(7)

Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and then murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture... yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick.

It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever.

And the 'eye thing'... very cool.

But I am not writing this to praise Rhona... well, actually I am...

...no...no... the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday.

"Oh yes, that film is a hoot!" he replied, "but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything."

(3)

My thanks to Shane Greer for alerting me to what, on the face of it, seems like very good news, from Northern Ireland:

The education minister has said she is very disappointed by grammar schools planning to set up a company to run independent entrance exams.

I was not disappointed at all, when I read that. If there is one thing that really, really needs to be got out of the clutches of the state, it is school examinations. Schools and parents and children need to be able to choose the best exams to take, and employers need to be able to choose which exam results they will take seriously. That way, exam results will change to suit the needs of the times, but will continue to be a meaningful test of educational excellence.

More than 30 schools have said the tests in English and maths, will be held over either two or three days.

The Association for Quality Education said the exams would be held in venues across Northern Ireland.

So far so good. But this is where the report becomes less pleasing:

However, Caitríona Ruane accused the schools of being elitist ...

Ah yes, elitist. What kind of a vicious school wants to teach only those pupils whom it wants to teach, and to teach them really well? Monstrous.

... and said they could face legal action from parents.

Parents, that is, demanding better exams results. At present, the government pays for all such litigation. An independent exam system will have to pay the costs of resisting all such legal challenges for itself.

Now comes the really scary bit, the bit that got me putting this here, rather than only, say, here:

"They have a choice, people always have a choice," the minister said.

"What I would say to them is think very carefully before you go down the route of bringing boards of governors into situations were they may find themselves spending their time in court."

This is the language of the Mafia.

What is happening here is that the state has made something, in this case exam results, so complicated and legally challengeable that only the state can easily afford all the litigation involved in supplying such a service. Then, they impose "progressive" and "radical" change, i.e. they wreck the state system. At which point, some people and some institutions try to make an independent go of replacing the formerly adequate (albeit ruinously expensive for the mere taxpayer) state service with one that they have devised themselves. And, legally, they can go it alone. They can do this. But the laws they have then to obey are so complicated that it will cost them an arm and a leg.

Back door abolition of whatever it is the politicians want abolished, in other words. Nationalise part of something. Throw money and laws at all of it, thereby herding everyone into the arms of the state system, on purely cost grounds. Then shut down whatever bits of the state system they always had in mind to destroy, and defy the "private" sector to respond, in an impossible legal environment that only the state can afford to function in.

Only very wealthy institutions can afford in their turn to defy such arrangements. Politicians duly denounce them as: very wealthy. If the private sector decides to charge quite a lot for the now very expensive service that they provide, they are accused of charging a lot. And the politicians use those excuses to pass yet more laws, if they prove to be necessary, turning difficulty into impossibility. There's a lot of it about.

The overall result in this case, Shane Greer fears, will be the destruction of the really quite good top end of the Northern Ireland education system.

(3)

I just came across this. What's happened is that they've discovered another Vivaldi opera, and classical music blogger Jessica Duchen is less than thrilled:

Vivaldi was an astonishing character with a hugely colourful life. But isn't there a limit to how many of these rattly, twiddly baroque things the market can take? After all, most of them feature either a one-name title (eg Tomasso, Soltino, etc) or a massively long one (Il trionfo del blogorissimo classicale di Madamina Duchene), arias da carping hell for leather for several hours trying to sound inventive on the reprise (my favourite carp is to be found in halaszle, Hungarian fish soup), not to mention recycled bits and bobs from other works, a harpsichord sounding as harpsichords do, a swarm of wasps where the violins ought to be and a reluctance to cut even one note leading to hellishly uncomfortable theatrical experiences as the reverential principles of Richard Wagner are applied willynilly to music that was actually designed as background entertainment to business meetings, illicit love affairs and the odd bit of orange throwing.

Well said. Or to put it another way, the trouble with the authentic movement is that it isn't actually very authentic. But the real point here is not the alleged tedium of Vivaldi operas, so much as the exuberantly self-centred relish of her own eloquence with which Madamina Duchene writes about them. Lovely.

(3)

Tim Worstall has interesting things to say about the difference between social status and economic inequality, pointing out that the two things only occasionally map onto each other, a fact which does rather undermine the egalitarian argument that reducing economic inequality will reduce differences in status. A good point indeed: in the former Soviet Union and in heavily statist countries today, for example, there was and is a gulf between the citizenry and the cliques that run the show. This exists to a lesser extent, however, in the mixed economies of much of the rest of the world, where 'new class' of people - bureaucrats, politicians, media folk, academics, quangocrats, etc, hold considerable power and influence, even though they may earn less than say, a Goldman Sachs bond dealer. The gap was arguably far harder to bridge than is the case in the more fluid situation one finds in a pure market order where the process of 'creative destruction', to quote the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, destroys once-dominant businesses and dynasties and creates new ones in a never-ending cycle. Tim also makes the good point that having high status is often little to do with money at all. Fame, or having a prestigious job, or being an influential commentator, or whatever, often counts for far more than how much money one has in the bank. Ask yourself this: who has more status in British society - the editor of the Times or a hedge fund investor?

Another way of thinking about the difference between being rich and status is this: in some cultures, where acquiring wealth is sneered at or even suppressed, what counts is the accident of birth, or the ability to pull the levers of political power, or manipulate opinion in some way. As you will, gentle reader, no doubt guess, I think that one of the great things about the pursuit of wealth is that it is, in one of the deepest senses, profoundly egalitarian. Think about all those media commenters who sneer at 'ghastly chavs' messing up the view in the South of France or taking cheap flights to Malaga: what this point of view admits, in a way, that capitalism makes it possible for the masses to get on the same ladder as those dealt a good hand by accident of birth. I still think that part of the motivation for the Green movement or strict controls on immigration and population growth is a desire to cut off the ladder of opportunity for the masses (yes, I know this is a bit of ad hominem argument but I think it carries some validity).

For a great book on the subject of envy, which of course lurks beneath a lot of complaints about status and inequality, I recommend this classic study.

Anyway, as Tim rightly points out, people who think that ironing out economic inequality through such methods as steeply progressive income taxes will narrow gaps in status are liable to be disappointed. Humans are by nature a competitive species, and ranking folk according to some metric or other is ineradicable. Also, as the US writer George Gilder wrote in his masterful early 1980s defence of supply-side tax cuts and entrepreneurship, the folly of progressive taxes and other methods is that they do not eradicate inequality. Rather, they fossilise existing patterns of unequal wealth distribution and encourage the most ambitious people in a society to channel that aggression into less benign forms. Not an original insight, of course - Samuel Johnson, the 18th Century writer, made the same point - but one that needs to be rammed home from time to time.

(36)

Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.

I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren't crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?

It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that "Read more" button, you may rather quickly want to read less.

Still here? Okay then here goes.

When I was a child, there were two recognisably distinct working classes. There was the official "working class", who wore cloth caps, who left school at fourteen, did manual labour, drank beer, went to football matches (where they stood on concrete terraces), and who didn't just vote Labour. They were Labour. The Labour Party was a vast social institution, with vibrant branches throughout the land, and you would no more switch to the Conservatives because of a bit of nasty economic weather than you would have switched over to the Germans during the war merely because your sergeant-major was a heartless swine. Remember all those black and white movies starring people like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay?

Likewise the Conservatives. When I was young they were a similarly huge organisation. Biggest marriage bureau in the land, they were called. There was a definitely middle - as distinct from an upper – class, of "deferential" office clerks and senior manual labourers. But the aristocracy and bosses to whom the slightly more affluent and trusted workers deferred still ruled their roosts, and the massed ranks of the Conservative Party looked up to them, and aped their manners and mannerisms. I can never think of the Conservative Party of those days without thinking of another movie, Genevieve, in which office workers, thanks to their newly acquired but extremely second-hand cars, were able to play at being aristocrats.

But those movies also told a different story, of what was to come. Freedom was in the air. Not all the cars were aristocratically ancient. Suddenly the movies became openly anti-conformist, colourfully cynical about everything. Two huge tranformations got under way. A culture war which started in the fifties, exploded in the sixties and which has been raging ever since, cut the deference from under the old Conservative grandees and caused them to be mocked instead of imitated, and as for the old manual labour Working Class ... well, it just melted away, went to Asia. Locally, it either smartened itself up and got itself a job pushing paper and talking over the phone, or it gave up and went on the dole.

The results were the Thatcher and Blair eras, which historians will probably come to regard as the same thing. What happened was that British voters were becoming much more alike. Not identical. Not all equally poor or equally rich, but definitely more like one another. Their ambitions, tastes and problems were converging. They tended to like the same (now televised) entertainments, to dress similarly, to do similar jobs, to live in similar houses, to have similar ambitions - not to the point where a rich manager of a big corporation is indistinguishable from a toiler in an office half a dozen rungs below him, or to the point where a good Oxbridge degree no longer counts for anything, but more so than had been the case before. Politically, there are now fewer people who define themselves as being Labour or being Conservative. They are more willing to switch, from one party to another, none of whom seem precisely to represent how they feel and what they believe in any more, not least because party politicians are now far more rarely sighted by regular people, other than on the television. And many more of those Oxbridge (and similar places) winners in the meritocratic race to the top will be liable to vote Labour, because of their ancestry or their newly acquired opinions, and because much of the modern media have now become a huge "left wing" stronghold ruled by "left wing" grandees (the quotes being because such titans are unrecognisably different from the old leaders of the old working class). Many toiling wage slaves, who wear suits but who still toil, with no ancestral Labour loyalties or leftish opinions, will willingly vote Conservative, if they offer a better deal.

As I say, you can exaggerate all this. I still buy timber from people who have permanent dirt under their finger nails, having walked to the shop past other grubby toilers putting pipes into holes. Grandees are still very grand. But so were my grandfathers, and I'm not. And who knows what the kids of the guy who cut up my timber for me last month may already be doing? Besides which, such is the nature of first-past-the-post democracy that if only, say, ten or twenty per cent of the electorate switch from being solid Labour or solid Conservative to people who will go either way or some other way, depending, that's a potential landslide, to somebody. That's humiliation, for somebody. The phrase tipping point is hard to avoid here, and why bother?

All the parties now try to be all things to all men, far more than was the case fifty years ago. In those days, the thoughtless cliché was that politicians were "all alike", when in truth they were alike only in being comparable but distinct sorts of disappointment to their own distinct armies of supporters. They all told lies, but different lies depending on which party they were. Now, they really are much more alike, a trend recently described in detail by Peter Oborne in his book The Triumph of the Political Class. Oborne describes a switch from a world in which Labour MPs had much in common with Labour voters generally, but far less with their Conservative opponents, Conservative MPs ditto, to a world in which all the MPs are, pretty much, on the same side as one another. Politicians used to get their money from their supporters. Now, they get it from, well, politics. It used to be that one lot said of government spending: more! The other lot said: less! They actually disagreed, at least in what they said. Now they all say: no more than we can afford, but no less. They agree. The circles of the Venn diagram have moved together, and all party politics - "grown-up" party politics - is now done in the area of overlap.

It's a point I almost certainly owe to Oborne's book (which I read some months ago but have now forgotten most of the fine detail of) that Winston Churchill, regarded by most as a very old-fashioned figure, what with his aristocratic ancestry and his antique mannerisms, was actually, from this point of view, a rather modern figure. He made his entire living from politics, and from political commentary and political writing. When young he did soldiering, sort of, but always with a newspaper contract and with an eye to a seat in the Commons. Once there, he had millionaire businessman friends who bank-rolled him. He switched parties when younger. But, that distinct Churchillian public persona still reflected a political world in which the classes were sharply divided, even if Churchill himself was an early member of that political class that Oborne has written about. Harold MacMillan, the Tony Blair of his day, was a similarly modern type. Now, they are all like that, or try to be.

What this means is that modern British party politics is a furious race to get just that bit ahead of the other fellows, and thereby win the whole farm. If that ten or twenty or whatever it is percent of merely rational voters, the fabled swing voters whom all the parties now court so desperately, decide that, for all your obvious faults, you are just that tiny bit less frightful than those other snouts-in-the-trough swine, then you stand to win hugely, in one of those seismic upheavals.

But, do not confuse such a landslide with being deeply respected or, heaven help you, loved. The cause of the landslide is not depth of feeling, and certainly not in your favour. It is merely a widespread judgement that you and your pals are, for the time being, likely to be a bit less incompetent, a bit less predatory, a bit more canny and a bit less panic-stricken by the unexpectedness of the unexpected than those other bastard losers.

A final point, which is that I am not describing a Final Point, some kind of local and party political end to history. A pattern in politics - in anything, come to that - is no sooner widely understood than it is ready to be smashed. I can remember when people talked, in the late 1950s, about the "end of ideology", of how the Welfare State had been set up by Labour and accepted by the Conservatives, and that, pretty much, was that. Only months after that, all kinds of ideological hell was breaking loose which is only now subsiding half a century later as the Baby Boom that unleashed it finally sinks into its dotage. No sooner has the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron age been identified as its own distinct age, than some wholly new confluence of forces will erupt to knock the smug looks off the faces of the entire Political Class as we now know them, and replace the whole damn lot of them with wholly other sorts of politicians, perhaps with dirt under their finger nails. Perhaps poltiics will suddenly reassemble itself along generational lines, with the Baby Boom demanding more terminal care than workers feel inclined to bestow upon it. Some new rough beast will slouch towards Bethlehem, as it always does. Maybe Cameron will win a huge majority, but then, ... something quite different will happen, and that Cameron decade that he must already be anticipating and hoping only to prolong will elude him.

Perhaps the EU will actually inform Britain, publicly, clearly, that it now rules it, and that merely British elections really do indeed now count for absolutely nothing, and maybe the British people will accept that, which will change things rather, will it not? Or maybe they won't accept it, ditto. Perhaps Labour will now pull themselves together and replace Gordon Brown with someone less off-putting, and we will enter a time not of Thatcher Mark 3, but of permanent, Italianate, John Majorism stroke Gordon Brownism, in which all politicians without exception are permanently hated and permanently despised. Perhaps there will be a new Peasants Revolt (Peasants Revolts always happen just when, and just because, nobody expects them, not even the Peasants). Perhaps the Chinese and the Americans will have a war, and we will have to go back to our fellow countrymen sewing our clothes and assembling our MP3s and mobile phones, and there will be real workers again, saying Eee Bah Goom to each other and voting Labour no matter what. Perhaps Dagenham will be the epicentre of a thermo-nuclear explosion, with who knows what party political ramifications. Perhaps a new Ice Age will suddenly start, or a new plague will sweep the world. Perhaps Scottish independence will (a) soon happen, with (b) all kinds of dramatic and unpredictable knock-on effects, such as England leaving the EU but not Scotland. Or Wales.

But in the meantime, party politically speaking, things are, I think, as I have described them.

(20)

This story in the Daily Telegraph today about Burmese officials allegedly pilfering foreign aid and selling it just reinforces any prejudice one might have about the efficacy of sending aid to a country governed by thugs. It is not obvious to me what, if anything, the major powers could or should do about this. Outright military intervention seems unlikely and given the stretched resources of western powers, unwise. However, given its rapid economic ascent, one might hope that India could exert some influence for good, which is preferable to that of China.

Right at this moment, though, the main emotion one might feel about Burma and its plight is one of dark despair.

(10)

Actually, it is even worse than that.

- An unnamed BBC news journalist with whom I unexpectedly found myself drinking on Saturday, when asked if the BBC really is the Stalinist bureaucracy it is reputed to be.

(30)

Glenn Reynold's has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul's best selling new treatise, "The Revolution: A Manifesto".

He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with a long shared background.

I guess I will just have to sit back in my favorite upper west Columbia University hangout (a Starbucks) and watch some of the regulars go apoplectic. Some times I just like to be evil.

But you knew that.

(3)

Like the diarist and blogger Diamond Geezer (now that's what I call a brilliant name), I have come to value much of the scenery in the southeastern pocket of ours in England. If you are planning a daytrip and cannot face a long drive but want something that just about gets you away from the capital without being all precious about it, there is a lot to be said for Whitstable Bay in Kent's north coast. It is not grubby like Margate or impossibly twee; it is in fact a bit like Southwold in my old stamping ground of Suffolk. The place has several good pubs and restaurants so it pays to book in advance to guarantee a table in the height of the summer. Yours truly and Mrs P. drove down on Sunday and got there early enough to ramble along the coast before filling our faces with lots of seafood. I visited the area several years ago and forgot how pleasant it is. The existing owners of the seafront properties have not - yet - sold up and given the presumably high price of property there, will not do so and make way for tall hotels. I am all for freedom to develop but I hope that the place does not get spoiled. I guess that in such a place, even without planning laws, owners almost operate a sort of tacit law that states: "Don't mess this place up and ruin the long-run value of your own property". I think this sort of unspoken desire by property owners who are proud of an area not to foul it up is actually a good example of how order and harmonious building design of sorts, comes about without the need for planning laws at all.

I'll be back, as a certain Governor of California might put it. For two hours' drive from central London, it takes a lot of beating.

(8)

"If the BBC was given charge of a three star Michelin restaurant, it would puree all the food and feed it to its customers through straws."

- Stephen Pollard.

(13)

Some splendid person, writing pseudonymously in the obscurity of an open thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free semiblog, has provided a parallel text translation of the Report of the Independent Scheme Assurance Panel. His discussion begins here. It deserves a wider audience. Excerpt:

DAMN, I really must get back to work, but this is just so wonderful...

3.3 Identity management within Government

Early on, the Panel challenged the assumption that existing sources of identity data should be ignored in favour of a new set.

Like a lot of people, we couldn't understand why the NI number and its related data wouldn't do.

However, safe and reliable maintenance and use of a shared asset across multiple parties is a challenge for any organisation, not least Government with its many departments, each with its own priorities, objectives and challenges.

Then somebody showed us the figures that with a total population of 60M people in this country, maybe a sixth of them under 16, there are over 75M currently-issued NI numbers, and we finally started to understand that the entire current system is a complete balls-up.

People say to me, "Don't worry, it won't work." I would like to remind them that grand government schemes that are not working tend to be adopted anyway, and all the suffering they cause is declared a good thing, necessary for the progress of the nation. Lysenko's 'winterizeation' of wheat, did not work. Protectionism does not work. Most of the world's 'development' projects do not work. It did not stop governments implementing them at the expense of humanity. It does not stop massive numbers of politically influential people still believing in the grand reconstruction of deep natural systems and human institutions by government power, and devoting their working lives to promoting it. The National Identity Scheme still has every prospect of being Britain's 'Great Leap Forward'.

(Hat-tip: Wendy M. Grossman)

(17)

We have witnessed two weeks of unravelling. A fortnight where the socialist foundations of New Labour were exposed by the electorate after Brown's redistributionist endeavours foundered upon the rocks of his middling class taxcut dogwhistle. And their unionist pretensions were undercut by Wendy Alexander's referendum put option. Salmond will never buy.

The disaffection with New Labour is a confluence of favourable attitudes and pernicious circumstances. The expansion of clientelism widens the contacts between the state and the working poor. Not those on incapacity benefit, not those on income support, but people who apply for tax credits or pensioners on the borderline of poverty. These people never put money by for adverse circumstances or sickness or retirement, since they had to fund state monopolies through taxation or national insurance. Their plight is imposed by the state and they are forced to recoup the taxes paid through the bureaucratic process of tax credits and means testing.

We forget our history at our peril. Nobody likes a state employee snooping in our lives and people will vote to put them back in Brown's cuticle. There is only so far the state can intrude, even in a social democracy. Britain has never been a liberal democracy as liberalism died with Campbell-Bannerman, our first "Prime Minister". Yet, the dismantling of war socialism was a popular move that assured Tory ascendancy throughout the nineteen-fifties, even with Eden's reversal at Suez. Blair took note that consumerism trumped jingoism.

We have heard that the British people show greater trust in the state than their foreign counterparts. Why? Because the British political system, in the past, has been responsive to state intrusion and has reversed its effects. ID cards were abolished over here. That is why Britain survived as an admixture of monopolistic services and the judicious application of state power. New Labour revealed that the settlement had been overturned by all mainstream parties, with the help of Thatcher's radical centralisation. All law-abiding citizens found themselves facing unprecedented scrutiny from the government and they responded with true British grit: they walked elsewhere in unprecedented numbers and said "Fuck you!".

This makes the Tory achievement even more astonishing than it already appears, since so many of their natural constituency have emigrated.

So, Cameron, the people want government off their backs. Adverse economic circumstances and higher taxes, the inevitable outcome of socialism have increased their taxes and reduced incomes. New Labour wanted a voting bank and they found that state dependency equals Northern Crock (especially in Crewe) . Scything waste will reduce expenditure. It is not difficult. Reduce pork, reduce taxes.

(45)

Gordon Ramsay, the 'outspoken' celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian.

The TV chef said it was "fundamentally important" for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. "Fruit and veg should be seasonal," he said. "Chefs should be fined if they haven't got ingredients in season on their menu. I don't want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown."

The 'I am' does not want to see something and so thinks his views should be the force backed law of the land: the psychopathology of the expert that we so often see coming from doctors is at work again. The great unwashed must be forced to follow expert opinion, which means their opinion, naturally.

I like the idea of third world farmers pulling themselves out of poverty and selling me their products whenever I want to buy them and why should a loud mouthed self important chief and a bunch of fascistic green activists get to have a say in that? Their craving to impose their will on others should stop being socially acceptable and they need to be called authoritarian thugs to their faces.

(53)

Leaving aside the practical objections (such as decline in the quality of the UK legal system) is capital punishment justified for murder?

Note, this is not a question on whether capital punishment is effective, but is it just?

(24)

The monster who locked up relatives in his Austrian home for many years - at god knows what cost to their psychological state or physical health - is trying to defend himself by blaming it on Adolf Hitler.

Oh well, makes a change from blaming it all on video games, globalisation or George Bush, I suppose.

(55)

To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture - to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques - it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim's mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.

The trouble with this disgusting arrogance and condescension is that it is widely supported in Koranic texts, and we look in vain for the enlightened Islamic teachers and preachers who will begin the process of reform. What is going on in these mosques and madrasas? When is someone going to get 18th century on Islam's mediaeval ass?

- Mary Jackson quotes from a Spectator article by London's newly elected mayor Boris Johnson written just after the July 7th attacks on London (but Boris backtracked during the recent campaign)

(4)

One writer I rate pretty highly is Ross Clark. As well as being a regular newspaper and magazine columnist in places like The Times (of London) and The Spectator, he is also the author of several good books. He has written a fine piece, with deliberate echoes of George Orwell, about the current mania for surveillance in Britain. His liberal views seem to be pretty robust. He has also written a short satire on life in Britain in 2051, a dystopia, showing what the country became when industrialism, liberty and associated individualism, modern technology, medicine, commerce and mass travel and communications were destroyed by a mixture of forces. Unlike the dystopias of Huxley which attacked modern technology, Clark's dystopia very clearly shows that, with all its occasional shallowness and gaudiness, life as we now enjoy it is pretty wonderful and to turn our backs on it would be to miss things such as mass communications and information sources; techniques such as modern dentistry and keyhole surgery; cheap flights; fast, relatively safe transport, cuisine from around the world; downloadable music of any type available for a few cents, the prospect of DNA mapping to cure many diseases... the list rolls on. Our society is still pretty free, on the whole - though the losses of civil liberties and the associated nanny statist developments are a part of the trend towards a darker society that Clark writes about. But if you think, gentle reader, that Gordon Brown's Britain is bad in certain respects, then Clark's version is vastly worse still. He imagines a society, fractured into tiny tribal units lorded over by thugs and religious bigots, in which all these things and more are banished, loathed. His nightmare prediction is one of a world in which scientists, doctors, engineers and bankers are attacked, even murdered, for what they do. It is not a book to read if you are suffering from a bad depression and need a bit of cheering up.

A question that occurs to me about this book is that Clark seems to have written it with the partial object of satirising reactionary Greenery, religious fundamentalism and technophobia, hoping no doubt that the loathesomeness of the dystopia he presents will remind readers of the dangers of what the Greens/others have in store. My problem, though, is that other dystopian novels have often not had much of a salutary effect. As Perry of this parish remarked some time ago, our capacity for satire has been so sated by real-life lunacy that even a hit TV show called 'Big Brother', taking a line from Orwell's 1984, does not inspire the same intended feelings of loathing that Orwell's attack on totalitarianism was supposed to elicit. Fair enough, there are signs of a fightback against this trend.

But I wonder whether Clark is only really preaching to the converted. I hope not. I hope some stray Guardianista who thinks that John Gray or Bill McKibben are great sages will pick up this great little book and learn something from it. And for undecideds, I would hope that this dystopia warns them off from the anti-Enlightenment trend in which part of our society seems to be moving.

Perhaps a another way to think about winning arguments for technology, capitalism and so on is to portray positive fictional accounts of such things, rather than to portray the opposite. One way to win an argument to is be positive, to give examples of how things are improving, and improving the lives of millions of people. Grumpiness is not really a great sales pitch. Alas, avoiding the error of slipping into grumpiness is difficult when there is so much to be grumpy about, so it takes quite an effort to avoid it.

(3)

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner and I love London town, but from where I sit by far the most newsworthy winner in the recent round of British local elections was the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. However, unless I am very much mistaken (which is entirely possible), the Boris Johnson blog, far from being at the centre of the Boris campaign, was put on ice for the duration, and looks like staying there.

Or am I missing something? Is there another Boris Johnson blog? Is there one for his currently very neglected constituency (the one linked to above), and another blog (not linked to because I can not find any such thing) about him trying to be and now being the Mayor of London?

If my failure to spot it means that there is indeed no Boris For (Boris Is) Mayor blog, then I think that's rather a telling fact about the limits of internet political campaigning in Britain. The way Boris himself told it when interviewed on the telly at the very end of his campaign, he did his campaigning not via any internet efforts, but by trekking around London making personal appearances and being on local radio stations. You might have thought, what with so much of success in local politics being the art of attracting any attention at all, and what with Boris having done this so very, very well and having got his own vote out so very, very successfully, a blog might have been part of it.

Or is the thing that I am missing that other bloggers, like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, made crucial contributions to Boris becoming Mayor by campaigning on his behalf, under the opposing radar so to speak, making points in his favour and claims on his behalf that he himself did not have to worry about and which he was not personally obliged then to, as they say, clarify? Boris would no more have his own campaigning blog than he would set up and run his own radio station. In politics, it seems, either you do it, or you blog, but, you don't do both. This makes sense, I suppose. Blogging works best when you blog your mind, and tell it how you see it. Blogging means having an authentic voice. Politics, on the other hand ... Some bloggers - this one, for instance, in something he said at a gathering I was at - have complained that Boris's authentic voice was also muted, for the duration. Something to do with him not drinking, perhaps? (Bring back the booze I say.)

On the other hand, why didn't any of Boris's mere supporters gang up and run a Boris-is-here-today-and-there-tomorrow Boris-thinks-this-Boris-says-that blog, at least while the campaign itself lasted? Not worth the bother, presumably.

In other local election news, my brother Toby Micklethwait (UKIP) came a decent (but to him I daresay deeply disappointing) second to the Conservatives in Englefield Green west, very near to where we were raised and where our Mum still lives. He too accomplished what he accomplished not with any fancy blogging or internetting, but with lots of posters stuck up in people's gardens, with a ton of leaflets and other printed material, and with all the associated personal chit-chat. Maybe the truth is that the more local the politics (and Toby's latest burst of politics was about as local as it is possible for British politics to get), the less relevant blogging is to the campaigning politician. The blogging USP, its ability to send your message whizzing around the entire planet in seconds, does everything but solve your actual problem, and tells everyone in the world all about you except the exact people you are trying to reach, so blogging is of little use to you. Maybe it is time for me to revive that notion I once had about becoming the Supreme Ruler of the World.