Yes, but ...

“Oh, Geoffrey!” A rather excellent excerpt from the...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:53:00 +0100

“Oh, Geoffrey!”

A rather excellent excerpt from the BBC’s Test Match Special today, in which Jonathan Agnew tries to get on with commentating on a cricket match while Geoffrey Boycott completely fails to get the hint about when some topics of conversation should be quietly dropped - especially when you’re on live radio and have about a million listeners.

Things Churchill didn't say, or why the right is wrong

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:55:27 +0100

Right-wing people always seem to enjoy quoting a line that’s usually attributed to Winston Churchill:

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”

As with many things he’s quoted as having said, Churchill didn’t say that. As the Churchill Centre points out, that would have been enormously disrespectful to his wife Clemmie, who was a lifelong Liberal. Besides, Churchill himself was 30 when he crossed the floor of the Commons and joined the Liberals, and was over 50 before he crossed the floor for a second time back to the Conservative benches.

Even if Churchill never said this, the quote sticks in peoples’ minds, and is often used as a faintly condescending way of saying “Ah, not being a Tory is just something you’ll grow out of once you’re old enough to understand how things really are in the world.” It’s repeated often enough that the general assumption has become that as you get older, you get more right wing because you have a family to look after, or because you have more money having worked for a while, and these things naturally make you more inclined to self-centredness.

By these assumptions I should now be a raging Daily Mail-reading Tory. But I’m not. If anything, I’ve moved towards the left since I was younger. I would never have said I was even right of centre, but in the last years I’ve moved to the left. But why?

Firstly, the money thing. Yep, I have more money now than I did 20 years ago. I’ve got a good, steady job in the private sector which pays me more than I need to pay the bills and keeps my family well. But at the same time, I know how much tax I pay and I’m now far more aware than I used to be of how little money some other people have to look after their own families. That makes me ashamed and makes me feel massively fortunate and privileged.

I also know that there are some people who are paid inordinately more than me but who, if they play their cards right, probably don’t pay much more tax than I do and might even pay less. If I could afford to pay more tax to make sure the people at the bottom of the pile are better looked after, then they certainly can damn well afford to pay quite a bit more tax to help the people who they probably don’t even know exist. Giving to charities to help relieve poverty is one thing, but it’s a band-aid placed on a wound that’s already bleeding. On the other hand, taxation for the purpose of running a compassionate welfare state is like charitable giving on steroids. The public sector is best placed to administer social assistance for those who need it, to make sure people are cared for when they’re sick without bankrupting themselves, and that their kids are not hungry. A welfare state makes sure people don’t get into the situation where they have to go to charities for support. It does these things enormously efficiently, and a single donation in the form of an income tax bill does more to keep more people’s heads above water than a year of shoving money in tins. A few percent on income tax for people on higher incomes to make sure the welfare state, education and the NHS are properly funded? Sounds good to me. People on higher incomes are getting more out of society, so it seems only fair to give more back.

Secondly, ah, family values. How dare people want to undermine the sanctity of marriage? Getting married was one of the best things I’ve ever done and it’s one of the things that both made me happy at the time and continues to make me happy. Marriage is companionship, sharing, a commitment, and a bunch of other stuff. Before getting married I didn’t really think much either way about the whole issue of marriage equality - after all, living together was pretty much the same as marriage, right? Actually being married for a couple of years turned all that on its head. It now seems simply illogical to me that marriage between two people should be arbitrarily restricted to couples of the opposite sex. A marriage isn’t made by your chromosomes, it’s made by a willingness to express a commitment and to stick with that commitment. So… nope, not really very right wing there either.

But I have kids! Surely I’ll feel the natural instinct to keep as much possible for myself because my kids have to have all the possible advantages, right? Well… no. Having kids focuses a laser beam on life. I’m lucky. I have a beautiful one-year-old daughter who, right now, wants for nothing - we can keep her healthy, clothed, warm, clean, fed, and supplied with a few brightly coloured objects to play with. Sure, in a few years we’ll probably have to have a talk when she asks for a car or something, but that’s some way in the future. And I know how very, very lucky I am to be in this position. Now I have a child of my own, every story I read in the paper about child poverty or child abuse or child neglect is like a knife in the heart. I hate reading them. Some of them I can’t even bring myself to read. Knowing how many people out there have an enormous struggle just to provide the basic needs for their children… well, there’s the ol’ guilt again.

So yes, experience of life has changed me politically, but it’s damn well not changed me in the way society seems to assume I should be changed. I’m tempted to misquote a misquote of Churchill myself -

“If you’re a Conservative when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a socialist by the time you’re 35, you have no soul.”

The sloganeering of the modern right, with its simple statements of blame and self and insularity, may be easy to digest and appeal to younger minds.. but well.. you’ll grow out of it.

I must have been bored this evening - but if you find yourself...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:18:53 +0100

I must have been bored this evening - but if you find yourself stuck in 1981 and need to make stings for the ITV “Watch It!” children’s TV strand (maybe you want to make your own Tiswas titles?), here’s the relevant bit clipped from Paul Keogh’s Dragster and given an 8% speed-up to give it the right pitch and tempo.

It’s even in stereo, but if you’re stuck in 1981 this won’t be an issue as NICAM stereo won’t be officially launched in the UK for about another 10 years. Come to think of it, MP3 codecs will be a while away too, so you should dub it onto tape before you go.

I guess I got tired of hosting my own blog

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:47:03 +0100

After all, I hardly ever posted to the thing. Why keep Movable Type around just for that? Take it away, the cloud.

The Mysterious Affair of the Midnight Intervention

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 13:06:00 +0200

The surreal Westminster story of the day concerns the blocked election of Labour MP Cathy Jamieson - who has knowledge and experience of issues related to the current excitement - to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee which today will be grilling the Murdochs. Select committee appointments are generally uncontroversial and unopposed. In fact, there’s even a cross-party committee which agrees on the party makeup and membership of each select committee. So when the appointment of Cathy Jamieson was agreed upon by that committee and was put to the House as a quick petition last night, everyone was remarkably surprised when an obscure Tory backbencher shouted “NO!”, thus objecting to the appointment and referring it back for resubmission or debate.

It’s even more surprising that this happens the night before one of the most important sittings the DCMS Select Committee has ever had, leaving it one member short. Even more surprisingly, the obscure backbencher concerned - Nick de Bois, member for Enfield North - has apparently never met Ms Jamieson. There is no history between the two. An admittedly cursory look at Hansard suggests that de Bois has neither a history of showing an interest in culture, media and sport or a tendency to attend the House during the wee small hours (the latter is just going on his last few speeches, so I might be wrong there).

So why, on a day like this, would a random backbencher stay at the House until after midnight - not participating in any of the other business of the Commons, according to Hansard - just to shout “NO!” when the motion for Ms Jamieson’s appointment was moved? If the objection was somehow party political (which is unlikely, given that he was going against his own parliamentary party’s specific agreement to appoint her) why did he not also object to the other select committee appointment that was nodded through immediately after his intervention? And why, moreover, did he not object to Ms Jamieson’s somewhat less urgent appointment to the committee on member’s expenses only minutes earlier?

The government (his own party..) has moved to have the Commons reconsider the nomination and it will no doubt go through given the cross-party support it has - but this is not going to happen before the Committee meets this afternoon.

de Bois has so far been silent on the matter, which is strange considering that @nickdebois is a prolific Tweeter on political matters.

Why did he deliberately and knowingly go to so much effort to nobble this sitting of the DCMS Committee? The rabbit hole continues to go ever deeper..

Baby gyms can be a little mind-altering. #fb

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:26:20 +0200

Baby gyms can be a little mind-altering. #fb

Not watching Eurovision this year.. it’s just way too...

Sat, 14 May 2011 21:16:03 +0200

Not watching Eurovision this year.. it’s just way too long.

Was it really Osama?

Sat, 14 May 2011 09:34:00 +0200

Okay, let’s look at the evidence:

Straggly beard
Lives spartan existence
Extremely leery of the latest technology
Employs absurdly longwinded techniques for reading web pages
Highly fundamentalist beliefs
At odds even with many sympathisers
Although widely considered irrelevant is still a hero to many
Doesn’t celebrate Christmas
Does not own a cellphone due to fears of being tracked
Occasionally issues statements that leave people scratching their heads and trying to divine what they actually mean

I can’t work out whether that bunch of Navy SEALs got Osama bin Laden or Richard Stallman.

Five months! Here’s the obligatory horsie-comparison shot....

Tue, 10 May 2011 09:07:23 +0200

Five months! Here’s the obligatory horsie-comparison shot. You can see the whole series here.

Things! Things are interesting!

Sun, 08 May 2011 20:25:25 +0200

Things! Things are interesting!

Doesn’t matter that she can’t talk yet. This facial...

Sun, 08 May 2011 20:23:06 +0200

Doesn’t matter that she can’t talk yet. This facial expression makes her opinion of bathtime perfectly clear.

Cycling Explained: Why Cav is pissed off.

Sun, 08 May 2011 18:20:00 +0200

So, it’s stage two of the Giro d’Italia (that’s the Tour of Italy, the Italian version of the Tour de France), and Manx sprinter Mark Cavendish has just pulled on the pink jersey which tells the world he’s currently in the overall lead at the race. He should be happy - the pink jersey in the Giro is pretty damn prestigious.

But he’s got a face like an angry, uh, like an angry short guy from the Isle of Man. He even came second in today’s stage, but that shouldn’t matter as it was enough to put him in the lead. Why so cross, Cav?

He’s cross because he didn’t win the stage. Okay, he’s cross because he didn’t win the stage and thinks he should have won it. Take a look at the video of the last kilometre from Belgian TV before going further.

Okay, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on in the last km of a race that’s going to end in a bunch sprint. What you want to look out for is the last couple of hundred metres, where Alessandro Petacchi, the eventual winner, launches his sprint. Cavendish goes after him, but as he’s gaining ground on the inside Petacchi veers across the road and cuts him off, losing him momentum. Cavendish then accelerates again and loses the sprint to Petacchi by about a tyre’s width.

Well, it was a race and Petacchi won, right? Well.. kind of. The thing about sprinting like that is that it can be really dangerous if people swerve all over the road, so the UCI (cycling’s governing body) has a rule against it. Rule 2.3.036, to be precise:

Riders shall be strictly forbidden to deviate from the lane they selected when launching into the sprint and, in so doing, endangering others.

Deviation is what Petacchi did - pretty much a textbook example, and Cavendish himself knows this as he’s been disqualified from races himself in the past for doing the same thing. I guess this means he’s entitled to expect others not to do it either, and that’s why he’s pissed off at Petacchi as they cross the line.

However, this is cycling, and it’s a parochial sport (just look how possessive Americans get when anyone suggests Lance Armstrong may not be the greatest cyclist of all time). The Giro d’Italia is the national tour of Italy, the judges are Italian, and Alessandro Petacchi is something of a national hero.. are they going to deny him the win? Probably not. The only thing Cavendish and his HTC-Highroad team could do would be to lodge an official complaint which might not go anywhere - it’s better to just swear a lot and move on. It’s likely the same would have happened if Petacchi had been French and this had been the Tour de France.

But! I hear you say.. he’s got the pink jersey, so he’s in the lead. Isn’t that what he wants anyway?

Well.. it is and it isn’t. Being in the pink jersey for a few days is nice, but Cavendish is a sprinter and therefore has no chance of winning the Giro overall - the mountains will kill his time as sprinters just aren’t built for grinding slowly up mountain passes. He’s after the points jersey, which is unofficially the “sprinter’s jersey”, for the most consistent top finisher. As sprinters tend to finish high up the order in more stages than the mountain guys, it’s usually won by a sprinter. Petacchi’s stunt appears to have cost Cavendish points towards this competition (first place gets 25, second place gets 20), and it’s really, really important for anyone having a run at the points jersey to get as many points in the bank early on as possible.

Incidentally, as the Giro being run by Italians the various leaders’ jerseys have stylish colours - the overall leader’s jersey is pink (the Maglia Rosa), but the points jersey is a fetching red (the Maglia Rosso Passione, or “Red Passion Jersey”). Until a couple of years ago it was a kind of mauve colour, cyclamen, but it got changed as nobody could spell Maglia Ciclamino.

So that’s why Cavendish looks pissed off despite being in the lead. He feels he should have won the stage, and it’s doubly infuriating as the guy who did win did so by doing something for which Cavendish himself has been heavily penalised in the past. Can’t blame him for looking like he wanted to wallop someone over the head with that fizzy wine bottle during the podium ceremonials.

This is my cushion. on Flickr.Bow down before the cuteness.

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 11:46:20 +0200

This is my cushion. on Flickr.

Bow down before the cuteness.

Those bloody gates of Downing Street

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:07:54 +0200

I remember when the huge black gates went up at the entrance to Downing Street:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street#Downing_Street_gates

At the time they were regarded as a sign of how detached from the people the Thatcher government had become. Tony Blair promised to tear them down. Didn’t happen.

Now I see that David Cameron needs a bigger motorcade than the Queen to get from Downing Street to Westminster Abbey, a short walk away which previous Prime Ministers would have quite likely covered on foot. Sure, you can say “security reasons” but security was so tight in central London today the risk would have been minimal.

Maybe this is one reason why people are disillusioned with politics and don’t think it relates to their lives?

My UK bank is currently displaying this interstitial when you...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:57:04 +0200

My UK bank is currently displaying this interstitial when you log into online banking.

Apologies to those who saw this earlier, but...

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 20:00:30 +0200

Apologies to those who saw this earlier, but...

Academics v. Administration

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:22:00 +0200

Academics v. Administration

Royal Wedding marketing tie-in of the day..

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:02:29 +0200

To: me
Subject: Who’s gonna clean up the mess after the wedding?

Hi Mike

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