Category Archives: Politics

Notes to AM – Resignation

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12th May, 2010


Labour’s Love Lost


I would not trivialise your demise dear bro

with half-baked bons mots about that day or this

but I will say


What stunned me

– in the back of the car

crossing town for that brutal farewell –

what slapped me in the face

(and does today)

was the way

the world despite calamity carries on

oblivious.


There was your name

in bold blunt prison

behind Ham & High wire mesh


searing


and yet

the impudent business of living

– bastards standing at bus-stops –

went ridiculously on

as if any meaningful bus could ever –


a girl on her mobile

laughing

laughing?

another, taking leave, hand on hip, of a guy,

skirt stretched, one heel braking her wheeled suitcase

going somewhere


as if going somewhere

still meant anything

when we now know it’s just

going ridiculously on.


And later, when Downing Street called

it’s not that I wasn’t grateful

it’s that it was too late for prime ministerial tea

and sympathy to sugar the shock of earth’s outrageous turning

(he’s gone, by the way, I meant to say, your decent friend,

just yesterday, with two bonny lads and some dignity).


Of the numbing fractured kaleidoscope of that day’s images

one alone spoke sense:

Closing Down Sale

acknowledging as it did

resignation

acknowledging as we must

passing

heydays’ ebb and heydays’ flow

and look, here’s one again, on Oxford Street,

Everything Must Go.









Poem

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12th May, 2010

 

 How Beastly the Bourgeois Is

 

 D. H. Lawrence  


How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–


Presentable, eminently presentable–
shall I make you a present of him?


Isn’t he handsome?  Isn’t he healthy?  Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
   thing


Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
   man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
  face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
   demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.


How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species–


Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable–
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
   than his own.


And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he’s all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.


Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty–
How beastly the bourgeois is!


Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
   England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.




(With thanks to Guy Hibbert, who is himself a poet, for reminding me of this.)

I Woke Up A Tory

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9th May, 2010


I was worried that come the Friday after the election, I would wake up in a sea of ideological blue.  A country gone comprehensively Conservative. 


It was much worse than that.


The country had not gone blue.  But I had.


Because now that we have a hung parliament, and the smoke-filled room shenanigans have begun (I take no pleasure in saying I told you so) I have been brought to a horrible realisation.


I am the only ‘progressive’ person in the UK who doesn’t believe in PR.  I am alone with half a country’s worth of Tories.  Or, let’s just cut to the chase: I am now a Tory.


I must be because every bone in my body hates this PR nonsense.


First of all, PR produces hung parliaments. It produces exactly the kind of undemocratic nonsense we are currently witnessing.  Unlikely bedfellows negotiating in the Cabinet War rooms; exactly how much?  Exactly what favour will that buy me?  Soon they will book a room and make unholy alliance.  God save us.


Do democrats REALLY want this the whole time?  The voter, under any system – PR or not – has no say in these whoreish bargains.


Anthony King, a professor of politics and ‘Constitutional Expert’ suggests in today’s Observer that we should be relaxed about coalitions.  They happen in other countries.  They happen INSIDE parties.  So that’s all right then.


No.  Coalitions inside parties are different.  They are resolved ahead of an election.  Compromises are formed, and manifestos drawn up.  The big issues at least are agreed upon.  And voted upon.


Coalitions after an election stink.  Parties can ally with whomever they like, and trade whatever they like; the voter is a million miles away.  This is not democracy in action.


I have argued elsewhere about the disproportionate power given to small parties by PR.  I’m really bothered by it.  But I don’t want to keep banging the same drum.  And I have a suspicion that the coming weeks and months will reveal just how disproportionate and distasteful that power can be.


Pro-PR people are writing everywhere that now is the time; now is a unique chance in history to FORCE through PR.  Interesting language for democrats.


Listen, I accept that PR was never going to be the choice of a majority Tory or even Labour government; to carry it off, the LibDems were always going to need a hung parliament and the disproportionate bargaining power that affords them.  The trouble is, it is disproportionate.  It is an abuse of power, and no democrat can feel comfortable with that.


Second,  even if you like your parliaments well hung, PR systems are just rubbish.  I really wonder how many of the proponents of electoral reform have actually read the Electoral Reform material?  


Has the crowd currently clamouring for PR as if it would let us “take back parliament” – and cure cancer along the way – been to the ERS website?


If you haven’t, give it a whirl.  There are tons of PR systems to choose from, but the favoured one is STV. Download the factsheet and weep. It’s boggling to understand. That should already ring alarm bells for any democrat. The demos ought to be able to understand how it confers its kratos, surely?


If you persevere with the STV factsheet and wade through the self-congratulation, you’ll see this.


1) WHEN IS A VOTE MORE THAN A VOTE? People who vote for a candidate with ‘more than enough’ votes get to choose more than just that candidate. Surplus votes get ‘redistributed’. Back a winner, and your second choice counts too. Ahead of everybody else. There’s value for you.


2) EXTREMISTS’ CHARTER People who vote for loonies and racists, take heart. Your second choice will count! Yes, your candidate, if he is last, will be thrown out. But fear not, your second choices will go right to the top of the pile, and be added to the tallies ahead of those cast by sane people for candidates ranking only in mid-table mediocrity.


Bonkers! Do free-thinking progressive types really want to dignify the second choices (not even the first choices!) of those who vote for loonies, nutters and racists?


And that’s not to mention the obvious disadvantages of PR, like losing the simplicity and accountability of ‘one constituency, one MP’. Ho ho, goes the argument: that simplicity was just for when we were illiterate and to continue with it patronises the modern voter. And that accountability was presumably for some long-forgotten time when MPs were corrupt and didn’t need the scrutiny and exposure of being the one MP responsible for a constituency. We’re better than that now.


STV’s devisers seem to be obsessed with maximising the number of voters who’ve ‘helped to elect’ MPs. This ‘helping to elect’ idea attaches undue importance to the second choices of the winning candidate – which is counter-intuitive. And, worse, it prioritises the second choices of those who vote for losing candidates. Which is just plain nutty.


I worry that this whole PR thing is a distraction from detailed policy debate; I think urging Clegg to exploit his position to drive PR through is, ironically – but grotesquely – undemocratic and no progressive thinker can be comfortable with such (ab)use of disproportionate power, no matter how badly they desire the end; the LibDems’ motivation will always be clouded by self-interest and sure, that’s not unique to the LibDems but then you can’t also dress up the promotion of a system which will benefit its proponents as fresh, clean politics.


Those of us who want values in politics ought to examine our own house.  Armando Iannucci said he thought the public had had a good election.  I’m coming to think he was wrong.  We the public hate our politicians.  As Stephen Fry pointed out recently, we tear them to shreds at every opportunity. We punish them for their crimes, but also for their misdemeanours, for their husbands’ indiscretions, for the pitch of their voices, for their squints, their tics … and ultimately for their humanity. Consequently they cannot even begin to be honest with us; they must obfuscate or die. Politics is shabby because we make it so.


It’s our fault.


Voters like us sometimes don’t deserve to be represented, proportionately or otherwise.


Seven Shades of Shame

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5th May 2010


There is some corner of the Groucho Bar

That is forever England


Because sitting in that corner is my friend, our dearly beloved national treasure, Mr Stephen Fry.  It is treason, still punishable by death – or at least (as Fry might say) seven shades of shit falling on your head – to query, question or otherwise undermine the pronouncements of the jewel in our national crown.


Fry, the Answer To The First Question.  (“Who shall I follow on Twitter?”)


Fry, the first lord of luvviedom, the one-man ‘wiki’ of extravagant and obscure knowledge; champion of Wodehouse, Wilde and Conan Doyle; emotional anchor of the Cambridge set of Thompson, Laurie et al; early adopter of all things Mac, et cetera, et cetera.


Oh and don’t forget the taxi in America.  The thoroughly decent openness on manic depression.   The heart-rending Who Do You Think You Are?


Meddle with this icon at your peril. 


ESPECIALLY if you’re still hoping to persuade him to come and make that drama series with you. 


ESPECIALLY if this all-round untouchable good guy nominated you for the Groucho.  These things are un-doable, you know.  Memberships may be withdrawn.


So, hold my hand, reader, while I say what I have to say.


Stephen oh Darling oh Sweetie oh Braveheart.  Vote 3?  Giving it a number doesn’t make it better!  Vote 3 is still a vote for the LibDems!


Why are you even contemplating it?  Ay me.


You seem to offer two reasons:


1) you think Clegg and Cable are “more impressive” than many other candidates and therefore , “our country can only be enriched, in its moment of economic crisis, by their presence in government at some level.”


Is it not, Great One, that you prefer any of their policies?   Which ones?


2)  you like the sound of a hung parliament.  (No double-entendres, please; these are serious issues and serious times.)  “The arguments, if arguments they be, that hung parliaments mean hobbled, lame parliaments are surely nonsense.”


Oh but Dear One, what motivates you to want a hung parliament?  “Our society is open enough, with its media and social networking, to force the politicians to come to a workable arrangement.”


I fear this is a “knock the heads together” argument similar to that espoused by another hero of mine, Armando Iannucci, in yesterday’s Independent.   It springs from a desire to see cleaner politics.   No argument there.


My concern is that a hung parliament entails back-room horse-trading; politicians disappearing into smoke-filled clubs to form and maintain governments, well away from the public eye.   I don’t think that produces open, clean politics, or delivers accountability.


Worse, hung parliaments give disproportionate power to centrist parties.  In our case, the LibDems have not said whether they would side with Labour or the Conservatives in the event that they held the balance of power.  It’s a huge choice, and the public would have NO say in it.   How democratic is that?


And how democratic is it that a party with 80 – 100 seats could hold what is laughably called the “balance” of power and freeze out a party – choose your colour – with 250 or more seats? 


How democratic is it that Nick Clegg would seek to insist on the choice of leader of another party?  (Perhaps you missed this while you were writing your book in Hollywood.  Mr Clegg first said that if Labour came third in the popular vote, then they would have “lost comprehensively” and he would not be able to support them.  Then he changed his mind, saying he would countenance supporting Labour in that event, but not Gordon Brown.  So, if it suited him, he would prop up a government which had “lost comprehensively”. )


None of which bodes well, Lovely Man, for the “determined effort to move to a genuinely open and well constructed parliamentary democracy” that excites you.


Oh I feel so horrible gainsaying you.  I embrace, kiss and adore you for speaking up for decency in politics.  An end to sniping?  Yes please.


And then I snipe at you.  I am loathsome and unworthy.  I have given way to base feelings, crude loyalties and deep turbulent emotions bubbling down in my depths.


I’ll be round the Groucho later to give back my little member’s keyfob.


As I walk away up Dean Street, the seven shades of shit will fall on my head, and I will know that my heart will never be at peace under an English heaven.