Temperama

Rock Fall

I wrote this piece for Comment Is Free yesterday. The immediate crisis has passed. But for how long?

"For all I know those impervious queuers who've been emptying the vaults of Northern Rock really are the bunch of lemmings both the bank and government's top brass think they are yet daren't say so. But I'm inclined to look on them more fondly. Would you sink a single penny into that company just now? The sound of on-message Andy Burnham, chief secretary to the Treasury, squirming away from just such a question on yesterday's PM programme has been a highlight of the Great Rock Crumble so far.

What its customers think they know, is that investors, City wiseguys, politicians and the rest know that no one is in full control of this credit crunch thing, and that the whole edifice of debt whose shadow we've been gorging in is wobbling. Listen again (from 0708) to those interviewed hours before dawn this morning and you'll see what I mean. It's sobering stuff. At the same time there's something horribly thrilling about catching the great god of global finance, if not in its birthday suit, then in surprisingly threadbare underwear. That goes too for the search for scapegoats. Perhaps it's a further measure of how amorphous is that mystic entity "the markets" - hallowed be their name - that no one can agree on what or who is to blame."

Peter Oborne's Political Class

As I've yet to read The Political Class, the new book by conservative political commentator Peter Oborne - some say he's of the paleo variety - I won't be daft enough to offer a judgement on it. You can get the flavour, though, from this extract in today's Mail and a feature summarising of its thesis in The Spectator. The latter contains the following:

"Before the emergence of the Political Class, the conventional mode of leadership was based on a vestigial idea of gentlemanly conduct. The style had been laid down by the Duke of Wellington in the early 19th century, both as a leader of men on the battlefield and later as Prime Minister and national icon. It was based on understatement, sobriety both in personal conduct and in speech, self-sacrifice, restraint. Wellington eschewed displays of private emotion, downplayed his personal achievements, and showed a studied indifference to public opinion...Margaret Thatcher, in certain of her leadership techniques, such as the use of methods and personnel drawn from commercial advertising, marked a turning-point. Her successor John Major attempted to revert to an earlier style, and was not successful. Tony Blair, however, exchanged this old school of leadership for a Political Class methodology which favoured display, self-promotion, knowingness and ostentation."

So far, so good. But these days is it possible for any large political figure to be like Wellington? And, if not, is it all politicians' fault? Love or loathe Tony Blair - and Oborne loathes him even more than I - his political style and substance were defined largely in inevitable response to the relentless rubbishing of the Labour Party by the right-wing media, of which Peter Oborne has long been a part. But there again, I've yet to read the book...

Is Nothing Safe?

Here's where I met someone from the BBC today, just round the corner from Broadcasting House. With the world economy crumbling it was comforting to be in the company of the Corporation, still a solid and admirable national institution for all its recent follies. Mind you, these signboards don't inspire total confidence. Note the missing "e" and the disrespectful sticker calling our attention to some MySpace site. As for the plaque, click on the pic to read that it marks where stood the original location for the Proms, which have been broadcast by the BBC since 1927 - and that it was bombed flat 14 years later. Suddenly, even Auntie doesn't feel quite so safe any more.

Thrift: An Appreciation

I'm quite big on thrift. Perhaps because it was a value my parents prized and practiced I am horrified by those surveys showing that people in Britain today throw away a third of the food they buy. Also, I learned the need for thrift during the years after separation from my ex-partner - my habit of storing minute quantities of left-overs in little pots in the fridge amuses my older children to this day. Now you can buy a book about the subject. Even the small extract published by the Telegraph has introduced me to a heap of useful penny-pinching ploys. Not that many of them will be much use to me. For example:

"Patent leather can be cleaned with vaseline or the inside of a banana skin."

Sorry, don't buy bananas - too expensive (just kidding). This one caught my eye too...

"Put on a pair of cotton gloves before you put on a shear pair of tights to prevent snagging."

...but only because they meant "sheer." However...

"Sell clutter. As William Morris said: 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'"

Trouble is, no car boot could begin to do justice to our clutter. We'd have to turn our front yard into a shop. And the front room.

"Line the bottom of the salad drawer in the fridge with newspaper or paper towels to help keep vegetables fresh for longer."

At last, a use for all those wretched Evening Standards. And finally:

"Keep sliced bread in the freezer. It thaws in seconds, so take out only what you need."

Hah! As if I don't do that already!

Almost Correct

Sam Leith in the Telegraph on the conviction of a male gay couple for the sexual abuse of young boys thay had fostered:

"To denounce 'political correctness' as the central evil...is to check your brain in at the cloakroom. It is to downplay individual human agency, and rail against a range of institutions and attitudes of mind that are real, but are so incalculably diffusive that you might as well condemn 'bad stuff'. It gestures at the wood, but doesn't make a start on cutting down the trees...We should keep in mind that the problem here is two child-abusing bastards and a handful of dim or timorous social workers, rather than a magical liberal juju that turned them all into zombies. Eliminating political correctness is impossible not because it is too deeply entrenched in our public-sector institutions, but because it doesn't exist: it's an imaginary enemy...[it] is no more than a boo-word for anything the speaker considers excessive or officious in efforts to prevent personal offence, legislate against discrimination or promote equality. As such, it's a perfectly hopeless term for grown-ups to use in discussion, because nobody can agree on what it means."

Yes, but it's also something more. It's a "boo term" insinuated by the Right into mainstream language so effectively - it long ago infiltrated the supposedly liberal-infested BBC - that challenging bigotry, inequality or unfair discrimination in any part of society has become difficult without attracting mockery. Insofar as "nobody can agree on what it means" that is simply a result of its ubiquity blurring its core meaning. This only partly undermines the term's rasion d'etre which is to ridicule the noblest impulses of those who wish to see our fellow citizens treated fairly.

SNP: The Unity Party

Iain Macwhirter at Comment Is Free on the SNP's legislative programme:

"It seems pretty much business as usual, with the kind of health-first, female-friendly measures Labour has been enacting for the last eight years. A bill to make it easier to convict rapists, abolition of post-graduation student fees (the graduate endowment) and attempts to improve health in Glasgow, where life expectancy is less than in war-torn Iraq...

"...it's exactly what Salmond promised when he said that this government could only 'lead and propose, not dictate and impose'. This was consensus government in action, the legislative embodiment of his acceptance speech in parliament in May when he promised to act only with the express agreement of parliament. The fact is that these are the only issues that parliament actually agrees on. He could have put before Holyrood a bill to have a referendum on independence, but that would have been voted down in short order. He could have tried to abolish council tax and introduce a local income tax, but without a long process of consultation, that would have been defeated also. Similarly, any bill to repatriate oil revenues, or set up a Scottish oil fund, would have been rejected on the grounds that it was divisive and beyond the powers of the Scottish parliament...

...provocative legislation would have led to chaos, and chaos is not what this administration is about."

Ah, the "progressive consensus", Nationalist style. Now read on. Meanwhile, minds are boggling at The Scotsman's ad. for a new political editor. Apparently:

"Some travel to Scotland will be required".

Maybe the Queen should apply.

Lacking In Class

In a recent post contrasting my responses to Tim Henman and Andy Murray I wrote:

"At least my relationship with Henman was straightforward - he was my class enemy."

This has inflamed Jonathan Calder. Under the headline "Bourgeois Radical False Consciousness" he produces what I think he may believe to be an expose:

"Class enemy? I wonder what Hill does for a living? Coal mining, perhaps? sheet-metal working? Farm labouring? Er, no. If you look at the top of his blog you will find that hill describes himself as a novelist and journalist. And a journalist who writes regularly writes for the Guardian at that. Hill couldn't get more middle class if he tried."

Several points here. Firstly I'm not sure that the fact of being a novelist automatically defines a person as "middle class", as Jonathan implies. The same is true - though maybe less so - of someone who writes for The Guardian. As ever with these matters much depends on how you're defining middle classness in the first place. Is it a question of income? Of occupation? Of tastes and attitudes? Of roots? Some complex combination of them all? In Britain, of course, the term has long encompassed a very broad social spectrum which renders its meaning imprecise unless deployed with qualifications.

Let me tell Jonathan a story. As a youth I was quite a talented sportsman: not truly outstanding, but the type who sometimes rose above school team level. I was once invited to attend a programme of coaching sessions run by my home county's tennis authority. This followed a visit to the state compehensive I attended by its roving talent-spotter, his task being to locate any potential Roger Taylors lurking outside the independent sector, British tennis's traditional seedbed.

Clearly, he saw something in the slice backhand I'd cultivated on a local concrete court through watching Wimbledon on TV, and soon I was displaying it in company of an unfamiliar type: boys called Gavin and Quintin; boys who spoke with a bored, self-confident drawl; boys who played on private grass with their parents at weekends. For me, it was like entering another world; the posh, county set world from which, a few hundred miles away, Tim Henman later emerged. I was intimidated. I stopped going.

None of this is an attempt to claim working-class origins. I have always considered myself middle class. My father was a skilled manual worker - a plasterer - proudly self-employed and, like my mother, proudly respectable too. I grew up in a detached three-bedroomed house and all my material needs were met. But it was a very different middle classesness from that which Henman personifies and even today tends to rub me up the wrong way. That said, there was another element to my "class enemy" remark that Jonathan seems to have missed - I was having a joke.

Diana's Legacy

Peter Singer on Diana:

"Some people use cynicism to evade moral responsibility. If you can convince yourself that everyone behaves selfishly, why try to be a better person? A person with a naive but sincere desire to do good threatens that protective shell, and one way to blunt the threat is to sneer."

Very true. And also why, for all the nonsense, the enduring popularity of the late Princess reflects a better version of Britain than that preferred by a certain female contemporary of hers. Now read on.

Baggage Sale

From the Telegraph:

"Tens of thousands of pounds worth of lost bags and belongings are being sold off by airlines at auctions across the country...A baggage crisis at Heathrow has led to suitcases being piled up in corridors at the airport, left outside in the rain or sold at auction houses. Hundreds of suitcases are put under the hammer every week - with clothing still inside. Scores of iPods, mobile phones and digital cameras are removed and auctioned separately. Airlines insist that the luggage is only sold after going unclaimed for three months, but insiders at auction houses say that in reality some items have only been missing for a few weeks when they are sold. A worker at one of the main auctioneers, R F Greasbys in Tooting, south London, said he expected record numbers of bags to arrive in coming months."

I'm beginning to think airports are where the worst and stupidest features of modern British society are laid bare. Now read on.

Teenage Killings

The number of teenagers murdered in London this year has risen to 17. Meanwhile, in Manchester, the killer of a 15 year-old shot dead in a park one year ago has yet to be found. Prepare to be depressed.