The Golden Latrine

Partying with the English Defence League - a disturbing glimpse into the mind of the EDL rank-and-file

2012-02-15T16:50:00.019-08:00

"I'm not racist but..." Can there be another phrase in the English language more likely to make anxious liberal buttocks clench in queasy anticipation? Sometimes The Golden Latrine pines for those Alf Garnett days when racists were at least upfront about their prejudice.

Current doyens of the "I'm not racist but" line are the English Defence League (EDL), who insist they are charming, warm-hearted folk who like flowers and kittens and just happen to be against the creeping "Islamisation" of Britain. Definitely not racist.

The far-right group are planning a national demonstration at the end of the month in Hyde, an economically-depressed market town most famous as the home of mass-murderer Dr. Shipman's surgery (although oddly the local council haven't used that on the town's website).

As is standard procedure with the EDL, they have attached themselves to a local cause, in this case the attack of a 17-year-old white teenager and his friend by a gang of asian youths in Hyde town centre (you can read the Manchester Evening New's report of the attack here).

The Facebook group for the march quickly began to scour the area for similiar cases and muse about how the police would ignore the racial element of the attack (in actuality, the police treated it as a 'hate crime' and charged the alleged perpetrator with a section 18 assault). Perhaps more troubling was the persistent need of one poster to capitalise the first letter of every word ("I'm Unsure, But The Divisions We Are In Will Not Stand By And Watch This Happening In The Streets That He Lives In, Another Reported Case Tonight!"), presumably to ratchet up the drama and make everything he said sound like a headline. Or maybe he's just not that bright.

But endlessly rehashing the EDL's shortcomings is boring, and instead I'd like instead to offer a disturbing glimpse into the mind of the rank-and-file by means of a personal anecdote.

The Golden Latrine casts his mind back to Halloween a couple of years ago. That day there happened to have been a large-scale demonstration by the EDL in Leeds city centre, matched by a counter-demonstration by Unite Against Fascism.

The plan was to nip downstairs to our neighbours' party for a drink or two, before heading to our friend's place. Now, at the neighbours' party there was an EDL member and a Unite Against Fascism member in attendance. Let's call the EDL member Dean (if there are any liberal-minded Deans reading, I do apologise, it just seems like a good solid racist name) and the UAF member Tarquin.

The meeting with Dean did not start auspiciously. After sampling my limp-wristed greeting, his first words to me were: "That's a poofter's handshake". Never one to shirk a challenge, I decided to give him the eyes. Since it was Halloween, I had white facepaint on, with kohl eyes and ruby red lips. I tried explaining to Dean that it was Halloween make-up, but it did not compute. Squinting with the effort, metaphorical steam billowing from his ears, his continued response was: "To me, make-up is gay".

Now, I can honestly say that Dean was one of the least intelligent people I've ever met in my life. If most peoples' brains are Pentium processors, his was a plastic Fisher Price toy computer. But talking to him outside, he seemed far more confused than nasty. He'd clearly been well-schooled in the rhetoric of the Islamisation of Britain, although when I asked him to give me an example of this Islamisation, his only suggestion was that a Muslim on his estate had tried to convert him. I pointed out that a Christian had handed me some reading material earlier that day.

But here's the rub. While Dean was woefully undereducated, UAF's Tarquin was, if anything, much more of an idiot. Despite being university educated, his major complaint about the protest that day was how disappointed he was that the police had put the kibosh on any hope of a running street battle between the two groups. Which was a joke, because he was a skinny wisp of student and the fascists would have ripped him to pieces like a strongman with a phonebook.

At this point in the night, things began to go a little awry. My friend, a maths PhD student with a machine-like brain then pointed out, Spock-like, the flaw in Tarquin's logic. If Tarquin wanted to fight fascists, well, there was one right over the other side of the room. You know, the guy he'd just been chatting to and joking with for twenty minutes. His self-righteousness questionned, Tarquin confronted Dean and launched into a giant tirade about how ashamed Winston Churchill would have been of him.

A giant bust-up ensued in which Dean was, if anything, extremely restrained. As we left, Dean shook my hand and explained to me, with a sad frustrated face, that he was "basically just a very violent person". You had to admire his honesty, and we took that as our our cue to stagger off into the night.

EDIT: The family of Daniel Stringer, the assaulted teenager, have made quite clear that they did not invite the EDL to Hyde.

The Golden Latrine would also like to make clear that he is in no way implying that UAF are comparable to the EDL. This piece simply happens to shine a spotlight on the youthful stupidity of one UAF member.

Does it matter if Britain loses its triple-A credit rating? The opinion of the undemocratic ratings agencies is worthless

2012-02-13T16:20:00.013-08:00

The Golden Latrine has sympathy for Greece. Although my overdraft doesn't quite yet run to the hundreds of billions, the pain of unpayable debt is something that is all too familiar to most of us.

News percolated through last night that the credit ratings agency Moody's has warned that Britain may have its AAA status downgraded. In laymen's terms, these agencies grade the security of debt i.e. how likely a lender is to be able to pay the money back, AAA being the most secure. Put simply, a downgrade would mean that in theory it was more expensive for the British government to borrow money. Last month France lost its AAA status and eight other Eurozone countries had their status downgraded in this way.

Britain hasn't been downgraded, or even put on "negative watch" (which implies there is a 50% chance of being downgraded within two years), but rather on "negative outlook" which suggests only about a one in three chance of a downgrade in the next year or two.

Nevertheless, this is news that will have the chancellor's heart (if George Osborne has one) aflutter and raise alarm in the City, but the average person will shrug over and carry on with their day. And you know what, the average person would be right.

These are the ratings agencies, after all, that completely failed to spot the 2008 global economic crash and, more amusingly given their pronouncements from on-high about the creditworthiness of the Eurozone economies, the Greek debt crisis. As the brilliant Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out recently, Moody's report on Greece in December 2009, six months before the country had to be bailed out by their Eurozone partners to the tune of $147bn, was entitled "Investor fears over Greek government liquidity misplaced." In other words: everything fine here, nothing to see.

The stark fact is that global finance has reached the stage where it is simply too complex to be properly comprehended. As screenwriter William Goldman said of Hollywood: "Nobody knows anything.”

And don't just take my rabidly liberal, frothing-at-the-mouth word for it. Watch this clip, for example, from Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's outstanding documentary about the economic crash. Asked why they had given a AAA rating to bundles of extremely risky sub-prime mortgage debt, the heads of the credit rating agencies lined up to tell a Congress inquiry that, in the words of Moody's CEO Raymond McDaniel, their ratings "are just opinions."

Nevertheless, these undemocratic purveyors of "opinion" are being invited into the heart of our public life. Only recently the NHS regulator Monitor floated the plan to scrap the current assessment system that rates NHS providers (hospitals, ambulance services etc.) on clinical quality and instead use the rating agencies to grade their "financial strength" - with those achieving a low grade liable to lose their contract to operate in the NHS.

The mind well and truly boggles. Chancellor Osborne's office is somehow trying to spin the Moody's report as a validation of his austerity measures (you can read BBC Economic's Editor Stephanie Flanders excellent editorial here), since the Moody's report suggests that the downgrade might go ahead if the UK eases up on the cuts.

But should the credit rating agencies, who are accountable to no-one and have shown time and again that there predictions are basically just a stab in the dark, have this level of influence over government policy? We complain about EU law violating British sovereignty, but the credit ratings agencies exert a far greater sway over national governments than Brussels.

Maybe there is hope though. Last summer Standard and Poor downgraded the US's triple-A rating, to which the market's response was largely: So what? It's time for governments and policymakers to stop running scared.

McDonalds is creating 2,500 new jobs in the UK. Is sneering at "McJobs" just plain old snobbery?

2012-01-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

The Golden Latrine began to suspect that McDonalds did not have the most rigorous hiring policy after a friend listed "self-harm" on an application form under 'interests'. And still got the job.

The global fast food giant announced yesterday that it was creating 2,500 new jobs in the UK, sparking a debate about the worth of such "McJobs" - a term derived from Douglas Coupland's slacker bestseller Generation X, defined by Coupland as: "A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one."

Newspaper columinists and economists wrung their hands over this being the "wrong type of service job" (basic and low-skilled, rather than the creative, hi-tech jobs we're all supposed to crave in our glass-and-steel utopia), but is working in McDonalds really that bad? Is it the modern day equivalent of the blacking factory that Dickens' David Copperfield is sent to work in? Or is the real problem, as McDonalds themselves put it, "the prejudice that still exists around service sector jobs."

I can't help but think it's the latter. Charlie Brooker wrote a brilliant blog last year about working in a shop (you can read it here). He concluded:

What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn't the occasional snooty customer, or the shop, or the hours, but they way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant – their automatic assumption that I didn't enjoy it. I didn't particularly enjoy my life at the time, but I did enjoy the job. Not every day, not constantly – but I liked it more than I disliked it.

This rang true for me. I worked in a call-centre and for the most part, angry clients and asinine corporate motivational videos aside, quite enjoyed it. Nevertheless I used to occasionally find myself on the receiving end of similarly nuclear levels of condescension - mostly from well-meaning types who felt I should be doing something more commensurate with my genius.

More annoying were the ethical objectors. I recall a trainee paramedic telling me, in complete seriousness, with pitying eyes: "I really admire what you do. I personally have to do a job that means something." To which the only appropriate retort is: try paying your rent in principles when your landlord comes a-knocking.

I worked in a call-centre to raise the money to do my journalism qualifications, so there was always an end-goal in sight. But reading the Guardian's reader debate on McJobs, most of the comments from past employees were reasonably positive. People said the job taught them discipline and in many cases, if it wasn't a glamorous life, well that was an incentive to work hard and do well.

And let's be honest, there are worse things to do for a living than fry chips and serve burgers. As one poster put it:

I worked at Burger King's for a while when a student. I definitely saw it as a step up from my job before uni (working at a kennels). Anyone who thinks fast food provides s**tty jobs should try one where the real thing is provided in large quantities.

What was most shocking was the level of vitriol directed at fast food workers. Several even reported being physically attacked by customers. In part that's likely to be because fast food places tend to stay open late to cater for the lairy throwing-out time crowd. But it's also because there is a general air of contempt that hangs around these jobs, which is fostered by the non-lairy professional class too.

A number of posters on The Guardian's discussion seemed to think that the correct response to "Would you like fries with that?" was "If I wanted fries, I'd have asked for them." Which is to miss the point that the server doesn't actually care if you have fries, they just have a script they have to stick to, and they get in trouble if they deviate from it. Personally I would have stabbed them in the eye with my till fob, no second thoughts.

McDonalds certainly has a diverse racial profile (mainly because a lot of Brits consider such service industry jobs beneath them) and the general consensus was that they promote from the shop floor. So next time you're wrecked and mouthing off in McDonalds/KFC/Greggs, spare a thought for the person behind the counter. This probably isn't their dream job, but it's a job, and right now that's better than nothing.

Have you worked in a McJob? The Golden Latrine invites you to share your experiences of unruly customers/psychopathic managers/terrible corporate videos below.

David Cameron is downright delusional if he still thinks unemployment will fall over this parliament

2012-01-24T23:00:00.000-08:00

The Golden Latrine dimly remembers July 2010, one month after the Coalition's election - a time when he was still hiding under the duvet, fingers firmly plugged in his ears, la-la-laing and praying it was all just a feverish dream.

Back then our freshly-minted PM latched on to figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) to confidently predict during Prime Minister's Questions: "Unemployment is going to be falling during this Parliament". Let me just repeat that: Unemployment is going to be falling during this Parliament.

While it was transparently obvious that the deficit reduction plan was going to wipe out large swathes of public sector jobs, Cameron was insistent that the growth in the private sector would more than makes up it.

In fact, as recently as June 2011, Cameron's friends at the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies were claiming that public sector job losses would be offset by a ratio of 3:1 in the year from March 2011.

Those claims now look openly delusional, to put it mildly. Over the last year, new private sector jobs have (just) offset public sector job losses, but I don't imagine that momentum is likely to be maintained.

Cameron, meanwhile, is still claiming that there have been over 500,000 new private sector jobs created since he was elected, a claim which some minimal digging from Channel 4's FactCheck proved to be just plain untrue.

New statistics released on January 18 by the Office for National Statistics show unemploymemt at 2.68m (8.3%), the highest since 1995. David Cameron responded at PMQs by taking "responsibility" for the figures, rather than the blame - a stance nicely lampooned by the Guardian's parliamentary sketch writer Simon Hoggart:

[Cameron said] "The government takes absolute responsibility for everything that happens in our economy, and I take responsibility for that." But not the blame. It might be the government's responsibility, but it isn't their fault.

Except clearly it is. The idea that the private sector could take the slack for the wholesale vandalism of the state (and by extension, public sector jobs) has been shown to be fundamentally flawed. In the three months to November, employment in the private sector rose by 5,000, while employment in the public sector fell by 67,000.

There was also a large increase in part-time work, a classic sign, as Larry Elliott has pointed out, of weak demand in the labour market.

And why does all of this matter, you ask? Because unemployment is the spanner in the economy, creating a vicious circle. When unemployment is high, people have less money to spend: benefits don't stretch far, and companies can get away with offering pitiful wage increases to those clinging to a job, knowing employees will be take whatever they're offered. But that lack of spending hits the economy, which means new jobs aren't created. It's a cruel algebra, and one that looks set to be troubling the UK for some time to come.

Journalists take shelter, Wikipedia is offline

2012-01-17T05:04:00.000-08:00

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. The Golden Latrine has taken to his Anderson shelter and advises you all to do the same, for today the apocalypse has hit. Yes, that's right, Wikipedia is down for the day.

This seemingly minor inconvenience will hit the journalistic profession with the force of a meteor strike. Forget all the other issues bedevilling the profession - the Murdochs, phone-hacking, the loss of advertising revenues, dishonest journalists - this is, as political types like to say, a game changer.

Newsrooms across the globe will come to a standstill. Puzzled journalists are, right now, sitting and scratch their heads, starring bereftly at their half-eaten sandwiches, wondering where the hell they are going to find out the GDP of Gambia, that actress's credits or an explanation of a basic scientific concept. It's almost as if they're going to have to start doing genuine research.

But there is a serious point behind Wikipedia's temporary snooze. Their 24-hour blackout has been decided upon by their community to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. Anyone trying to log on will be confronted with this:

There is a reasonably clear explanation of the two bills here on the BBC website. Essentially they are entertainment industry-backed bills designed to crack down on music and film piracy and illegal downloading. And the punishments they are looking to impose are suitable draconian: anyone found guilty of streaming copyrighted content without permission 10 or more times within six months may face up to five years in jail.

The recent case of Sheffield-based Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old student threatened with extradition to the U.S. for running TV Shack, a site linking to pirated TV shows, proves that simply not being a U.S. citizen isn't going to save you. Those free South Park episodes may soon be a thing of the past.

The two bills also ban advertisers/search engines from linking to file-sharing sites, effectively rendering them invisible. So why are Wikipedia (and other internet giants like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook) so strongly against these bills? Well, you can read Wikipedia's full statement here, but it boils down to the fact that the wording of the bills is so open-ended that if passed it would be, in their words, "devastating to the free and open web". The battle for the internet has well and truly begun.

Is Wikipedia accurate?

When Wikipedia announced the blackout, there was a lot of snarky online comments along the lines of "Quick, we'd better stockpile inaccurate information". Amusing, yes, but research has continually shown that the myth of Wikipedia's inaccuracy is just that, a myth. A 2010 study showed that cancer information on Wikipedia was just as accurate (if less well-written) than on the National Cancer Institute’s peer-reviwed Physician Data Query.

EDIT: For anyone still puzzled, I've just found this nice little animation on the Guardian website which clearly explains SOPA.

How close was Margaret Thatcher to turning Liverpool into a ghost city?

2011-12-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

The Golden Latrine once went to Liverpool and found it a charming, cultured city, far removed from media reports painting it as a concrete hellhole full of curly-haired Scousers shouting "calm down, calm down" in comedy accents.

However, as The Guardian reported, new cabinet papers released yesterday by the National Archive show that following the Toxteth riots in 1981, a number of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet were less keen, with a number of them apparently urging a gradual evacuation of the city.

The "concentration of hopelessness" on Merseyside, and perhaps more pertinently the city's record of industrial strife, was enough for the likes of Sir Keith Joseph and then Chancellor Geoffrey Howe to ask if money spent on the city was simply money wasted. To quote Howe:

Isn't this pumping water uphill? Should we go rather for 'managed decline'? This is not a term for use, even privately. It is much too negative, when it must imply a sustained effort to absorb Liverpool manpower elsewhere – for example in nearby towns of which some are developing quite promisingly.

Quite. After all, if the people of Liverpool don't have the decency to vote Tory, or serenely acquiesce to socially-destructive Conservative policy, why should the government do anything to actively help them?

While there's no evidence that Howe's words were ever likely to become official government policy, it still represents an alarming snapshot into the mind of Thatcher's cabinet. In the end Michael Heseltine was left to argue the case for Liverpool's regeneration - asking for £100m-a-year, he instead got pocket change, and even that came with the express proviso that there be no publicity attached. If Liverpool's plight was self-inflicted, the Tory thinking went, why should they be rewarded?

Which is probably why Tory politicians are about as popular in Liverpool as The Sun. More recently Boris Johnson was made to go and grovel after his 2004 Spectator editorial which claimed that the people of Liverpool "cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, thereby deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance about the rest of society".

While the mass majority of the present Coalition cabinet give the impression of only ever having seen a council estate on Shameless, the likes of Work and Pensions Secretary Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith do at least seem prepared to engage with the reality of what life is like in Britain's most impoverished areas.

I was present at a fringe event at this year's Conservative Party Conference, where Duncan Smith blamed successive governments for “ghettoising” large parts of Britain, a situation which he felt played a significant role in the 2011 riots.

Acknowledging that government policy (rather than merely the inherent fecklessness of a city's inhabitants) might have played a role is a step in the right direction. But for all Duncan Smith's good intentions, the fact is that the cuts are hitting Britain's inner cities hard. The Tories may have given up on the idea of evacuating Liverpool's inner city. Check out, for example this and this.

Does Santa care if you're a Christian? (militant atheists, take note)

2011-12-27T06:28:00.000-08:00

The Golden Latrine spends the blustery days after Christmas Day each year weeping into the last of the cold cuts, his tears thankfully blotting out the endless re-runs.

However, there's only so many top 100 lists featuring Stuart Maconie (a man, as the great Stewart Lee pointed out, "able, if the price is right, to recall almost any aspect of the entire spread of all human existence") you can take before you begin to crave a bit of intellectual substenance, and my favourite article over Christmas was a piece by the philosopher Allan de Botton, grappling with the thorniest of Christmas issues: Should an atheist celebrate the holiday at all? [NB: If at this point you're keen to get back to gorging on Quality Street while watching Cars 2 with your aunty and your girlfriend, the short answer is yes they should. Thanks for reading.]

Despite being a non-believer, I have always been a twinkly-eyed enthusiast for Christmas. As a child I would transform our front room every year into a tinsel and decorations obstacle course. It never occurred to me that the yearly nativity play was meant to be anything other than a good yarn. It's clear then that it's quite possible to celebrate Christmas and enjoy reuniting the family and eating nice food and a glitzy tree, without the trappings of religion.

For the more militant of atheists though, the equation is simple. Christmas is a celebration of the life of Christ, a gaudy carbuncle on the underside of Christianity. If you aren't a believer, there's simply nothing for you here. Take this, as a random example:

During the so-called holiday season, [the atheist] must be able to stand aside and look at it all objectively and say, "Why, this is silliness. Gussied up though it may be in tinsel and fantasy, it's all no more than ritual kow-towing to an imaginary being in the sky. I'm a grownup now, and I no longer need to believe in Santa Claus.

The question came up for me before when a Jewish ex-girlfriend explained to me that her family wouldn't be celebrating the festival fully because they weren't Christian. To which my natural response was: well, um, neither am I.

De Botton talks about being raised as a hardline atheist (him and his sister were given presents in August to subvert the Christmas tradition), but coming to realize that Christmas (and by extension, religion) could serve a useful social purpose. As he puts it:

We invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day: the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses; and the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise. God may be dead, but the urgent issues that impelled us to make him up still stir and demand resolutions which do not go away when we have been nudged to perceive some scientific inaccuracies in the tale of the five loaves and two fishes.

I find that a fairly watertight argument (if any militant atheists are reading, do feel free to post and tell me why it's not). For Dawkins et al, religious belief is simply a category error, based on a misunderstanding of the scientific method. If only the religious looked at the facts, they'd have no choice but to forsake their faith and skip merrily into the sunset of scientific reason. But science only tells us how things are - it doesn't tell us how to live, or offer up any sense of community.

A lesson for ITV: Just how do you tell the difference between reality and a computer game?

2011-09-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

The Golden Latrine still remembers the time he played Grand Theft Auto III solidly for a weekend at university. Finally stepping outside, sun-starved and bow-legged, the real world and the computer game world seemed to have merged.

It appears that the Golden Latrine is not alone though - ITV know exactly how that feels. In the most po-mo development in human history, it emerged that some footage from an ITV documentary of "terrorists" using Libyan weapons to shoot down a plane was, in fact, lifted directly from the video game ArmA II.

Now, anyone with half a brain (or anyone who watched any of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe) knows that the news is a simplified, abbreviated, selectively-edited construction, and not a perfect mirror of current affairs. The joy of documentaries is that they can put some flesh on the basic facts.

But once you know that one piece of the documentary is falsified, it's not a great leap to then ask yourself what else has made its way in there? Consider the case of the recently shamed Independent columnist Johann Hari: once his shall we say "liberal" attitude towards quotation and maliciious Wikipedia editing became public, it cast a shadow of doubt over his entire body of work. I recently re-read his beautifully-written piece on Dubai, and found myself wondering if any of it was real. Knowing what we do now, it just rang false.

ITV's official statement blamed an editing room mix-up for the inclusion of the computer game footage. As they put it:

The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers. This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologise.

Now I don't know about you, but to me that rings some fairly shrill alarm bells. If it truly was, as ITV claimed, "human error", then they're guilty of rank amateurism (and precisely how did the ArmA II footage end up there?). And if it was inserted intentionally then...well, those of us in what a George Bush aide once called "the reality community" might as well hang up our coats and surrender. How did they think no-one would notice?

That said, perhaps the "human error" alibi isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. In his wonderful critique of the news industry, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies tells of trainees at ITV's newsrooms left to cut pictures and write underlays (the words to be spoken over the pictures) despite having no experience of either. As Davies reports of one such trainee:

She said she had cut pictures too short for their slot with the result that the screen went to black for several seconds, as well as writing underlays that were too long for their pictures so the item ended in mid-sentence.

The perfect metaphor

However the game footage made it into the IRA documentary, it nevertheless seems the perfect metaphor for our times. In 1991, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published three essays before, during and after the first Gulf War: "The Gulf War will not take place", "The Gulf War is not really taking place" and "The Gulf War did not take place". Baudrillard's thesis was not that the conflicts had not physically taken place, but that the way both the soldiers and viewers at home experienced these conflicts had changed massively. The "war" was conducted like a computer game, a remote-controlled war, with a minimum of casualities on the American side. The daily news showed on-board recordings of the bombers hitting their targets.

Back to the IRA documentary though, and Marek Spanel, chief executive of the game's developer Bohemia Interactive Studio, professed himself bewildered but told Spong he took it as a compliment of sorts, calling it "a bizarre appreciation of the level of realism incorporated into our games." And in a perverse way, he's right.

Computer games are becoming graphically ever-more lifelike, and incorporating an increasingly cinematic level of narrative (take something like L.A. Noire), but let's not start using them as a substitute for reality in weighy documentaries just yet. Thanks ITV.

Edit: The Guardian's Ben Goldacre posted a link on Twitter to this brilliant spoof of the story discussed in this blog. Recommended viewing!

Did Sarah Palin take drugs? And does it matter? After all, Obama took the White House despite admitting he inhaled

2011-09-15T15:11:00.001-07:00

The Golden Latrine once snorted a sherbet fountain on the school bus in the mistaken belief that he would experience profound spiritual insight and euphoria. What actually resulted was a profound sneezing fit and a week's worth of blocked sinuses.

Seriously though, drugs are no laughing matter (well, except for nitrous oxide). While our elected representatives may, on occasion, take cash in brown-paper envelopes or conduct steamy affairs with high-class vice girls, surely none of them have stooped so low to dabble in controlled substances? Wasn't the message on Grange Hill clear enough? Just say no.

Imagine my shock then on reading that US presidential hopeful Sarah Palin has been accused of using cocaine and marijuana in a new "tell-all" biography. While the image of Palin hoofing coke off the side of a snowmobile and getting stoned with a groovy college professor is undoubtedly an enticing one, the evidence for the accusations seems pretty sketchy.

But if it was true, the model for responding to these kind of allegations has to be Conservative MP, chick-lit author and walking self-advert Louise Mensch. After speaking eloquently as a member of the Select Committee responsible for grilling Murdoch senior and junior, she was (entirely coincidentally, I might add) contacted by a journalist who said they had information that she had taken drugs in a nightclub with violinist Nigel Kennedy while working in the music industry.

Her tactic for dealing with this accusation? Outright denial? Cowering in fear? Getting straight on the blower to Max Clifford for some hasty "image management"? None of the above. She simply admitted it sounded likely, but her memory of the particular night was unclear (presumably because her head was clouded with said substances).

What a breath of fresh air! And what a change it made to the parade of New Labour politicians coming out to mumble and sheepishly admit to smoking cannabis, once or twice, when they were students. Alistair Darling even felt obliged to state that didn't like the taste (echoes of Clinton's "I did not inhale").

Before we jump on the bandwagon and condemn politicians for being elusive and mealy-mouthed, we should ask ourselves why they are so cagey about revealing details of past indiscretions. The truth is, our culture expects our elected representatives to be whiter-than-white - take instance, the outpouring of public anger at the expenses scandal (despite the fact fiddling your expenses is almost a national sport). Who among us hasn't got past experiences we aren't proud of? A person with no regrets would be a very boring person indeed.

But does the Louise Mensch drug-use story perhaps indicate that we are moving beyond such retrospective moral hand-wringing? Lurid stories of Chancellor George Osborne's alleged drug use have hit the news again this week, but let's remember that evidence of past use hasn't been an impediment to either of the last two US Presidents: George W Bush was a recovering alcoholic and Obama openly discussed using marajuana and cocaine in his memoir, Dreams from My Father . Obama even went on record to confirm that he inhaled , adding: "That was the point".

The truth is that both Brits and Americans love the idea of redemption - hence the phenonemal success of the X-Factor with its sob stories and "this is my last shot" narrative arcs. What the public demand is not that our politicians are squeaky clean, but that they are simply honest enough to come clean about their pasts.

David Cameron is wrong - Britain isn't broken, just slightly chipped

2011-09-04T03:47:00.000-07:00

The Golden Latrine is old enough to remember those glorious days, way back when, when life was all rosy-cheeked children playing football in the street and fry-ups and chatting to Nora from the lauderette down the labour exchange.

But how different life is now compared to that golden past - at least according to PM David Cameron, who is adamant that the nation is in the grips of a full-blown moral crisis.

In case you missed it, Tony Blair recently penned a piece on the UK riots in The Observer, in which he argued that the riots were down to a relatively small number of highly dysfunctional, asocial households which are atypical of Britain as a whole. As Blair put it:

The left says they're victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won't help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties. The key is to understand that they aren't symptomatic of society at large.

This seems to me an eminently sensible analysis. Study after study has shown that prison doesn't work, but neither does sending in a single social worker once a week. Wholesale 'family intervention' is required. And to be fair to Cameron, he seems to agree, vowing to turn round the lives of 120,000 troubled families by 2015.

But there was a very definite disagreement about what the riots meant. Blair concluded his Observer piece:

Elevate this into a highfalutin wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally and we will depress ourselves unnecessarily, trash our own reputation abroad, and worst of all, miss the chance to deal with the problem in the only way that will work.[my emphasis]

However, David Cameron remained unconvinced. Responding to Blair in an interview on the Today programme, Cameron insisted that Blair was wrong, and that the moral malaise was far more widespread:

In the riots there was clearly a hardcore of people who were just breaking the law and had no sense of right and wrong or moral boundaries. But, tragically, we also saw people who were drawn into it, who passed the broken shop window and popped in and nicked a telly.

And that is a sign of actual moral collapse, of failing to recognise the difference between right and wrong. So I don't think you can simply say this is just a criminal underclass and no other problem at all. I think it does go broader than that.

The mistake Cameron makes, it seems to me, is in treating rioting and looting as the same thing. While the hardcore rioters may well have been the troubled families Blair (and Cameron, for that matter) believes we need to target - aided and abetted by the odd bored student - plenty of people helped themselves to a free t-shirt or widescreen television. Evidence of a far-reaching moral malaise? Or just a reminder of a basic article of human nature: if we can get something for free, we will?

Remember the cases of the cash machines malfunctioning and giving out free money? There's been numerous cases of queues of well-balanced, middle-class people queuing round the block with their children for their handout.

In many ways Cameron's Today interview was just a reprisal of this speech made in August, in which he talked about the coalition tackling "the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations". Buying into the myth of moral decline seems to be an occupational hazard for Tory PMs - Thatcher frequently pined for "Victorian values", seemingly oblivious to the fact her allegiance to free market economics was dissolving those very community values.

So whenever we feel tempted to start seeing the riots as omens of the forthcoming apocalypse, let's just remember: none of this is new. 2000 people helping themselves to some free trainers is not the end days. The fear of feral youths and teenage gangs is a phenomenon that is centuries old. Let's try and keep some perspective, yes?

The UK riots: a reaction to ingrained poverty? The work of "mindless" thugs? Or just an over-enthusiastic shopping spree?

2011-08-13T04:35:00.001-07:00

Britain, first an apology.

Like our blessed Prime Minister, The Golden Latrine watched the UK riots unfold from a shadowy lair in the sunny Tuscan hills, a glass of flat prosecco in one hand and smartphone in the other. As England smouldered and its anxious citizens cried out for a State of the Nation blog, I lay sweating in paradise, perversely wishing I was there.

After getting past the initial "What, in the name of David Dimbleby, is going on?", the question I, like everyone else, wanted answering most was simple: Why is this happening? As the initial suggestion that this was a political protest over the shooting of Mark Duggan faded, a large section of the population (and the media) quickly reached a consensus that the rioting was "mindless" - an atavistic outpouring of rage from an animalistic underclass incapable of higher thought.

Such was the hysteria surrounding the riots and looting, that the suggestion was that even looking for causes was wrong. As Owen Jones said in a Newsnight interview with an inflammatory David Starkey: "there's a dangerous climate at the moment, I think, to even begin to understand the underlying social and economic causes is seen as justifying mindless thuggery" (and in this context Labour leader Ed Miliband deserved a great deal of credit for not giving in to the temptation to sensationalise, telling a crowd in Manchester: "We have got to look into the causes, why people are going around doing this. And I think there are a complex number of causes").

There were, though, commentators who did try and delve into the rioters' motives. The idea of the rioters' "mindlessness" was challenged by Dan Hind in his piece for Al Jazeera and Russell Brand. And The Golden Latrine can't believe he is saying this, but...in The Guardian, Zoe Williams (a journalist who until now has reminded me of Daisy Steiner from Spaced) produced a brilliant piece on the psychology on the rioters and looters.

Williams set out the three common positions on the riots: the authoritarian response (riots as glorified mugging, carried out by a generation with a colossal sense of entitlement, and enabled by a limp-wristed, mealy-mouthed criminal justice system); (the liberal response (as exemplified by youth worker Camila Batmanghelidjh's piece in the Independent); and a more pragmatic response (summed up perfectly by blogger Sarah Carr:

"the media coverage makes them look like cunts. And perhaps many of them are. But even cunts can have legitimate grievances. Maybe they’re destroying stuff because they have no other channel to express their sense of hopelessness and rage at their situation. Or maybe they and their friends just like the thrill of a ruckus with the added bonus of free gear."

The best example of the authoritarian response unquestionnably came from Golden Latrine favourite Melanie Phillips, who, in a truly batshit crazy piece in the Mail blamed Labour, lone parents, "ultra-feminists", the welfare state, 'victim culture' and multiculturalism for the rioting.

What was really interesting in Williams' piece, though, was her discussion of whether the riot was nihilistic ("everything is shit and pointless") or consumeristic ("I want a new pair of trainers"). She persuasively argued that the two were not necessarily contradictory, quoting marketing and consumer expert Alex Hiller:

If you look at Baudrillard and other people writing in sociology about consumption, it's a falsification of social life. Adverts promote a fantasy land. Consumerism relies upon people feeling disconnected from the world.

And personally I think that's bang on the money. The UK riots saw young people turning that advertising fantasy world into a reality, which is why the whole thing looked so unreal, like a computer game. And the sense of rioting and looting as a great adventure cannot be overlooked - just read Kevin Sampson's piece on his part as a youngster in the Toxteth riots:

In all the hours and pages of reportage since rioting returned to our cities last weekend, not one commentator seems to have touched upon the sole unifying factor that fuels and drives such unrest – excitement, fun, teenage kicks. In 1981 I could have cited unemployment (check), low-income, single-parent family (check), experience of police brutality (check) as factors in my participation, but none of the above even remotely came into my thinking then and I doubt it is stoking today's unrest, either.

I went along in 1981 because I was swept away by the mind-blowing buzz of mob mayhem. There's no justifying that – in the crudest terms such behaviour is quite simply wrong – but try telling that to a 15-year-old on a mountain bike. To him or her, it's like a Wii game come to life – a hyper-real version of GTA. You taunt the police until they chase you, then you leg it and regroup. Some of the more radical kids will throw rocks and set cars and wheelie bins alight to get them going, but sooner or later the "bizzies" (police) will charge.

It makes you think, eh?

Somalia is starving...but what's that on the horizon? Is it a bird? Is it an aid parcel drop? No, it's...the Daily Mail's Liz Jones

2011-08-02T03:38:00.000-07:00

The Golden Latrine almost choked on his crunchy nut cornflakes this morning at the news that the Daily Mail is sending Liz Jones to cover the Somalia famines.

For those not in the know: Jones is a former editor of Marie Claire, now in the lucrative employ of the Daily Mail. Her deeply confessional columns about her eating disorders, her failed marriage, her facelift , and lately, the running of an animal sanctuary reveal a woman so self-obsessed that her ego has developed its own gravitational field, sucking everything else into its orbit. So self-parodic are some of her columns that I have often wondered whether if she isn't just some journalistic in-joke.

To try and search for an equivalent, sending Jones to Somalia is like sending Rod Hull to cover the House of Representatives' debate on the US debt-ceiling or, um, Lindsay Lohan to explore child-trafficking in India.

Jones announced her latest assignment in the most obnoxious way possible in a piece for the Mail entitled 'The caring professions? They just don't seem to care at all' (read it here). Starting with the blindingly obvious ("I don't scrape and scrabble at the coal face of the NHS very often" - hardly a surprise for a £200,000-a-year columinist), she rails against the injustice of her local GP refusing to give her the numerous jabs she needs to fly out to the Horn of Africa. Despite the fact she's given them no notice. And she's not registered with them, so they don't have her notes.

If there's one person who could make the Somalia famine about herself, it's Jones. As she tells the GP's receptionist: "'I mean, it's a global crisis. Millions of people are dying and you won't put yourself out to allow me to be seen by a nurse, not even a doctor, for five minutes?'" The correct response, we are told, would have been: "'Sod the protocol – everyone needs to know about this famine, Miss Jones, so I am going to speak to the GP and see what we can do.'"

Throughout the whole piece there's the reek of entitlement and a hysterical sense of self-importance. The cherry on the cake comes when Jones compare the receptionist's shocking rudeness (i.e. completely understandable inabilty to help) to the abuse at the Winterbourne View care home in Bristol, revealed by Panorama in their recent shocking expose. I am a talkative man, but sometimes even I am lost for words. (For those are interested, there's a more extensive, point-by-point demolition of Jones's piece by doctor and Sirens author Brian Kellett here).

While Jones's belief in the importance of her vocation is touching, let's be clear - Liz Jones is not a medical practioneer or an aid worker, she's a journalist. She can write what she sees, raise awareness of Somalia's suffering and, who knows, maybe inspire a few Mail readers. But the suspicion remains that for Jones, this is "misery tourism" - a "cheap holiday in other people's misery," as the Sex Pistols put it. As Ros Cowards says: "I've noticed some journalists and travellers seem to seek out places of extreme suffering almost as a way of trying to quell discomfort about their own personal dissatisfactions and unhappiness. And as we know, Jones is very, very unhappy."

To given Jones her due, she's a talented prose writer and, hell, I'm all for people spreading their journalistic wings. But I'm just not sure she's got the political savvy or the empathy needed to report on Somalia. Read this sympathetic interview with Deborah Ross, and you're left with a portrait of a woman hopelessly lost in self-absorption. In the past Jones has covered Bangladesh, but this famine deserves our best reporters, not our best paid.

Edit: Thanks to @nickrowan27 for pointing me in the direction of the sublime spoof Twitter account @LizJonesSomalia, which offers frequent updates on Jones's progress in Somalia. Sample tweet: "I'm not trying to be crass - I know there's a water shortage, but wetwipes cost about 17p a pack. I'd offer to share mine but I need them."

Was the Utøya killer Anders Behring Breivik insane?

2011-07-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

First, a confession. The Golden Latrine has a huge journalistic crush on Deborah Orr, she's one of the few columnists able to get inside a story and tease out its subtleties and absurdities. Hence my joy when I read this piece, from Thursday’s Guardian, where she makes the same point as me about Melanie Phillips not being to blame for being quoted in Utoya killer Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto.

But where our views massively diverge is when she then goes on to argue that Breivik is clearly mad, railing against what she calls “the widespread reluctance to characterise outrageous miscreants as insane.” As Orr puts it:

I'd suggest that all indiscriminate acts of murder are most profitably viewed as symptoms of mental illness, and that a more universal reluctance to describe attempts at mass-murder as "terrorism" might be an eminently sensible way to go in the future. Those who attempt to justify such acts, as logical or understandable? They seem pretty unstable to me themselves.”

But is this true? Does mass murder automatically equal insanity? I think in this case, I have reluctantly to declare myself one of what she calls the "unstable" ones. The 'you have to be mad to be capable of mass murder' thesis is certainly a convenient belief, but I'm not sure it's true. As Guy Walters persuasively argues in the New Statesman:

If you passionately believe you are right, and you feel you have no other method of obtaining your goal, then killing is a very logical thing to do. This is undoubtedly a normative form of human behaviour, as human beings have been killing each other for the "right reasons" for millennia. Many of us are repelled by the act of murder and, thankfully, we do not resort to it even if we believe the other side is wrong. But some do kill others to advance their interests, or to stymie those of others, especially if they believe that a greater threat is posed to society by not carrying out the killings.

Was every member of the IRA or ETA mad? Were these groups just clubs for the psychotic or psychopathic? Surely not. While for some it may have just been a convenient ideological excuse to blow people up, many members genuinely carried the belief that such action would further their legitimate political cause. The skill of Chris Morris's suicide bomber "comedy" Four Lions was in showing that most suicide bombers are just angry, confused teenagers, not psychopathic criminal masterminds.

Breivik's lawyer, Geir Lippestad, is clearly of Orr's persuasion, telling journalists that "This whole case indicated that he is insane," and refusing to represent him unless he undertook psychiatric evaluation. But so far the only evidence suggesting mental illness is Lippestad's claim that Breivik is a "very cold person". No hearing voices, no disordered thoughts, no hallucinations. By declaring that Breivik is automatically mad, we are letting human nature off the hook.

Mass murderers heart Melanie Phillips

2011-07-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

While it’s difficult to find a silver lining to the mass murder of 76 human beings in Norway, it was hard to suppress a smirk at the news that killer Anders Behring Breivik had quoted Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips in his rambling manifesto.

Her initial response to this unnerving fact was to stress that Breivik had only quoted her twice in 1,500 pages - which is, let's face it, still not a great hit-rate.

But let’s be clear, there’s a world of difference between Breivik and Phillips. While her views might be repugnant, I think we can safely say that Melanie Phillips does not condone the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, even if they are card-carrying Labour Party members (now mass detention, that’s another story. No no, I jest.)

In fairness to Phillips, Breivik did also quote such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Orwell, and an author has no control over who reads their material. Was it J.D. Salinger's fault that the Catcher in the Rye "inspired" a psychotic Mark Chapman to kill John Lennon? Clearly not.

But the episode does serve to underline the danger of Phillips's intemperate words, her intolerance and hyperbole. She believes her tirades exist on some rarefied intellectual plane, and Keith Kahn-Harris may well be right when he says she is "polite company with a ready (if sometimes acidic) wit and a very sharp mind", but if you write incendiary words, there's always a chance they'll come back to bite you on the ass.

Phillips, a former Guardian staffer, seems to get much of the left foaming at the mouth, but the main emotion she evokes in me is sadness. I still remember reading this interview and thinking she sounded like the angriest, loneliest woman in the world.

Idiot Detector

2011-04-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

It's way past the witching hour, but I felt obliged to share this. I'm praying for it be patented and rolled out sooner rather than later...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/microsoft-word-now-includes-squiggly-blue-line-to,19739/?utm_medium=promobar&utm_campaign=recirculation

Bettakultcha 8, 12th April 2011

2011-04-13T15:38:00.000-07:00

Picture a good night out and an evening sat watching slideshows is not necessarily what springs to mind, conjuring up, as it does, images of The Mighty Boosh’s Howard Moon preparing yet another an interminable lecture on his fossil collection, or your dotty uncle insisting on showing you his neverending holiday snaps. Such trepidation would be entirely misplaced though. As Bettakultcha makes clear, slideshows are quite possibly the most fun it's possible to have with your clothes on.

The brain child of marketing director Richard Michie and professional speaker and artist Ivor Tymchak, Bettakultcha is based on a simple format: each speaker gets five minutes (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) on any topic they wish. It's become a bit of a word-of-mouth success and tonight around 300 people pack into the palatial surroundings of Leeds' Corn Exchange for a slice of slideshow action.

The talks are uniformly excellent, covering everything from the cystic fibrosis to the history of North Korea to pinhole cameras and the joys of Iceland (home of Bjork, rather than the budget supermarket). There's a handful that particularly lodge in the mind, including one by Martin Carter (AKA Maria Millionaire) about drag queens, complete with dramatic entrance down the staircase of the Corn Exchange (he later confides: "I did think 'Oh no, the floor’s laminated, I’m going to go arse-over-tit down these stairs!') and Jayne Rodgers' inspired reimagining of Star Wars as a perfectly-crafted Mills and Boon tale.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's Angela Whitlock's presentation "inspired" by creative thinking guru Edward de Bono declaration that no-one inspired him. She discussed her inspiration - her friend Dave, a man with lymphoma who was blanked by his hero Ian Botham and so renamed his tumour in Beefy's honour. It manages, in the short space of five minutes, to be both very moving and hysterically funny.

Such diversity is weaved into the design of Bettakultcha. As co-founder Richard tells me when I grab him at the end for a brief chat:

"I receive all the slides, and all I ever see is those slides. I have no idea what these people are going to say. So you look at the slides and start to juggle it and say “well, that one seems to fit with that one” and you try and pace between the serious things and what you think might be the more amusing things. The trouble is until they start speaking, I really don’t know. Sometimes it’s a happy accident, and sometimes it’s just a...[facial expression indicates a very much non-happy accident]. I think – or I like to hope – that we’ve got a nice balance between more energetic people and people who are a bit more nervous."

Drag queen Maria Millionaire, AKA Martin Carter. Thanks to Jon Eland (http://strawbleu.co.uk/) for the photo.

There is, however, one major rule: no pitches. As Richard explains, the Bettakultcha ethos is simple: "we want people to talk about their passions, what we don’t want is people turning up saying 'I sell cars' or 'this is my business'. Adds Ivor: "As soon as you start introducing this commercial, corporate-type element, people just want to switch off. I’ve seen it too often. There’s some ulterior motive – 'actually we want you to spend money on our product'. Bugger off."

There's one presentation that veers close to a pitch, but otherwise the speakers talk with passion and knowledge about their chosen subjects. As the evening draws to a close, three or four people get the chance to do some Bettakultcha freestyling over some random slides.

Bettakultcha has hit on a powerful formula, and it's so nice to come to event that brings together Leeds' alternative cultural community, or what Ivor calls "the arty, cultural, kind of eccentric people". Tonight, as well as Richard and Ivor, I meet the lovely Jess Haigh (AKA the Travelling Suitcase Library), Ellie Snare, Kirsty (the girl behind the brilliant Foldageddon) and, well, more nice people that it's possible to catalogue. As I grab the ravishing Maria Millionaire for a quick chat, he sums it up perfectly:

"It's one of those things that makes you think ‘Actually, Leeds is amazing’. Why isn’t there more things like this?” When people ask you what it is, it’s an evening of slide-shows, but it’s so much more than that. It’s one of those things where you need to get people to come here to understand it."

For more information, check out: http://bettakultcha.blogspot.com/

Bettakultcha co-founder Ivor. Thanks to Jon Eland (http://strawbleu.co.uk/) for the photo.

I'm late, I'm late, I'm very very late...

2010-06-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

Browsing the net this week, I stumbled across this amazing mini-lecture on our changing perspective of time by Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, the mind behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.

Perhaps most interesting is Professor Zimbardo's thoughts on how technology is rewiring our brains, and why, as consequence, the traditional cirriculum of active teacher-passive pupil and rote learning is doomed to fail.

The killing fields of Cumbria

2010-06-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Twelve people have been confirmed dead so far today after the carnage wrought by gunman Derrick Bird in the Cumbrian seaside town of Whitehaven.

As is so often the case, news networks quickly rounded up a gaggle of acquaintances and friends, who to a man described him as "polite", "mild-mannered", "placid". His friends said he was "good craig", while his local ladylady declared he was a good egg.

How, then, do we broach this gap between the public persona and the bloody reality of events? The Guardian reports a man who knew Mr Bird telling Radio 4: ""I can't see how this piece fits into his jigsaw. It's just completely out of place."

Perhaps, scary though it is to admit, the truth is that we don't need to. Maybe it is quite possible to be a well-functioning citizen and a cold-blooded killer? Isn't that the basis of shows like Dexter, where we root for the serial murderer on the flimsy premise that he only, er, y'know, murders bad guys?

The Not So Big As You Imagined Society

2010-05-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

One of the great fallacies/thought farts of this election has been Cameron's idea of the "Big Society", which basically translates as: "should you have any problems, it's not our fault, you're on your own kiddo."

This is politicians abdicating responsibility, giving up on The State. It harks back in the most transparent way to Thatcher, whose genius was to somehow convince the British electorate that, even after unemployment had reached 3 million, it wasn't the State's place to intervene.

And if you don't believe me, how about this from the Times, not usually the most Labour-friendly of papers:

"If the Conservatives get in, Osborne will be overseeing the biggest spending squeeze since 1945 as they engage in their traditional pastime of scaling back the welfare state. Over the decades, the main task of any Tory administration has been to come up with a new, euphemistic way of describing how it will scale back the welfare state. Cameron's pop is the coining of the phrase 'Big Society'. Big Society, charities and voluntary organisations will, apparently, step in and pick up the slack in areas where once the welfare state existed.

For anyone wondering if this might work, Cameron's former tutor at Oxford, Vernon Bognador, appeared to explain:

"That is the philosophy of the 19th century," he said, briskly. "What does 'Big Society' really mean? That if you become destitute the Salvation Army will step in? It doesn't work. That's why we invented the State."

The Frontline of Homelessness

2010-03-02T12:24:00.000-08:00

I arrive just before midnight on a windswept Yorkshire evening (let's face it, aren't they all?) to meet Fred Tidball, 63, and Dan Copperwheat, 21, Night Support Workers at St George’s Crypt in Leeds.

The crypt was converted in 1930 by the Reverend Don Collins to provide solace to those feeling the hardships of the Depression and now operates at what Dan calls “the frontline of homelessness in Leeds", the only place prepared to take the “street homeless” (those with no bed for the night and no referral). Service-users frequently include those suffering from alcoholism, drug and gambling addictions, mental illness or domestic violence.

I am met at the door by Dan, a Sports Science student at Leeds Met University, who ushers me into a small reception area with small brown leather armchairs and a white tiled floor. First impressions are good. If this was a hotel, I’d happily stay in it, the result of an elegant refit unveiled in February this year. I hear Fred before I see him, a booming disembodied voice echoing through the corridors. A former alcoholic himself, who lived homeless for several years, he has worked at the Crypt since 2006 and greets me with a knuckle-crunching handshake.

The revamp (covered by the Guardianlocal here) was more than cosmetic though, and the hostel now offers more than just a meal and a bed for the night. Team leaders work throughout the week to find clients new, more permanent accommodation. As Dan poetically puts it: “Now it’s not just a plaster on a gunshot wound.” Nevertheless, the crypt only has fifteen rooms, so they inevitably have to turn people away, a fact sorely acknowledged by Dan, who tells me: "I’d love to be able to take everyone, but we just physically can’t.”

It’s a peaceful night tonight, a few groups of young men pass through, but that isn’t always so. Dan calls it “a challenging job, perhaps the most challenging”. Fred tells me that in the four years he has been at the Crypt, he has been threatened with knifes, broken bottles, one man told him he’d set him on fire, and one even pulled a gun. “I told him if he didn’t put it away, he’d be leaving the Crypt with metal fillings,” he tells me with a mischievous smile.

Nevertheless, the pair’s enthusiasm for the job appears undimmed. Both practising Christians (though Fred is keen to stress that he isn’t the “bash-people-over-the-head-with-a-Bible-kind”), the pair stress that the positives far outweigh the negatives and both talk of the job in terms of a religious vocation. "You wouldn't do this job if you didn't have some sort of calling," is how Fred puts it to me.

Asked of the frustrations of their jobs, they cite the fact that they often don’t get to hear about the success stories (interestingly, a paramedic friend told me a similar thing recently). Dan is pragmatic about this though: “people are not here to rebuild their lives, we’re here to bridge the gap between homelessness and sustainable, ‘positive’ accommodation.” Fred qualifies this slightly: "we're not here to rebuilt their lives, but we are here to encourage them to take the next step."

There are good news stories though, and it's those that make it worthwhile. Fred regales me with a story about a former resident at the crypt who he helped get off the drink. "He paid me the greatest compliment I've ever had," Fred tells me. "He said, "You're the most devious bastard I've ever met." But he meant it in a good way!"

As I wind the interview up, Fred approvingly quoting Muhammad Ali line "Even if I emptied garbage cans, I'd aspire to be the best garbage collector there was." It seems a perfect encapsulation of the commitment and passion they demonstrate for their job. As he says as he shows me out, back into the alcohol-fuelled chaos of a Saturday night in central Leeds: “At the end of the day, we’re all here for the folks that come through that door”.

For more information on the work done at St George's Crypt, and the work that they do, see: http://www.stgeorgescrypt.org.uk/

I want money, that's what I want...

2010-02-18T13:51:00.000-08:00

A brilliant piece of spoofery from American satire sheet the Onion, daring to imagine a world in which those in control of global money flows woke up and smelt the coffee.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_economy_grinds_to_halt_as

Protestors, Put The Eggs Down

2009-06-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

I watched the recent egg-throwing protest against the BNP with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

As BNP leader Nick Griffin fled the scene, faced besplattered with yoke, the ambient irony levels were raised to intergalatic proportions by Unite Against Fascism member Donna Guthrie, who told the BBC: "We don't believe in free speech for fascists".

Now egg-throwing might be cathartic, and it might "signal opposition", but it is an idealistic pipedream to think that such stunts will make BNP voters question why the party incites such heated opposition. On the contrary, it's far more likely to have several extremely counter-productive effects:

1) It immediately puts the backs up of everyone who voted BNP. The message it sends, in essence, is: "Dear electorate, you were wrong to vote for this man. Please try again." Which is perhaps not the message Anti-Fascism campaigners want to send to a nation of voters who already feel frustrated and patronised.

2) Egg-throwing gives credence to the BNP's notion that there is a "liberal conspiracy" that prevents people from talking honestly and openly about race and immigration. The irony of a protest against mob rule consisting of an elected MEP being screamed at by a mob, pelted with eggs (an act which is, technically, an assault), forced to flee and then having his car surrounded is a bit much to take. Which leads me on to the most important point:

WE NEED PEOPLE TO HEAR WHAT THE BNP ACTUALLY STAND FOR

An awful lot of swing voters who voted BNP did so on the grounds that the three mainstream parties had failed them, so now "it's time to give them a chance" or "let's see what they have to say". And that's exactly what needs to happen - their views need to be exposed. You only had to witness Nick Griffin squirming under David Dimbleby's questionning to realise that this was the way forward. He needs to be asked, again and again:

1. what would you do for the health service? In particular how would you deal with chronic understaffing problem caused by your immigration policy?

2. Remind us, why is it black people can't join the party?

3. So, what happens if everyone rejects your offer of voluntary repatriation?

Of course, there's also an important distinction to be made between what the all-new, shiny rebranded BNP claim they want to do (e.g. softly-softly voluntary repatriation for those who moved here post-Windrush) and the reality (for example, watch Nick Griffin telling a room of American Nationalists that hopefully one day the BNP would be in a position to say that "every last one must go"):

This, then, is our challenge, to publicize the true face of the BNP. Denying them a platform to speak is simply letting them off the hook. To use a good solid racist metaphor, let's give them the rope to hang themselves with.

and finally...

3) Tossing dairy products at racists simply demonstrates to a lot of the nation that the BNP are disliked by worthy, politicized students. Which, frankly, for a lot of people is a good enough reason to vote for them.

Why Economists Are in Need of Some Greek Tragedy

2008-10-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

This week, Alan Greenspan, the man who held the world's purse strings in his hands from 1987 to 2006 as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, admitted to a congressional committee that his hands-off, free market ideology was beginning to spring leaks. His words make for fascinating reading. Asked by Congressman Henry Waxman "Were you wrong?", Greenspan replied:

Partially...I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms...I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. The overall view I take of regulation is, I took an oath of office when I became Federal Reserve chairman. I'm here to uphold the laws of the land passed by Congress, not my own predilections.

What's really surprising about Greenspan's admission to the House of Representatives is just how flimsy his basic dogma seems in the wake of recent developments. Conventional economics has always treated people and organisations as rational actors who will always act in their own self-interest. The absurd presumptiousness of this position, even its silliness, should be clear to any layperson. Most people would surely concur with Jonathan Swift, writer of Gulliver's Travels, when he wrote to his friend, the poet Alexander Pope, of "the falsity of that Definition animale rationale, and to show it should be only animale rationis capax." Put simply: man is not a rational actor, merely capable of rationality.

People do things all the time that are damaging to their self-interest: abuse drugs or alcohol, sleep with an unsuitable person, fail to control their temper or emotions. The Greek's even bequeathed us a word for it - cacoethes, defined by Chambers Dictionary as "a bad habit or itch; an uncontrollable urge or desire". Shock horror, driven by greed or just a desire to continually create and open up new markets rather than shore up existing ones, bankers might not always act in the interests of their banks or clients. They are fallible, not acting for our best interests in the best of all possible worlds.

Still, given that ideology is so unfashionable in both American and British politics at present, Greenspan's words seemed almost otherworldly, as he presented his realization of "flaws" as a kind of religious doubt, a wavering of his faith in complete deregulation. When Congressionman Waxman pressed: "You found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?", Greenspan essentially agreed: "That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

So how has the media responded to Greenspan's bombshell? Jim Randel at the Huffington Post applauds Greenspan's forthcomingness "in acknowledging that he miscalculated the events which have led to the worst financial crisis in the United States since the Great Depression." Randel paints the former Fed Reserve Chairman as an ideologue living in the "Washtington bubble", blind to the anarchic reality that deregulation has created.

This airy attitude to risk does seem to characterise Greenspan's tenure in the Federal Reserve. For instance Greenspan was an enthusiastic backer of deriatives, the chopped-up parcels of saleable debt that brought inter-bank lending to a standstill. As Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003:

"What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so. We think it would be a mistake to more deeply regulate."

Come the credit crunch, Greenspan was left floundering: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief. Such counter-party surveillance is a central pillar of our financial market's state of balance."

Using military edifices for sporting ends

2008-07-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

An idea from left-field here: Israeli filmmaker Eytan Heller and international NGO, OneVoice, have floated the idea of a joint Israeli-Palestinian bid for the 2018 World Cup.

Now this got me thinking. Whilst the military checkpoints and lack of infrastructure would appear to be a insurmountable obstacle to hosting a global football tournament, the 700km security wall would be perfect for a game of "Wally" (pronounced wall-e).

No, not the new Pixar movie, that's Wall-E. And not the guy you have to find in the red-and-white stripey jumper. This is "Wally": the childhood game in which you kick the ball against a wall in such a way that your opponent can't return it. There was a raft of tactical possibilities: you could go for power in the hope that the ball would travel sufficiently far that you're opponent couldn't reach the wall with his kick, or strategic placement - hitting the wall at such an angle that the ball ricocheted violently off somewhere that made it near impossible to hit the wall unless you were some kind of footballing wizard. If you were a conniving bastard, you could just run in their way and stop them kicking it.

Argentina's Lionel Messi might think he's good with all his little dinks and dribbles, his tricks and tomfoolery, but let's see how he fares when faced with a little bit of "Wally". British defenders take note - extreme power with no thought of direction will win the day here. Forget picking a teammate out, just hoof it my son!

Anyway, I have no doubt that a dose of global Wally action would smoothe the way to peace in the Middle East more successfully than any global submit or Presidential peace initiative. Although...when I think back, Wally was quite a competitive game - we were always accusing one another of having taking an extra touch. Yes, now that I come to think of it, it's probably a bad idea...any hopes of a two-state solution will be cast out of the window forver when Mahmoud Abbas is seen gloating wildly after Ehud Olmert swings his right foot and "air kicks" before triping over his own shoelace.

Also, on a more technical level: with a wall that long, how would you miss?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wally_%28Game%29

Trials and Triangulations

2008-06-10T04:05:00.000-07:00

Roy Hattersley wrote a very insightful piece in The New Statesman recently about New Labour's obsessive desire for consensus. The hubris of 'The Third Way' was the belief that it was possible to keep everyone happy, all of the time. The truth is, as Hattersley recognised, politics is about conviction, and sometimes you need to take unpopular decisions.

This was something that Margaret Thatcher understood implicitly. When unemployment spilled over the 3 million mark, a statistic that should have been a one-way ticket to electoral death, Thatcher simply shrugged and said that it was not part of government's role to regulate employment levels.

Monetarism was callous and dysfunctional, but the principle is sound - politics is not always about "consulting the electorate". Throughout the Thatcher period, millions of voters repeated the same mantra: "I don't agree with her policies, but she's a strong leader." From the beginning, New Labour has been petrified the press would see it as returning to Old Labour, "reverting to type", and has worked using Clintonesque 'triangulations' i.e.

- What we would like to do
- What the public finds it acceptable for us to do
- Find a 'triangulation' point between the two

If Labour is to have any hope of winning the next election, it needs to give up this facile wish to be liked, to appease all. Forget triangulation, just decide on a project, and follow it through.

Blair's third election win was a case in point. By that stage, the public were utterly disillusioned with him as a person but, crucially, continued to belief that he had an idea of where the country should go.

The Clunking Fist Goes Virtual

2008-05-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

"The Brain" is wobbling. As a champion, throughout the Blair years, of Gordon Brown and his more cerebral approach, his recent fall from grace has been uncomfortable to watch. Once public opinion turns, it's like watching a stunted, anaemic child being ripped apart by a pack of schoolyard bullies.

What really disturbed me though, was Brown's response to the disastrous local elections: the pledge, like that of a beleaguered football manager, that he would "work harder". Brown has, according to observers, raised his already Hurculean workload to truly Stakhanovite proportions. He is reputedly getting by on a spirit-withering, Thatcher-esque four hours of sleep per night.

This desire for hard-graft, for "getting stuck in", is coupled with an obsessive desire to consult the public. Brown recently claimed that Labour's problem was that it hadn't been listening hard enough, and Downing Street advisers clearly agree, having decided that the way to combat Labour's calamitous showing in the local elections is to slingshot the PM into cyberspace, where he will be able to "engage" with those elusive young voters on YouTube:
http://uk.youtube.com/downingst

Gordon Brown recognises that Labour is unwell, but his diagnosis is wrong-headed. If all Brown's "hard work" and engagement with the public is to pay any dividends though, he has to accept that merely refining policy is not enough. He refuses to be drawn into "the politics of personality", but he must accept that Prime Minister is a talismanic position, a figurehead. In The Political Brain: How People Vote and How to Change Their Minds: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, Drew Westen writes persuasively about the preponderent role played by emotion in politics. Both Al Gore and John Kerry lost out to Dubya, Westen claims, because they harped on about policy, fixated by the minor details, whilst Bush made broad-ranging emotional appeals to his audience.

The thing that excited the nation about the New Labour project in the first place was not policy details, it was the emotional charge of it's "narrative" - Britain as a young country, on the cusp of a new dawn, ready to do away with stale grey men in grey suits and embrace the new millennium.

Toilets Not Included

2008-05-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

The other day I overheard two girls comparing the Fritzl case with that of Natasha Kampusch, another Austrian, who escaped to freedom in 2006 after seven years in captivity, in a bid to decide which case was worse. One of the girls definitively claimed that the Kampusch case was worse, “because she didn’t even have a toilet”.

Okay, now I am a big list-maker, as a sports fan I love statistics and league tables and the idea of comparisons, but the idea that it was necessary to decide which involuntary detention and rape was “worse” left me slightly queasy. Call me crazy, but I’m not sure that the provision of toilet facilities entirely compensates for the extra 17 years of imprisonment and rape.

Sharon Hogan wrote an interesting piece in The Guardian about how her hunger for details on the Fritzl brouhaha made her feel like a pervert. I would argue that the need to know these baleful details is natural - there's nothing more human than curiosity. Also, stories of incest and imprisonment are piercingly dramatic. As my former English teacher once said: "the three most interesting things in life are sex, death and suicide."

The truth is, it's part rubbernecking, part empathy. Hogan frets about hoovering up the gory details whilst luxuriating in domesticity. As she puts it: "I want the full story. I want to read about it in the morning while I munch a croissant with SpongeBob on in the background. We imbibe these tales of gruesome horror while going about our everyday lives." That is the nature of suffering though. If we spent every waking moment pondering other people's suffering, we'd be blithering, jelly-like moral wrecks. As Auden put it in his wonderful 'Musee des Beaux Arts':

the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

Sharon Hogan, 'From Josef Fritzl to Fred West, why do I lap up every sick, perverted detail of these vile stories?'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/15/1

Fritzl and Fiction

2008-05-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

The thing that really struck me when the details of the Josef Fritzl case first came to light was it's implausibility. It's that hoariest of cliches, the one that Tom Wolfe felt obliged to confront when he wrote 'Bonfire of the Vanities': truth really is stranger than fiction.

Nevertheless, when the case first appeared like a genetically-mutated deer in front of the headlight's of the world's media, there were two obvious cultural parallels that sprang to mind. The first was Chan-wook Park’s film Oldboy, a dark, keep-you-guessing thriller, in which a man is arbitrarily imprisoned in a single room for seven years before being released just as arbitrarily.

The other, slightly less explicit, was John Fowles’ 1963 novel The Collector (made into a film two years later by William Wyler), which tells the story of Frederick Clegg, a butterfly collector and city clerk who decides to kidnap the object of his affection – a beautiful art student at Slade – and induce her into loving him. After chloroforming her, Clegg stashes her away in his cellar and, after several aborted escape attempts, the student eventually succumbs to illness (echoes of Kerstin, Elizabeth Fritzl's daughter, the reason Fritzl was finally found out). True story: my mum once told me how disturbed she was when she read Fowles' novel because the lead character not only shared the same name - Miranda - but my mum also happened to be a librarian at the architecture library at UCL, next door to Slade, where the collector stands and observes his victim. The kidnapping itself takes place outside the Everyman cinema in Hampstead, one of her favourite haunts at the time.

As horrific as Fritzl's acts were, they were not entirely alien to us. I think Nicci Gerrard hit the nail on the head when she observed that the Fritzl case was "beyond the wilder shores of our comprehension and yet it fits with an unsettling neatness to a whole set of domestic stereotypes." The idea of a dark flipside to suburbia now seems rather trite - Twin Peaks is virtually a period-piece, and American Beauty seems, if anything, rather glib. In fact, there was even a Desperate Housewives plot involving a son kept chained in the cellar. The notion of the mirror image - above ground, a world of domesticity, family values and good, wholesome fun; downstairs, a subterrean realm of of murky sexuality, pain and torture, is a familiar trope of fiction. The tragedy of Josef Fritzl is that he misunderstood which was which. In his "confession" Fritzl rationalised his actions, claiming that he imprisoned his daughter in her makeshift penitentiary to “protect” her from the damaging influences of the modern world. For Fritzl, the "cellar family" was the utopain idyll, whilst the outside, "real" world was brimming with corruption and prurience.

Nicci Gerrard, 'A monster from the pages of a Grimm tale'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/04/austria.internationalcrime