Snow has the capacity to silence London. Somehow it absorbs the rumble of tube trains and traffic and shrill class-riddled politics. Unfortunately, it's now thawed and the election campaign has begun. The opening gambit from Gordon Brown ... New Labour is back and the Middle Classes must be wooed.
Just exactly who these Middle Classes are I can't quite tell but I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to fit in there somewhere. In his speech this week to launch this 'new' strategy, Gordon informed us:
"A fair society is one where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams whether that's owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business''.
I'm thinking of the dreams of people who might just want comfortable, secure, affordable housing, no matter how big it is. Extending this a bit further, I'm thinking of the dreams of urban planners to create beautiful, open, slow living spaces, sustainable cities with affordable public transport so we may not even need a new car. I'm dreaming of a country that is a world leader in innovative technology, where educators have the resources to provide free life-long learning to create a population that is curious, critically reflexive, and adaptable to a changing world. I'm thinking of the dreams of every environmentalist in the country that we have an inspiring economic policy that creates thousands of green jobs in renewable energy. As for holidays abroad, I'm thinking of the dreams of young people to be able to move across a postcode boundary without fear, before even contemplating getting to the airport. I'm thinking they are also possibly dreaming that the government doesn't raise University fees too much to give them a fighting chance of paying it back in their working lifetime. I'm thinking of the dreams of anyone who gets up every morning and thinks what an awesome thing life is and wants their kids to share it. I'm thinking of 'dream' speeches ... Mandela, Martin Luther King ... dreams of freedom and equality.
Of all the possible dreams we could have what do we get from 'New Labour Mark II' ... Gordon Brown's dream that we will vote for him because he thinks all we want is bigger homes, a holiday abroad and new cars.
Is that it? Is that all New Labour think we are capable of aspiring to?
Personally I dream of an ethical foreign policy, a proper democracy with accountable politicians who realise they are just representatives of we the people, and an unlimited supply of fair trade wool to knit socks with.
Mr Brown ignored my dangerously flashing, slender pointed 3.25 mm needles and continued ... there will be more Middle Class jobs than ever before apparently and education is the key, setting a target of 75% of people aged under 30 to have access to either university or technical college. Fab. Only didn't you just cut the higher education sector's budget by almost £900 million Gordon? And didn't you just fine the sector £3700 for every extra student we took on above the government's quota to try to prevent young people ending up in unemployment? While many other countries in western Europe seem to be investing in higher education to get themselves out of recession and arguing that even 3 years isn't enough to properly train new graduates, we get larger class sizes, fewer teachers, and the prospect of two year degrees .
Mr Brown's 2IC (or 1IC possibly), the Dark Lord (Mandelson), has announced that the 50p tax rate for high earners will be abandoned as soon as possible as part of this effort to woo the middle classes. This is the top tax rate that affects those earning over £150 000. Given that the average wage in the UK is something around £26 000 (£531 per week for men and £426 if you happen to have female genitalia) I'm not sure which Middle Class Lord Voldemort is aiming for.
There is a great expression that I have learned to love in Britain ... numpty ... translated from the Scottish to mean 'general foolishness'. New Labour is numpty. I'm not being party-ist though. David Cameron's Conservative Party is as numpty. David has announced he will bring in tax breaks for married couples which will cost us 100s of millions of pounds ... because getting a ring on my finger will undoubtedly ensure that any offspring I happen to produce will never do anything naughty like take drugs, spray graffiti on walls, get pregnant as a teenager, or wear a hooded sweater.
In my desperation, and to the strains of a marching tune, Left-Right-Left-Right, I find myself strangely attracted to Nicolas Sarkozy. Okay he's indulging in the usual misguided attempts to define French identity (which can be anything except Islamic basically), but he's also talking about a Carbon Tax (potentially not the fairest in targetting big polluters but at least he tried) and institutionalising new indicators to measure the 'wealth' of a country by bringing in Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz to head a commission to work on it. Apparently their final report concluded that GDP should not be the only measure of progress but that the overall quality of peoples' lives is also important. It's not how much we consume but how we feel. Okay, so many of us have been saying this for quite some time now but at least he's trying ...
In the general gloom of the times I've bought myself some new red shoes. They look lovely in the snow and make me feel good, as does the feeling of snow on my nose and being able to wear wellies to work. I shall wear my new red shoes with the socks that will be created through the hours of interminable double speak that will emerge from the mouths of our democratically elected representatives that we are about to be subjected to in the media over the next five months. I will drop stitches in rage and frustration at the general numptiness of politics in the UK, but I will persevere and dream of how lovely my new socks will look with my new red shoes and I'll feel better.
Monday, 18 January 2010
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Surviving Britain's Winter Storms: Tip 2
We've exhausted the box set of Blakes 7, Pride and Prejudice, and all of David Cronenberg's work (yes yes I get it ... technological mutation and questioning Cartesian boundaries of body and mind, not to mention sexuality and gender ... Long Live the New Flesh!)
There's nothing left but ... the entire box set of The Wire ... with subtitles.
Back in a couple of weeks. We should start thawing out by then.
There's nothing left but ... the entire box set of The Wire ... with subtitles.
Back in a couple of weeks. We should start thawing out by then.
Everything I've Ever Needed to Know I've Learnt from Climbing Up Things: Commandment II
Commandment Two
Thou shalt all suffer from altitude headaches and anyone who doesn’t shall be beaten about the head until they know what it feels like, for this is no ordinary headache. Imagine a vice getting a good grip around your temples and being squeezed tighter and tighter until the body becomes divorced from the mind and decides it will just do its own thing. Altitude in general does strange things to the body. The third and final hut on Kilimanjaro, at about 5000 metres, can be seen from several kilometres away but it is like wading through treacle to get to it which is very confusing for the brain as there is no visible sign of resistance. The question of food at altitude is also problematic. You may be starving but put so much as a piece of four day old bread in your mouth and your stomach will instantly heave. There is nothing for it but to go to bed, at 4.30pm, and wait it out till it is time to get up to begin the final push to the summit. As you wait it out in your tent or hut it is decreed that one by one people will begin to keel over. Someone will throw up in their balaclava and all over the hut floor, and someone else will collapse in the corridor and have to be carried out for some fresh air. In this instance it was so cold outside he had to stand in the toilets for 20 minutes. The toilets are sensibly situated some distance from the huts: they are pits, they stink and altitude does funny things to your stomach and your aim. So imagine how bad you must feel to choose to stand in a latrine until you feel better. Altitude sickness induces a certain amount of passion; mostly a desire to get off a mountain as quickly as possible.
Thou shalt all suffer from altitude headaches and anyone who doesn’t shall be beaten about the head until they know what it feels like, for this is no ordinary headache. Imagine a vice getting a good grip around your temples and being squeezed tighter and tighter until the body becomes divorced from the mind and decides it will just do its own thing. Altitude in general does strange things to the body. The third and final hut on Kilimanjaro, at about 5000 metres, can be seen from several kilometres away but it is like wading through treacle to get to it which is very confusing for the brain as there is no visible sign of resistance. The question of food at altitude is also problematic. You may be starving but put so much as a piece of four day old bread in your mouth and your stomach will instantly heave. There is nothing for it but to go to bed, at 4.30pm, and wait it out till it is time to get up to begin the final push to the summit. As you wait it out in your tent or hut it is decreed that one by one people will begin to keel over. Someone will throw up in their balaclava and all over the hut floor, and someone else will collapse in the corridor and have to be carried out for some fresh air. In this instance it was so cold outside he had to stand in the toilets for 20 minutes. The toilets are sensibly situated some distance from the huts: they are pits, they stink and altitude does funny things to your stomach and your aim. So imagine how bad you must feel to choose to stand in a latrine until you feel better. Altitude sickness induces a certain amount of passion; mostly a desire to get off a mountain as quickly as possible.
Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Everything I've Ever Needed to Know I've Learnt from Climbing up Things: Commandment I
In the beginning there was a tendency to climb up on the roof any time dad left the ladder out to escape the confines of four walls full of noise. Then an accidental opportunity to climb Kilimanjaro while bumping across East Africa in the back of a truck with twenty other backpackers. And from there the ten commandments for women with altitude were revealed.
Commandment One
Thou shalt ascend only one way - slowly. There are those who will be found on any trek who will attempt to win the ‘first-into-the-huts’ prize each night. They can generally be spotted by the latest gortex gear and having all the right food - power bars, protein shakes etcetera. But don’t feel inferior because you have three day old bread and vegemite. Speed counts for nothing up high and those that try it shall be struck down – see Commandment Two.
Commandment One
Thou shalt ascend only one way - slowly. There are those who will be found on any trek who will attempt to win the ‘first-into-the-huts’ prize each night. They can generally be spotted by the latest gortex gear and having all the right food - power bars, protein shakes etcetera. But don’t feel inferior because you have three day old bread and vegemite. Speed counts for nothing up high and those that try it shall be struck down – see Commandment Two.
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Surviving Britain's Winter Storms: Tip 1
Settle in for the weekend with all six hours of the original BBC production of 'Pride and Prejudice'.
Oh Mr Darcy!
Oh Mr Darcy!
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
Negotiating Notting Hill
Each year after Notting Hill Carnival there is debate in media columns and talk back radio about whether the Carnival has outgrown its current site. ‘The streets of gentrifying Notting Hill can no longer accommodate Europe’s largest street party’, is one argument. ‘The Caribbean community has moved on and so should the carnival’ is another. On reflection, there are perhaps two deep seated fears being presented in these arguments: first, fear of the crowd, its sheer size and unpredictability; second, the fear of the stranger and his/her ambiguity.
The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s sense of transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.
Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel a sense of transcendence. There is at first a sense only of discomfort. There is a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.
According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown. (…) It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.
The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.
Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.
On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.
Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.
The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s sense of transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.
Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel a sense of transcendence. There is at first a sense only of discomfort. There is a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.
According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown. (…) It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.
The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.
Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.
On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.
Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.
Monday, 10 August 2009
Electoral Reform in the UK
The UK has one of the most anachronistic voting systems I've ever had to use. First-Past-the-Post means that the current government, which had about 30% of the popular vote, has 100% of the power. So if you're interested in creating a system that is fairer, and that has the possibility of creating a democracy that actually incorporates representation and participation, feel free to check out the work of the Electoral Reform Society.
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