The professional Yorkshireman Godfrey Bloom, it will be remembered, lost the UKIP party whip because he was recorded telling some party workers at a meeting that they were "sluts".
I am not an admirer of UKIP (an electoral phenomenon rather than a serious political party) or of Bloom (a man who makes the robustly outspoken Sir Geoffrey Boycott look mealy-mouthed), but I couldn't help but feel the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber was hard done by.
Mr Bloom was, according to the Torygraph, "challenged at a women's fringe event by Jane Collins, a former by-election candidate, who told him: "I have never cleaned behind my fridge". Bloom is reported to have replied, "This place is full of sluts", to general laughter.
Yet at this remark the media descended on Bloom like a pack of wolves and the whip was duly withdrawn by Nigel Farage. Actually, as Bloom tried to make clear, the word "slut" has two meanings - a promiscuous woman, or on the other hand a woman who is untidy and slovenly. It was clear from the context - the fridge, remember - that Bloom was using the word in the latter sense. And yet the press reported the story as if Bloom had uttered some dreadful insult.
I was reminded of this with reporting of the verdicts in the Rebekah Brooks / Andy Coulson trial yesterday. As I wrote at the time she was arrested, I was glad Ms Brooks had to face the law over her newspaper's phone hacking. She had overall responsibility for what happened on the paper, and there was a serious possibility that she had known about the hacking. Moreover for too long those close to the Murdoch empire had been looking over the Government's shoulder, and seemed to imagine that being wealthy and powerful they were above the law. Instilling the notion that they aren't is well worth the expense of the trial. Even, in Brooks' case, an unsuccessful one.
This morning the Guardian ran the story on the front page under the headline "Coulson: the criminal who had Cameron's confidence". David Cameron, it will be remembered, employed Coulson as press adviser for rather under a year from May 2010. By this point Coulson hadn't been News of the World editor for three years, and anyway had always denied any personal involvement in the phone hacking saga. It must have seemed a reasonable call by Cameron at the time, but it now appears that Coulson was a liar.
Nevertheless, the Guardian's opening paragraph seems guilty of hyperbole. It reads, "Seven years of deceit by David Cameron's former director of communications were undone in the Old Bailey yesterday".
The paragraph would more accurately have read, "Seven years of deceit by Andy Coulson about his conduct before becoming David Cameron's director of communications . . ."; but when did a journalist ever make their reputation by underplaying a story?
And of course, it's not just the Graun. All the papers are at it. Even Nick Robinson at the BBC, a well-known Tory sympathiser, weighs in with his "apology . . . will not be enough to silence the questions David Cameron now faces".
What utter bollocks. The phone-hacking story is important, because it shows how a powerful media organisation abused its position (and suborned the police). But that is the real story. The David Cameron angle is just noise.
In the Godfrey Bloom affair, I couldn't understand why no journalist had the balls to write, "In shock news yesterday the nation's entire news media deliberately misunderstood the meaning of the word 'slut' in order to end a politician's career and have something to write about".
So here. Journalists pretend that something Andy Coulson did years before David Cameron employed him is a political problem for the Prime Minister. It isn't. It's a media problem. That's why Cameron has apologised.
Cameron has calculated that less damage would be sustained by saying sorry for the minor infraction of employing somebody who turned out to be a criminal, than would be the case if he pointed out that the criminality occurred some time before Coulson came to work for him.
It must be galling for him, but Cameron knows the press are shits and that he has to play the game.
So, curiously, a story which started with the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies, ends (or perhaps that should be continues) with, er, the press behaving badly, interfering with the lives of individuals and telling lies. Who would have thought?
Wednesday 25 June 2014
Wednesday 18 June 2014
Tony Blair and the real villains in Iraq
What to make of the extraordinary events in Iraq recently, as Al Qaida 2.0, in the form of ISIS nasties, advance with Blitzkrieg speed across the country, murdering and burning as they come?
Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.
I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.
It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.
"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific. There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".
Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.
Tony Blair's reappearance as lost prophet, advocating fresh intervention, grizzled and impassioned, has probably done his reputation no favours, and certainly for the Not In My Name brigade there's plenty of fresh ammunition.
I have an interest to declare here. I thought that, WMD or no WMD, Iraq would be better off facing an uncertain future without Saddam than a certain future with him, given that a future with the Butcher of Baghdad in charge was as near as we're going to get to the personification of Orwell's vision of a jackboot stamping on a human face, forever.
It has however been a lonely business pointing out the awkward truth about Iraq's former dictator, and it's cheering to find this article in the Torygraph by one of its foreign correspondents, Colin Freeman.
"Saddam Hussein", writes Freeman, "was just as brutal a killer as ISIS's thugs are, and had Saddam's men had i-phones around to record their atrocities, the results would have been just as horrific. There would however have been one important difference. In Saddam's case, the footage of those toppling into mass graves wouldn't have just been a few dozen or hundred, but hundreds of thousands . . . It's estimated that Saddam killed around 300,000 people (in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991). . . one can't be certain that he would have done the same in the the event of an Arab Spring ten years later. But it does rather suggest he had it in him. . . Half a million people on either side perished in the eight year war that Saddam started with neighbouring Iran, a campaign of trench warfare far more brutal and senseless than anything in World War One. Another 100,000 were killed by the Allied armies as they repelled his equally foolhardy invasion of Kuwait in 1991. And this is before you take into account all those he tortured and killed in secret. . . if Saddam had already directed his armies to kill a million people in the course of . . . 20 years, he might well have done another few hundred thousand had he been left in power. And for that reason alone", Freeman concludes, "we should remember that it is him, not Tony Blair, that is the real villain alongside ISIS".
Amen to all that. And yet quite a lot of people genuinely think Tony Blair is a war criminal for getting rid of Saddam. Funny old world.
Thomas Piketty and the success of capitalism
The Guardian reports this morning that queues developed in London yesterday outside the lecture theatre where French economist Professor Thomas Piketty was booked to speak. Most of them, according to vox pops the paper conducted, hadn't read Piketty's book Capital, and you can hardly blame them for preferring to get its message in an hour or so rather than wading through many hundreds of pages.
The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".
So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.
Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.
But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.
I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.
What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous. "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.
The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.
Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.
Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.
Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.
The success of Capital in capturing the imagination of the Left-leaning public probably tells us as much about the phenomenology of the media (and of collective hysteria) as it does about economics. A friend recently asked me what I thought of the book. "I haven't read it", I said. "Neither have I", he replied. "But I read a review of it".
So have I now. Several reviews. That doesn't make me an expert, but lack of expertise has never stopped a blogger from having an opinion.
Piketty's thesis is, essentially, that assets grow in value at a faster rate than economies do, so people who have assets get richer faster than people who don't. Hence ever rising inequality.
But in purporting to address the bigger picture (which is certainly what Piketty's supporters claim for him), he excludes what for the purposes of analogy you might call the picture frame. Which is to say that although we live in a world of inequality, it is actually a world in which most people are getting richer.
I like to imagine what George Orwell would have made of the affluence of our society. I think he would have been horrified at the vacuousness of consumer culture, but amazed and impressed at capitalism's capacity to create wealth. For capitalism does indeed make people richer. It just doesn't make them richer at the same rate.
What would Orwell have made of mobile phones? Here is a gadget that would have been utterly beyond his imaginings. Even Ian Fleming, writing in the technologically obsessed 1960s, never dared to get Q to present James Bond with anything so outrageous. "Now look James, you can get the cricket score on it, and the weather forecast for Kuala Lumpur, and the chemical formula of cordite, and the latin name of the Ring Tailed Lemur. Clever eh?" "You're pulling my leg, Q". And yet fifty years later most people reading this will have one, all at the expense of a tenner or so a week.
The point of the mobile phone for Piketty's thesis lies in the whereabouts of its manufacture. These things are not made in Walsall or Frankfurt or Detroit. They're made in Thailand, or Taiwan or China.
Why are people willing to work in factories assembling chipsets instead of labouring in the paddy fields or herding the family's cows? It's because working in factories gives them a higher standard of living. The conditions may be rubbish and the pay exploitative by our standards, but it's still better than the alternative.
Of course the downside is that as jobs have leaked from the affluent West to the impoverished East, wages in Europe and America stagnated and even fell. That's capitalism in action too. But we are still living in societies in which the overwhelming majority of people have enough eat, get a free education and have a roof over their heads; whereas they are not.
Professor Piketty's fans are so concerned that they aren't getting rich as fast as the Duke of Westminster that they haven't noticed that in other parts of the world capitalism is slowly making genuinely poor people better off.
Tuesday 17 June 2014
The Trojan Horse letter - British values and the limits of tolerance
In the wake of the Trojan Horse saga alleging a plot by fanatical Muslims to make state schools teach, er, according to Muslim principles, the government has decreed that teaching British values should be part of the curriculum.
This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike. No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument. And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?
I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.
And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.
A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.
The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture. This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.
Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.
But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes? Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.
The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.
If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.
This edict has been widely and understandably criticised by cultural relativists and wiseacres alike. No-one knows what British values are so it is impossible to teach them, goes the argument. And who is to say British values are better than Muslim ones, ask the relativists?
I am a passionate enemy of cultural relativism, but I think the Government's critics are half right. British culture and values are the complex sum total of our food, climate, literature, music, architecture, sport and landscape, to name but seven items of what surely is a much longer list of component parts. You can't do more than scratch the surface of that at school.
And that's the trouble. Young Muslims brought up in Muslim families in largely Muslim areas of Birmingham are always going to lead a somewhat schizophrenic existence. They watch British TV, walk around Britain's streets and go to Britain's schools, but even if there were no Islamification in the classroom, they would still spend an awful lot of time at home and in the mosque. Theirs is always going to be a double life.
A friend from Hackney, a woman of Afro-Caribbean extraction, told me that her split existence even extends to speaking a different version of English to family and West Indian friends. But for her no cultural barrier existed remotely as high or difficult as the one which separates devout Muslims from their post-Christian white and black contemporaries.
The subtext of the Government's critics is the demeaning if generally unstated one that there is no such thing as British culture. This must be wrong, because if it were true we'd be just the same as other countries. And we're not.
Nevertheless hearing David Cameron struggling to define some of those British values, I was struck by his use of the word "tolerance". We're a tolerant people, he said. Well yes, in some respects we are. I would prefer to say that we're slow to get angry and willing to put up with a good deal.
But if we're so tolerant, why are we getting so cross about Islamification of British schools? Surely if we were really tolerant we'd just say, OK, you want to drop teaching of evolution and call white girls prostitutes? Fine. We're tolerant. We don't care. Just get on with it.
The reality is that Islamic immigration has exposed the limits of our famous tolerance. We weren't asked if we wanted it; if we had been asked, we'd probably have uttered a polite "no thanks". But now it's here and we have to work out a way of living with it, we must stop pretending what a tolerant lot we are.
If Britain's going to carry on working reasonably well as a nation, we have to get Muslims to assimilate. And if that's going to happen the rest of us have to say, you can do this, and this, and this, but you can't do that. No to Islamification of the classroom. No to forced marriage. No to honour killings. No to FGM. We may be tolerant, but we're not that tolerant.
Sunday 15 June 2014
Roy Hodgson and the quarter finals
Having got the statutory whinge about the World Cup out of the way a few days ago (The World Cup is for the mentally negligible), it's time to pontificate about England's opening performance against Italy last night.
What is the aim of England football managers? Answer, to get out of the group stage and on to the quarter finals. Why? Because they know that if we get to the quarters they'll keep their job. That results in the kind of pragmatic football which makes fans curse at the TV in frustration. Because of course eventually we come up against a better team. Time after time we have subordinated our natural head-banging desire to attack to dreary conservatism. We should long ago have learned that we'll never win a competition playing this way, and never have any fun in the process either. Because fun should be the object. We know we aren't the best team in the world, and what we really want is to see England playing the kind of football we can be proud of.
I realise this makes me look an idiot for taking football seriously, but there we are.
If I had to point to the acme of stupidity in this respect it would be Sven Goran Eriksson's selection of midfielder Trevor Sinclair to go to the World Cup in Japan in 2002. Sinclair was a decent club pro, not good enough to hold down a regular place in the first team, and he took the place of the maverick genius Steve McManaman. I remember fulminating about this at the time. Even if McManaman didn't get a start, I thought, he was exactly the kind of player you'd want to come on with 20 minutes to go when you were a goal down to Brazil and facing exit from the competition. He might just create something.
Unfortunately this scenario came to pass exactly on 21st June 2002 when, in the quarter finals against Brazil, England were a goal down thanks to Ronaldinho's miraculous lob over David Seaman. Eriksson looked along his subs bench for a player who could change the game. Not finding one, he instructed Trevor Sinclair to remove the tracksuit instead. I hope that at this moment he realised the awfulness of his mistake. Steve McManaman, who, to be fair, might also have achieved as little as Sinclair, was watching at home. England lost 2-1.
Like most England fans, I would have liked to see Harry Redknapp get the job in the wake of Fabio Capello's dreary reign. But in one crucial respect Roy Hodgson has proved we doubters wrong. He has revealed himself to be a gambler rather than a pragmatist, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead, and a romantic rather than a rationalist. He has stuffed his squad with the kind of rapid, fearless youthful attacking talent that seasoned, experienced defenders hate playing against. Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Daniel Sturridge are exactly the kind of players England fans want to watch. I didn't like losing to Italy last night, but it was a game we could very well have won had things worked out very slightly differently, and it was a performance which will have made the world sit up and take notice. England actually aren't bad at football after all.
I hope Mr Hodgson does get us out of the group stage and into the quarters, but if he doesn't I hope the FA lets him keep the job. He's already shown that he understands more about football than any England manager since Terry Venables.
What is the aim of England football managers? Answer, to get out of the group stage and on to the quarter finals. Why? Because they know that if we get to the quarters they'll keep their job. That results in the kind of pragmatic football which makes fans curse at the TV in frustration. Because of course eventually we come up against a better team. Time after time we have subordinated our natural head-banging desire to attack to dreary conservatism. We should long ago have learned that we'll never win a competition playing this way, and never have any fun in the process either. Because fun should be the object. We know we aren't the best team in the world, and what we really want is to see England playing the kind of football we can be proud of.
I realise this makes me look an idiot for taking football seriously, but there we are.
If I had to point to the acme of stupidity in this respect it would be Sven Goran Eriksson's selection of midfielder Trevor Sinclair to go to the World Cup in Japan in 2002. Sinclair was a decent club pro, not good enough to hold down a regular place in the first team, and he took the place of the maverick genius Steve McManaman. I remember fulminating about this at the time. Even if McManaman didn't get a start, I thought, he was exactly the kind of player you'd want to come on with 20 minutes to go when you were a goal down to Brazil and facing exit from the competition. He might just create something.
Unfortunately this scenario came to pass exactly on 21st June 2002 when, in the quarter finals against Brazil, England were a goal down thanks to Ronaldinho's miraculous lob over David Seaman. Eriksson looked along his subs bench for a player who could change the game. Not finding one, he instructed Trevor Sinclair to remove the tracksuit instead. I hope that at this moment he realised the awfulness of his mistake. Steve McManaman, who, to be fair, might also have achieved as little as Sinclair, was watching at home. England lost 2-1.
Like most England fans, I would have liked to see Harry Redknapp get the job in the wake of Fabio Capello's dreary reign. But in one crucial respect Roy Hodgson has proved we doubters wrong. He has revealed himself to be a gambler rather than a pragmatist, a Cavalier rather than a Roundhead, and a romantic rather than a rationalist. He has stuffed his squad with the kind of rapid, fearless youthful attacking talent that seasoned, experienced defenders hate playing against. Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Daniel Sturridge are exactly the kind of players England fans want to watch. I didn't like losing to Italy last night, but it was a game we could very well have won had things worked out very slightly differently, and it was a performance which will have made the world sit up and take notice. England actually aren't bad at football after all.
I hope Mr Hodgson does get us out of the group stage and into the quarters, but if he doesn't I hope the FA lets him keep the job. He's already shown that he understands more about football than any England manager since Terry Venables.
Friday 13 June 2014
Independent Scotland - a North Korean Brigadoon?
I have put a couple of quid on the Nationalists winning the Independence referendum. This isn't because I think they're going to win - I hope they won't - but because, if they do, my winnings will add to the gaiety of the occasion. The bookies were offering 11/4, meaning that if you put £4 on and the Nats win you'll get £11 back. Odds on a victory were more generous: a £1 stake will get you £4. So the bookies think the No campaign will win.
I think so too, probably, though it may well be close. I was confirmed in this view by two recent events. The first is that J.K.Rowling has given the Better Together campaign a million quid. The Yes campaign has had a lot more money than the No because of donations by two lottery winners (in an irony they would no doubt enjoy, the funds largely provided by poor people in England), and undoubtedly the Rowling Million will help.
The second is the revelation that, according to Jenny Hjul, an Edinburgh based journalist writing in the Torygraph yesterday (Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?), Scottish luvvies are overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was in the context of the Alternative Vote referendum that I first suggested the principle that if luvvies are in favour of something, they'll be wrong. The mere addition of, say, Colin Firth's weight to a cause is both a symptom that its advocates are mistaken, and advance warning that it will fail. So perhaps here.
Actually Ms Hjul goes further - she says Scottish luvvies are so determined to say Yes that anyone who wants to have a career in the arts in Scotland had better at the very least keep their mouth shut if they disagree. To do so would have the same effect as for any English artist admitting a soft spot for the Tories. The famed tolerance of those in the arts does not extend to people who disagree with them. Ms Hjul records the composer James MacMillan saying "artists are too scared to back the Union publicly, so fearful are they of the backlash". MacMillan wrote on Twitter "Major Scottish artist to me this morning: I am afraid to speak. I don't want to get my head kicked in".
Now I don't live in Scotland and I can't be sure this atmosphere of intimdation is real or imaginary. But MacMillan does, and he thinks it's real. That's pretty persuasive.
As it happens, Rowling is exactly the kind of person I would expect to back the Yes campaign. Which is to say, she has exactly the kind of utopian political outlook shared by so many Nationalists (some of whom seem blissfully unaware of the nostrum that things are very rarely as good as they first appear). But perhaps extreme riches have given her a knowledge of financial affairs, which are after all at the heart of the case against Independence.
As for the SNP, I wrote some time ago that their pitch seemed to be the mixture of fascism and sentimentality familiar to nationalist movements everywhere. The vitriol some of the Nats come up with is entirely consistent with this view. A letter in the Graun this morning derided Rowling's Scottishness (she's lived there for over 20 years) yet described her, perversely, as a "traitor".
Of course, since the case for independence relies on the idea that by securing the oil revenues it will make Scotland better off, this will, if the Nationalists are right, have the effect of making the rest of the UK poorer. Which must mean that the Nationalists are gathering round an idea of fairness, equality and social justice to be achieved by taking resources away from others. In a situation where comedy is in short supply, it's very funny that people enmired in their own righteousness should be so blissfully unaware of how greedy and selfish they look. If Scotland is truly richer than the rest of us are, shouldn't the worthy Nats want to share its wealth with their neighbours? Er, no. Because their neighbours are English.
This is what happens when you put dislike for another ethnic or national group in an uneasy alliance with a kind of sub-Braveheart bens-and-glens mentality. In an independent Scotland there will be a Sure Start in every hamlet and in every urban housing scheme a traditional music workshop plus creche. It will be a North Korean Brigadoon lite.
And it may yet happen. But if it does, at least those of us south of the border won't be paying for it any more.
I think so too, probably, though it may well be close. I was confirmed in this view by two recent events. The first is that J.K.Rowling has given the Better Together campaign a million quid. The Yes campaign has had a lot more money than the No because of donations by two lottery winners (in an irony they would no doubt enjoy, the funds largely provided by poor people in England), and undoubtedly the Rowling Million will help.
The second is the revelation that, according to Jenny Hjul, an Edinburgh based journalist writing in the Torygraph yesterday (Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?), Scottish luvvies are overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was in the context of the Alternative Vote referendum that I first suggested the principle that if luvvies are in favour of something, they'll be wrong. The mere addition of, say, Colin Firth's weight to a cause is both a symptom that its advocates are mistaken, and advance warning that it will fail. So perhaps here.
Actually Ms Hjul goes further - she says Scottish luvvies are so determined to say Yes that anyone who wants to have a career in the arts in Scotland had better at the very least keep their mouth shut if they disagree. To do so would have the same effect as for any English artist admitting a soft spot for the Tories. The famed tolerance of those in the arts does not extend to people who disagree with them. Ms Hjul records the composer James MacMillan saying "artists are too scared to back the Union publicly, so fearful are they of the backlash". MacMillan wrote on Twitter "Major Scottish artist to me this morning: I am afraid to speak. I don't want to get my head kicked in".
Now I don't live in Scotland and I can't be sure this atmosphere of intimdation is real or imaginary. But MacMillan does, and he thinks it's real. That's pretty persuasive.
As it happens, Rowling is exactly the kind of person I would expect to back the Yes campaign. Which is to say, she has exactly the kind of utopian political outlook shared by so many Nationalists (some of whom seem blissfully unaware of the nostrum that things are very rarely as good as they first appear). But perhaps extreme riches have given her a knowledge of financial affairs, which are after all at the heart of the case against Independence.
As for the SNP, I wrote some time ago that their pitch seemed to be the mixture of fascism and sentimentality familiar to nationalist movements everywhere. The vitriol some of the Nats come up with is entirely consistent with this view. A letter in the Graun this morning derided Rowling's Scottishness (she's lived there for over 20 years) yet described her, perversely, as a "traitor".
Of course, since the case for independence relies on the idea that by securing the oil revenues it will make Scotland better off, this will, if the Nationalists are right, have the effect of making the rest of the UK poorer. Which must mean that the Nationalists are gathering round an idea of fairness, equality and social justice to be achieved by taking resources away from others. In a situation where comedy is in short supply, it's very funny that people enmired in their own righteousness should be so blissfully unaware of how greedy and selfish they look. If Scotland is truly richer than the rest of us are, shouldn't the worthy Nats want to share its wealth with their neighbours? Er, no. Because their neighbours are English.
This is what happens when you put dislike for another ethnic or national group in an uneasy alliance with a kind of sub-Braveheart bens-and-glens mentality. In an independent Scotland there will be a Sure Start in every hamlet and in every urban housing scheme a traditional music workshop plus creche. It will be a North Korean Brigadoon lite.
And it may yet happen. But if it does, at least those of us south of the border won't be paying for it any more.
The World Cup is for the mentally-negligible
Is there anything edifying about the World Cup at all?
If sweeteners were distributed and consumed by FIFA officials when the competition was awarded to Qatar, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that Brazil did its fair share of palm-greasing to get the competition too. We then have the tawdry spectacle of a country whose citizens mostly live in conditions which justify outrage spending billions to build the necessary infrastructure, that infrastructure being shoddily done and in some cases unfinished by the time the football started last night.
Ah, but the football, you say. It's all about the football.
OK then, the football. After Croatia get a slightly fortuitous early goal, a Brazilian player elbows an opponent in the throat and escapes with a yellow card. Then after the hosts have equalized, a Brazilian forward, Fred, throws himself to the ground in the area, but instead of booking him for a dive the referee gives a penalty. Because after all, we can't have the hosts faltering at the group stage can we?
The World Cup is a tournament funded on the backs of the poor, organised by the corrupt, played by cheats and refereed by the incompetent. The whole thing is squalid beyond belief. Only the mentally-negligible, to adopt Wodehouse's phrase, take any interest in it.
Which possibly, soberingly, explains why when England line up against Italy tomorrow night, I will be there, beer in hand, perched nervously in front of the TV.
If sweeteners were distributed and consumed by FIFA officials when the competition was awarded to Qatar, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that Brazil did its fair share of palm-greasing to get the competition too. We then have the tawdry spectacle of a country whose citizens mostly live in conditions which justify outrage spending billions to build the necessary infrastructure, that infrastructure being shoddily done and in some cases unfinished by the time the football started last night.
Ah, but the football, you say. It's all about the football.
OK then, the football. After Croatia get a slightly fortuitous early goal, a Brazilian player elbows an opponent in the throat and escapes with a yellow card. Then after the hosts have equalized, a Brazilian forward, Fred, throws himself to the ground in the area, but instead of booking him for a dive the referee gives a penalty. Because after all, we can't have the hosts faltering at the group stage can we?
The World Cup is a tournament funded on the backs of the poor, organised by the corrupt, played by cheats and refereed by the incompetent. The whole thing is squalid beyond belief. Only the mentally-negligible, to adopt Wodehouse's phrase, take any interest in it.
Which possibly, soberingly, explains why when England line up against Italy tomorrow night, I will be there, beer in hand, perched nervously in front of the TV.
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