Blame-game and StupidPhones

Isn’t that interesting: The media are all over Gordon Brown’s gaffe of yesterday where he called a potential Labour voter a ‘bigoted woman’ (he thought the mic was off), the BBC in particular being quite sure that less people will vote Labour now. British politics is characterised by knee-jerk blaming and scapegoating and this is a great example for it. ‘If a politician has put his foot in, let him have it’, seems to be the consensus. So politicians become nervous about going into uncontrolled situations, i.e. talking to ‘normal’ voters rather than hand-picked ones, because they know that the press will spin everything they say in the worst possible way. Which is why they then put their foot in when they do come into these situations, at least that’s what Steve Richards of the Independent suggests might have happened (the full story is here).

At the same time as all this is happening, a huge mass of crude oil is slowing floating towards the coast of the Louisiana wetlands where millions of seabirds and sea-turtles are enjoying what could well be their last few hours of absence of environmental stress. And is there any blaming going on regarding this? No. The Times is all over Brown, as are most of the other broadsheets, but they’re descriptive, non-evaluative and seemingly understanding of this impending environmental crisis caused, if indirectly, by BP.

I find that a bit bizarre. I mean I understand that it’s easier to blame one person for the ill-fate or whatever of an entire country the way it is done with Gordon Brown. It’s convenient. I can’t see any other reason for playing the blame-game than that. Just because it’s convenient just isn’t enough to justify the way British politicians of the Left as well as the Right are dragged through the mud all the time. But if that’s what happens, why not also point fingers at environmental polluters?

I don’t understand why blame isn’t apportioned evenly to all ‘wrong-doers’. It’s hardly fair. Either you blame everyone, potentially at least, or you blame no one; either you try to understand where everyone comes from or you simply decide to be bigoted (the word of the day!!) and not listen to anyone.

I am off on a holiday now. Just me and my StupidPhone. No internet access for several days and I am glad for it.

Disheartened

Yesterday I was dreaming about crossing the US in my red shoes, today I am right back in the middle of mucky academia with all its problems. Here are the top problems on my list:

• The neoliberal revolution has turned academics into little professionals who have to perform in ways that are quantifiable. This means publishing, come what may.
• Sadly, it does not mean teaching well. My students have been confused again after two hours of lecturing that didn’t make sense at all. They’re not the brightest students maybe but they are perceptive which means that if they couldn’t understand what was talked about then the lectures were pretty bad. Not enough emphasis is placed in teaching and teaching well.
• There’s no money at the bottom of the academic ladder but there’s heaps at the top. The UCU has published figures recently that show clearly that Heads of Colleges and Vice Chancellors have received huge pay increases just last year. Very unfair though not altogether surprising.

I am in an ambivalent position: Being a PhD student, I am still a student, and in the hierarchical structure of my university this doesn’t mean a lot. It should mean heaps, I think, because I’ll be going out into the world some time very soon and I could carry the great name of this university with me and help to improve its reputation. I won’t do that, of course, if I feel like the only interest people have in me or my work is in something that can be expressed in numbers (£).

So that’s the one thing that’s a bit tricky, I’m a PhD student and that doesn’t count much but it should count more. Then, on the other hand, I’m also a Teaching Assistant whereby I have huge responsibility for a lot of students. When the lectures were bad and the students therefore couldn’t understand what was said, the TA has to make sure that the students still learn what they are supposed to learn. So the TA lectures at an hourly rate of pay that is a sixth or so of what lecturers earn. This is called exploitation. As a TA, you’re more involved in the organisational side of things and you quickly develop an awareness of what’s going on – but again, you’re very low in the hierarchy there.

I can see what’s happening but I can’t do or say anything about it. That’s the feeling I get. Oh yes, that feeling and the feeling that I should get the hell out of here (to tour the US in my red shoes after all).

Bridges and other American stuff

I just had a great 5 minutes scrolling down this here website and looking at all the pics. Big Dog Heading for the “Homeless HoeDown” takes you on a ride – literally – through the US in summertime and it’s absolutely beaut!! Big Dog likes his abandoned bridges and local cultural history which is why reading this website has been so enjoyable to me. I wouldn’t want to ride through the Midwest on a motorcycle myself – unless Ewan McGregor was there too, of course, I’d probably prefer to take the bike (i.e. the other bike).

How did I come across this again? Yes, I remember it now: I was looking for more pictures of dead cows. There is one among Big Dog’s pics as well.

On a brilliant spring day

I remember going for a walk with my friend Severine a few years back; it was a lovely spring day and we admired the cherry blossoms in the cherry trees and enjoyed the first really warm weather. It was a marvellous day.

Then we passed this field. We were very intrigued. It took us a while to figure out (talking about city girls in the countryside) that we were looking at a dead cow.

The Conservative Files – ‘Hug a Tory’

I observed an interesting campaign for change during my research with young Conservatives; I’ve written about it in some detail in the Conservative Files under ‘Hug a Tory’. The campaign involves hoodies, laughter and what-not – brilliant stuff!

Children are only small adults

…and therefore should wear heels and do everything else that adults do. This seems to be the current mood in the mainstream. I blogged about this before in regards to heels for 8-year-olds and sexy clothes for the wee ones. Women’s liberation is a great thing but liberating girls sexually definitely takes this notion too far, it was felt. The padded bikini for 7-year-old girls which came out earlier this year was therefore quickly withdrawn again.

Interestingly, when looking at the children-adult relationship historically, it turns out that our idea that children should dress different from adults – that girls should not dress as provocatively as their mothers, for instance – is a fairly recent one. Philippe Ariès, in his Centuries of Childhood, makes this point quite clearly. Looking at paintings over many centuries, Ariès identifies a point in time at which childhood was ‘invented’; before then, there was no separate phase of childhood that was characterised by specific activities or special ties of affection.

Children were born and treated as if they were adults from Day One. They took up the same trade as their parents and helped with the family economy. They were the poor man’s riches or ‘too many mouths to feed’ but they were not cute or special in any way. It was more pragmatic than that: they were cheap labour and a product of the biological life-cycle of the parents. Before the 17^th century children in fact didn’t matter at all. There was no sentimental parent-child relationship – basically, children were regarded as useful and that was it – and there was nothing that distinguished children from parents: they wore the same clothes except in smaller sizes, they did the same labour, they ate the same food. Children also drank beer like everyone else (beer was the common beverage all day around back then).

Ariès couldn’t find any paintings that depicted children before 12^th century, that’s how unimportant they were; no one would paint a small adult who couldn’t even work as hard as the grown-ups. And today we make padded bikinis for little girls and other skimpy clothes so that they can look just as cheap as everyone else. It is precisely in this way that, sadly, children are only small adults.

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Philippe Aries (1962) Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage.

The second debate in the broadsheets

Last night’s debate didn’t give the viewers what they wanted: a bit of meat. True, Nick Clegg did refer to the unholy Conservative European alliance as a bunch of ‘nutters’. True, Cameron and Brown ‘ganged up’ on Clegg (but what with him placed in the middle this time, who could help it – positionality matters). But overall there wasn’t a lot of policy talk in this debate either. Neither candidate risked coming out with opinions that might cost them votes (see the Pope question). The Independent thus concludes on the issue of Afghanistan:

So much for style. On substance, the debate was something of a let down. There was not the robust clash of ideas and policy that there could – and ought – to have been. On Afghanistan, the disagreement was about the tardy supply of body armour to troops, rather than the issue of whether British troops ought to be there in the first place. Mr Clegg chose not to emphasise his party’s growing scepticism towards that campaign. This is a shame because the question of foreign military intervention is one of the great ignored fault lines of British politics. Labour and the Tories combined to support the invasion of Iraq and the Liberal Democrats, alone, opposed it. It would be a travesty if Mr Clegg acquiesced while these same two parties seek to shut down debate on our mission in Afghanistan in the same manner.

In uncharacteristically sharp manner, the Guardian chimed in with that:

The three party leaders hurled themselves at last night’s debate as if competing in the Olympic luge. They didn’t talk, they gabbled. They weren’t debating, they were downloading. Gordon Brown and David Cameron had clearly been told to gaze into the camera like Nick Clegg last week. They did so much gazing that they weren’t actually listening. Like pub bores, they were just waiting for their turn.

I’m not sure what the Independent and the Guardian are so upset about; surely a televised debate aims to reach as many people as possible and to convince them somehow to vote in the first place. These debates are probably very successful at this, so that’s great. Their aim isn’t to bombard people with policies. Televised debates are about spectaculum and pretty colours. They represent the popularisation of politics with the lowest common denominator (interesting typo: demon-inator). It’s like what Glee did for people who never wanted to sing or dance ever before.

So I’m not so surprised that it’s a bit more show than substance. The FT stabbed in that direction, reporting that “Mr Brown admitted he lacked PR skills but said the election was not “a television popularity contest” – a reference to Mr Clegg’s popularity after his performance in the first debate.” Good on the FT. (I like the orange paper.)

The The Times was out of sync with all of this this morning; looks like this big ship is cruising on a different course. There, it was felt that feathers had been ruffled last night and sensitivities violated. (Makes you wonder who they’re writing for, but anyway.) They report that

A series of aggressive exchanges over Trident, Europe, the expenses scandal and election tactics replaced last week’s more consensual style as all three responded to the Liberal Democrat surge by taking their performances up a gear. Mr Clegg, who took the election by storm last week, gave an edgier performance, playing it anything but safe. “You’re the boss,” he told voters as he urged them to seize the opportunity to change British politics.

Very aggressive indeed.

New work culture

We’re running out of jobs. The number of available jobs has decreased for several decades now, and as time goes on there will be ever less jobs available. Forget full-time employment, think about ‘multi-activity society’ with several part-time jobs and a spot of volunteering on the side, plus a few hobbies and other leisure-time activities. We’ll all still have busy lives but of a different kind.

This is what Ulrich Beck, the famed German sociologist, argues succinctly in his 2000 book The Brave New World of Work. In this book, he also makes references to Frithjof Bergmann’s idea of a new work culture. This is what it would look like:

Bergmann’s vision is that everyone will spend two days a week at a paid job, two days working for themselves [i.e. self-employed], and two days ‘doing what they really really want to do’. This might be things of substance, which perhaps even lead to new paid activities.

Bergmann’s website gives a lot of information on these mind-blowing and radical ideas and offers workshops to try and help people to find out what it is that they really, really want. It could be something like wanting to become a better gardener and therefore taking courses, or reading books on gardening, or simply work in the garden a lot. Or a project like writing a novel, or become a painter.

I’ve discussed Bergmann’s ideas with my students today and we came to the following conclusions:

• Bergmann assumes high levels of self-motivation and discipline but not everyone has these gifts.
• He also seems to assume that everyone is quite knowledgeable – which is true to an extent but what about tradesmen?
• Implementation would be a nightmare.

Other than that I think it’s a brilliant idea! And we’re doing this already to an extent anyway; we work in part-time jobs and juggle things already. The sad point perhaps is that whilst this sounds all creative and free-floating and all, in 10years time or so this is perhaps the only way for people to have work (and to thus live meaningful lives – work is integral to our sense of well-being). There simply won’t be enough jobs, or in other words: There will only be enough jobs for most people to work, as an employee, for two days a week. Everything else they have to come up with themselves.

So get the thinking caps out.

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Ulrich Beck (2000). The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity.

The ‘Great Ignored’ and the Forgotten People

Observing Conservative politics across the Western countries can yield interesting insights, like for instance that all Conservative politicians (and this includes the Republicans) at one time or another will speak of large segments of the population as ‘the forgotten people’. Nixon has done it with the ‘silent majority’, Menzies in Australia actually coined the phrase ‘the forgotten people’, and Cameron is doing it with the ‘Great Ignored’.

Judith Brett, one of Australia’s leading social scientists, looked into Menzies’ rhetorical strategies to see why they worked. For Menzies, the Forgotten People were professional men, most farmers and rural producers, shop keepers, clerical employees and manual workers. Brett explains that

It is generally claimed that such people are forgotten in the struggle between particular sections because they are not as selfish and pushing as the other parties: the very rich, and organised labour.

But the real crux of the matter, and the point that I think applies generally across the board and specificallt to Cameron’s talk of the ‘great ignored’, is this:

To call people forgotten is to suggest that they have been forgotten, to arouse anxiety and self-pity, and at the same time to appease them by presenting oneself as someone who notices and remembers.

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Judith Brett (1997). Menzies’ Forgotten People. In Richard White and Penny Russell (Eds.), Memories & Dreams. Reflections on 20th Century Australia. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.

The Labour Parties’ election broadcasts

Labour isn’t being very clever in saying ‘vote for us because we’re not the Tories’ even though they might have a point. Their election broadcasts are out now and deserve a moment or two of our attention. Below are the transcripts of two election broadcasts: The first is for the UK party and features Eddie Izzard; you can look at the clip here. The second one is by the Scottish party. It is quite grim and a bit scary; the Tories don’t come off very well at all in this one either whilst what the party wants to do itself isn’t discussed at all. You can watch the clip here. (I didn’t transcribe the Welsh Labour Party broadcast but there is one.)

Eddie Izzard’s Labour TV advertisement Brilliant Britain’

During this election, politicians are going to give you a lot of political speak: ‘57 per cent of people think that 19 per cent of people over the age of 70 are 3 times more likely’ etc. I’m not gonna do that. I’m just gonna tell you what I think and you can make up your own minds. Two quick points and then you can go and have a cup of tea. Hang on for a second.

Firstly, the Tories are gonna hit us with lots of posters and adverts in this election. They can do this because they’ve got shedloads of money to spend to make themselves look good. They’ve got Lord Ashcroft out there busy raising cash for them from wealthy individuals and businesses. Do they give their money to the Tories out of the goodness of their hearts? Well, I think not. Or is it because they know they get the whole lot back and more in tax cuts and concessions for the wealthy few? What do you think? I’ll leave that one up to you.

Secondly, last year I ran around Britain and you know what: Britain is bloody brilliant. I take great offense that the Tories are slagging off Britain saying it’s broken. Up and down the country I met people who were working hard, creating projects, looking out for each other. If the Tories bothered to get on their bikes and go around the country they might actually find the real Britain. I was inspired by the people I met.

Now, are all the good things in the country down to the Labour Party? Of course not. Are Labour perfect? No. But I truly believe that Labour’s heart is in the right place. The Tories talk about change but what change would they give us? A change back to the Tories of old but with new suits on. Remember, these people are Thatcher’s children! She’s still an icon to them! It’s Thatcher! Be afraid, be very afraid! They’d take us back to 3 million unemployed, 15 % interest rates, tax cuts for the rich, fox hunting and the feudal system given half a chance.

That’s not the kind of change I want to see. I don’t want change for change’s sake, I want a party with values. Sure, there’s loads to do, and yes, Britain’s been through tough times recently. No one is denying that. But it’s Britain with compassion, Britain with community. The Britain I have seen is great.

I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to vote (mock-whispering: Vote Labour, vote Labour!) but I am trusting the Labour Party, a party founded on fairness, to make the right decisions in government.

I support Labour because I believe in brilliant Britain.

Scottish Labour election campaign – TV advertisement

The Tories – the party that gave us the poll tax and Margaret Thatcher – haven’t changed. They closed our mines, closed our steelworks and closed our factories. Interest rates hit 15%. Thousands of people in Scotland had their houses repossessed. And they even took away our school milk. The Tories opposed the national minimum wage. They opposed all Labour’s tax credits for hard-working families and their children. They starved our schools and hospitals of funding and there’s a real risk they would the same thing again.

Unemployment hit a record high. Three million people lost their jobs because of Tory cuts. Their cuts agenda of division and decay was tried in the 1980s. It didn’t work then and it wouldn’t work now.

The Conservatives remain the party for the few and not the many. They might talk tough on crime, but their record in government doesn’t match the rhetoric. They wouldn’t fight for the NHS. They call it a 60-year-mistake. They want to cut tax credits and the Child Trust Fund and families in Scotland would suffer.

The Tories would choke off the recovery before it is complete. They were against action to stop bankers’ bonuses and would stand back and let the recession take its course. At every turn, the Tories made the wrong decision on fighting this recession and they’re still making the wrong decisions now by cutting faster and further than is safe. They threaten thousands of jobs on the carrier contracts on the Clyde and in Fife, and others, right across Scotland.

They wouldn’t fight for hardworking families either. They would rather give tax breaks to a few millionaires at the expense of the rest of us. The Tories remain out of touch with the people of Scotland. The Tories would wreck the economy, slash funding for hospitals and schools, and stand up for the few, not the many, just as they always have. The Tories haven’t changed.

Scotland is a proud nation – proud of our country, proud of our people and proud of what we do together. This election is a two-horse race. We love our country and want the best for it. That’s why we want a future that is fair for all of us.