t have Galloway in it, are a bit odd. When one of their candidates mutters that the proceedings of a local election are a “charade” and another talks about “all three parties”, you have to wonder what they’re in it for.


• Personal votes don’t accrue automatically: in the ward where my parents were standing, there was a City Council election and a County Council byelection. The City seat was being defended by a Lib Dem who’d held it for ten years; the County seat was being contested by a Lib Dem who hadn’t lived in the area long and had never stood for election before. The Libs both won (my folks were both pretty good seconds), but the stalwart got just ten votes more than the neophyte. One personal vote per year of service – just enough to fill a nomination form. Conversely, in another ward, the city’s first ever Green won by sheer dogged personal effort put in over years.


• Democracy is a wonderful thing, both in theory and in practice. Reams have been written about how it develops and the conditions needed for it to survive, but I think it boils down to one thing: the willingness on all sides to be a good loser. Isn’t that right, Bob?

God, I love the smell of voting in the morning…

I adore voting. It’s nothing to do with whether my candidate’s likely to win, nor even the fact that democracy is wonderful and all that. It’s just the experience of it.

The party tellers (been there, done that, of course) are unfailingly polite and mutually cooperative. You could sit Brown, Cameron and Clegg outside a polling station with notepads and I guarantee they’d be friends within a couple of hours.

The ballot paper, with its surprising middle names and hitherto-unnoticed minor parties. The faux-private ‘booth’. The wonderfully archaic stumpy pencils on municipal string.

And the ballot box itself. What a piece of design. Plain, calm, solid, no-nonsense.

My best voting experience ever was for the European Parliamentary election in 1999. It was on the day of my last final and, being at Oxford, I had to dress like a posh tit. The informal tradition added to this look is that you wear carnations to your exams: white for the first, pink for the middle ones and red for the last. This meant that end result was that on the dot of 7.00am (dread and panic were regularly waking me before 6), I strode into the polling station down the road in full sub fusc with a Labour-coloured flower on my lapel.

I was the first voter of the day – the tellers were just setting up their chairs and my ballot paper was the first one torn off – and my outfit and timing clearly caused a bit of bemusement. But they were ready.

Then I went off to find some breakfast, half-heartedly cram, sit a rotten exam and get smashed.

This morning, though, I’ve had the unlikely pleasure of voting for both of my parents.

What rhymes with ‘cuttlefish’?

I’m seriously impressed with the inventiveness involved in writing this:

Two Haikus

I once wrote a pair
Of Haikus, related, but
Willing to fuse--please

Don't ask me how one
Limerick now replaces
The Haikus in twos

*****

A Limerick

I once wrote a pair of Haikus
Related, but willing to fuse
Please don't ask me how
One limerick now
Replaces the Haikus in twos

And the wit required to write this:

I don't usually have quarrels
Over where we get our morals
Ah, but every now and then somebody steps beyond the pale.
Once they know that I'm ungodly
They start looking at me oddly
And If I could walk on water, It would be to no avail.

[Plus a few more verses…]

I’m inspired to poetry myself. Alas, all I can come up with this evening – staying on the irreligious theme – is this:

There was a man nailed to a cross
For claiming his dad was the boss
There followed him churches
Whose prejudice lurches
From brimstone to twee candyfloss

You want better? Fine. Check out the Digital Cuttlefish (hat tip).

Book meme thingy, innit

Matt has tagged me with a meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you

This presents something of a problem. The nearest book, which I’ve been avidly reading, doesn’t have 123 pages. Nor does it have all that many sentences per page. Here’s the best extract I can manage:

See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Run, run, run.

The near-Dostoevskian desperation permeating this passage almost overwhelms me. I can’t wait to see how all the subplots will be woven together at the end. But that’s enough for one day.

I’ll tag: Liam, Scribbles, Paul, Bill and, er, David Miliband. Well, you never know.

I’m sorry we haven’t a Humph

Samantha has just had to pop out to the undertaker’s to pick a coffin. She was very impressed when he showed her his wood, and though he initially asked a lot for it, she managed to get him to go down.

Alas.

Conversion disorder

A really, really, clumsy blunder in the Economist:

To pay for a cut in the basic rate of income tax in his final budget as chancellor last spring, Mr Brown removed the 10p ($0.20) starting rate.

Doing 30% of the right thing

I had some Co-op flapjacks the other day, and very tasty they were too. There was a label on the packet saying:

Made with 30% Fairtrade ingredients

…and 70% Namibian orphans’ tears?

I’d have thought ‘ethical consuming’ would be more of an absolutist affair. You don’t get banks boasting that they won’t invest all of your money in the arms trade or hear swanky supermarkets proclaiming that their smoothies contain ‘not that many’ artificial additives. And how many films do you see where ‘only a few’ animals were hurt during the making?

More generally, I have yet to hear of anyone trying to market Stella to Muslims as ‘94.8% alcohol-free’, and I doubt that any industrialist has ever used the slogan ‘Most asbestos users stay alive!’

Anyway. Those flapjacks were the most fairly traded ones I could find: not completely fair but at least fairly fairly traded. So my conscience is clear. 30% of it, anyway.

On spotting an open goal

Her: Aw, come on. That wasn’t bad for a very low grade pun. But puns aren’t my forte.

Me: No, you’re right. Probably only your twente or thirte at best.

(Yes, it’s absurdly disproportionate smugness. But what the hell else is the internet for?)

What lies beneath

Greg Clark, Tory front-bencher, says that “tax credits are masking the extent of underlying poverty in Britain today”.

This concept of underlying poverty he defines as covering those people “who either are in poverty or would be without tax credits”. Hmm. So that’s those people who are in poverty plus some of those who aren’t but would be if not for a particular government policy.

But why, among all government policies, just tax credits? Why not child benefit and jobseeker’s allowance too? I bet they’re masking some poverty. Or the minimum wage? There must be plenty of poverty underlying that. Or the Sure Start childcare provision that allows parents the chance to go out and earn money? Or state education? That must help a few people get decent jobs who otherwise wouldn’t. Or Bank of England independence? Without that, the economy would have done less well these last ten years…

It’s almost as if Clark has it in for tax credits. Although he swears he doesn’t:

Let's be clear: tax credits are an essential part of a modern welfare policy, because it is obviously better to increase someone's income in work than to see them either in poverty or out of work.

But there’s a but:

But, surely, something has gone badly wrong with our economy - and our society - when more and more people every year are unable to earn enough to keep themselves and their families off the breadline.

By “unable to earn enough” he really means “unable to earn enough in the absence of certain government policies, namely tax credits”. Has something gone wrong with our economy – and our society – if this is true?

Well, that’s two questions. The point of the economy is to… actually, there isn’t a point to the economy. It’s the aggregate of the buying, selling, working, hiring, producing, consuming and other such activities that we all carry out. We carry these out to advance our own interests. If the untrammeled workings of the market would leave some people badly off, that’s no fault of the economy per se.

But most of us don’t want an economy with no government intervention. We expect our governments to do just that, in various ways and to various extents. Our society thus affects the working of the economy. One of the key reasons it does this is to ensure that those who’d lose out from laissez-faire are in a better position. There are many ways of doing this.

Clark mentions skills, and of course the government can make itself useful there. But there will always be a lot of low-skilled jobs. For every office block full of well-educated professionals, you’ll need catering and cleaning staff. If we want these people to be able to keep their families off the breadline, then we can’t imagine that the free market will do that. Society – via government – will have to compel employers to pay them more or will have to add to their wages directly. Or both.

As we do.

‘Underlying poverty’? The notion seems to treat anything achieved by government as somehow illegitimate and even unreal. Perhaps we should also have figures for underlying crime (counting those that would be committed if there were no prisons), underlying child mortality (including those deaths that the NHS prevents) and underlying school league tables (showing what exam results would be if schools stopped getting public funding).

You’ll always have a past

David Edgar has written a piece apparently about “defectors” from the “left” – although, given that he appears to count Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of the left, I may have misread the article completely. Perhaps it’s actually about Bolivian transport policy, or Renaissance dentistry, or fairies.

I don’t wish to add (much) to the good responses that have appeared already (see Andrew Anthony, Norm Geras, David Thompson and Oliver Kamm); I’ll just note one thing.

Edgar says that he’s “interested in the politics of defection”, although he seems to be more fascinated by the psychology of defection (or rather, the psychology of changing your mind when political cliques of some sort are involved). Key to his view is this:

Inevitably, however complete the conversion, what defectors think and do now is coloured by what they thought and did before.

Well, yes, that’s probably true. But you can also make a perfectly good psychological case with which to loftily sneer at consistency of view.

If my now thinking ‘X is bad’ is inevitably coloured by my having once thought ‘X is good’, then of course your now thinking ‘X is good’ is even more so coloured by your record of having thought ‘X is good’ all along. Dare you not be self-critical? Do you magnify, deny or simplify new developments so as to justify keeping your old position? Do you refuse to see things in new ways? Have you invested so much of your life in slogans and tracts and comradeships that to break with that would be more harmful to you than a mere admission of error?

We all have pasts; we can never escape them; our futures will always be coloured by them. Welcome to the human race.

Two short observations

The first is that, given its slow pace and general weirdness, Lost suffers hardly at all if you watch a whole series over one weekend when your brain is half-fried by a really nasty cold.

The second is that the housing market – generally, not just at the moment – is not a market at all but a series of bear traps. You actually have to pay for information about the thing you supposedly want to buy! In fact, it’s maybe more like a poker game than a series of bear traps, except with no order of play and an unknown number of hidden cards. And bear traps.

A tip for Gordon Brown?

From someone I’m sure he’ll listen to - from his own speech in Boston last week:

And although he was President for less than three years I believe that the much of the progress of this half century has been testament to the scope of John Kennedy’s dream, the worth of the ideals he lived for, the breadth of hope he inspired in us, and most of all - amid all the wit, style, elegance and statesmanship that adorned the Kennedy Presidency - his summons to service - one that never fails to inspire people to see farther and reach higher, a call which still reverberates around the world and always will.

(Let’s skip over the wit, style and elegance bit.)

Brown was fond of saying back when he was Chancellor and asked about his ambitions to replace Tony Blair, that it’s not the office you hold that matters but what you achieve with it.

True enough, although I don’t believe anybody ever actually swallowed that ‘non-denial denial’. But then I don’t think we were intended to swallow it.

What’s also true is that it’s not the time you’re in office for, but how you use that time. I doubt that even assassination would lead people decades hence to look back fondly on Brown; but he has the ability to achieve things, even if his time at the top is a brief as JFK’s, that will set the tone for time to come.