Doing the bisexual community info outreach stall in Sheffield last weekend, one of the conversations I had with quite a few stall visitors was about the Bisexuality Report. What was it; why it was useful; how it came about.

Each time I started along the lines of, "think back to 2010 after the Coalition Government was formed? One of the good things was, because it was a formal coalition, they laid out on paper what they were going to do. On LGBT issues there was an LGB&T Action Plan. It was incredibly helpful for people outside Westminster, outside the well-funded London clique groups like Stonewall. Because now we knew broadly what to expect and when, so we knew: this thing should come up next May, we have time to prepare and know what to look for, and what to chase up on if it doesn't seem to be happening." That then led onto talking about how the LGB&T Action Plan lacked a bi strand and evidence base, which gave momentum to the "Bi Life 2" idea and led to my proposal for the Bisexuality Report in 2011.

Having a coalition government meant a written plan with a timeline both parties had broadly signed up to.  Prior to 2010 there was never that kind of open agenda: to know what was going to happen next you had to be part of the Westminster bubble. You had to already be in the clique in order to influence the clique. Here instead was an open plan for all to follow.

Of course it hasn't meant that as grassroots community group organising types we magically have gained offices, staff and so on. But within what unfunded projects can do it has been massively better.

Which parties are involved in the next government will affect what winds up in any new five year agenda for action, but from the perspective of the less cash-heavy end of the third sector, I do hope it's a coalition. That way we all have more chance of engagement with what happens from here to 2020.

If you haven’t yet heard, the Government’s hastily introduced motion to change the way the Speaker is re-elected was defeated in the Commons by 228 votes to 202 after a debate of around an hour.It was quite an extraordinary debate to watch as one watched William Hague floundering to explain why the Government had suddenly decided that this matter had to be discussed at short notice while a range of MPs from all parties stood up to query the process. When Hague looks back on his Parliamentary career, he may be tempted to pretend that it finished on Wednesday 25th March rather than today, as it really wasn’t a good note to leave on.

The most impressive speech, however, was one that was delivered with typical Parliamentary bombast or bluster and showed that great oratory can be delivered quietly to devastating effect. Charles Walker, chair of the Commons’ procedure committee, whose recommendations Hague was ostensibly proposing to the House, showed just what skullduggery had been played out behind the scenes, with people who knew what they were about to do telling him nothing of the way they were about to use him:

It does suggest that some people in Parliament have been watching too much House of Cards and decided playing silly games is more important than getting on with governing. This is likely the last Parliamentary day of Michael Gove as Chief Whip too, after managing to end the Parliamentary session by getting the Government defeated on a vote they didn’t need to force while angering many of the more influential backbenchers with the manner in which they attempted it.

What did this mean for the Liberal Democrats? Well, Tom Brake sat alongside Hague throughout the debate playing the loyal deputy (and was mentioned as one of Walker’s ‘clever men’) but the only Lib Dem MPs to speak in the debate – Duncan Hames and David Heath – were both clearly going to vote against, and another MP told me privately that the announcement of this vote came as a surprise to them, but they were allowed a free vote, as MPs usually are on procedural matters of the House. How individuals voted we’ll have to wait and see for a few hours until the results of the vote are published on Hansard.

However, one thought did occur to me – was allowing this motion to be brought today the price exacted by the Tories for allowing the ‘Yellow Budget‘ to be presented in the House last week? There were some suggestions floating around earlier that Bercow’s complaints about using the House for a purely party political announcement had angered the party leadership enough to make them want to get rid of him. Sadly, it’s all too plausible that both party leaderships would be so enamoured of their respective clever wheezes that they neglected to think how they would look to their own backbenchers, let alone the public, and so we got the mess we had today. It’s a fitting capstone to stick on the end of this Parliament.

A piece of ebook-reader software called Clean Reader has been generating headlines and causing indignation among authors recently:

A new app that allows readers to swap swear words in their novels with sanitised versions is facing a backlash from furious authors, who have accused it of setting a dangerous precedent of censorship.The app, entitled Clean Reader, has been designed to take explicit words out of any book printed in electronic format - with or without permission from its author - to swap them with child-friendly versions.

(I'm not linking to Clean Reader directly—don't want to give them any free inbound Google mojo.)

Mangling an author's text is a clear violation of the author's Moral rights, an element of copyright which is very weak in the United States and very strong elsewhere (primarily in civil law jurisdictions). (The moral right is the right of an author to be identified as the creator of a work, and for the work represented as their creation to be unaltered by other hands, so that the relationship between creator and created work is clear.) Mangling an author's text may be legal or illegal in the USA, depending on whether it occurs before or after sale. After all, I can't stop you buying one of my books and editing it with a sharpie: it's a physical object and according to the first sale doctrine, it's yours to do with as you wish. I may be able to legally stop you modifying an ebook, though: ebooks are not sold but a limited license to download and use them is granted in exchange for money—a fine legal distinction that was borrowed from the software business's tame sharks—and that limited license may permit or deny such usage.

Clean Reader claim to get around this by (a) being a licensed distributor (they provide the app and sell books for it sourced from PageFoundry, a distributor who back-end onto various publishers), and (b) the censorship is performed on the reader device by the reader app, once the book has been purchased and downloaded. There's a bunch of case law around whether or not it's legal to do this to movie rentals or downloads, or legal to skip advertisements in recorded programming on your TiVo—it gets murky fast. But let's suppose they're right and what they're doing ("protect the children! At any cost! From naughty words like 'breast' and 'fuck'!") is legal.

Speaking as an author who deeply resents the idea of his books being mutilated to fit the prejudices of a curious reader's blue-nosed and over-protective parents (hint: I write for adults—if you don't think my books are suitable for your or your child's tender eyes, don't buy them), what can I do about this?

It's worth quoting some correspondence posted on Absolute Write at this point. The PR contact for Clean Reader had this to say, in answer to a public enquiry:

As for how we deal with context, the app does look for specific sequences of letters lick cock, shit, or f--k. But it also requires white space on both sides of the word. So your example of cockapoo would not be blocked by the app. But cock a poo would have cock blocked. There will be times when the app blocks a word that isn't being used as a profanity. Jesus Christ is another example. If a reader is reading the Bible with Clean Reader there will be quite a lot of words blocked; hell, damn, ass, Jesus, etc. The user will have to make a judgement call as to whether or not to use the "Clean Reader" feature with each book. If it's a religious book they may just opt to turn the feature off. Or if it's a book about chickens they may want to leave it off also. But for example, I'm currently reading American Sniper. It seems to have at least one F-word on every page and sometimes multiple per page. It's frankly a little over the top. Otherwise the book is fantastic and entertaining. So even if the app blocks out a word every now and again that wasn't necessarily being used as a profanity, I'd rather deal with that then have to read F--- every page. Those who have written articles about Clean Reader have typically downloaded a book that is riddled with swear words to show examples of how frustrating the book would be with Clean Reader. But I can tell you we aren't selling many of those types of books. I've read several books with the app and I typically only see a word blocked once every few pages. And it's usually pretty easy to get the gist of what was being said. It's just nice to not actually see it.

So. While it might be possible to get my books pulled from that particular distributor, I am more inclined to deal with this idiocy by getting creative with my scatalogical vocabulary.

No more "fucks" freely interjected; instead I shall steal "unclefucker" from South Park.

No more "cunt!" as a free-standing gender-neutral insult[*]; instead it'll have to be "cuntfart!" or "pissflaps!" or "clunge!" (go look it up) ...

... But that's not going far enough.

I am pretty sure there's plenty of context in which the censorbot can be induced to fuck-up a perfectly clean paragraph beyond all recognition, simply by removing words delimited by whitespace. "Chimney-breast" for example, becomes "Chimney-chest". "The cunt line of the mainbrace" becomes "the bottom line of the mainbrace".

How far do you think I can take this?

UPDATE:

Cory Doctorow takes a radically different approach ("I hate your censorship, but I'll defend to the death your right to censor"). I think he's missing the distinction between censorship and editing—that what's happening here is not straightforward "you can't read that" blocking, but actual substitution of someone else's words for my own, subtly or unsubtly corrupting and misrepresenting the author's words. One thing is clear, though: while we're having a doctrinal argument, it's important to keep in mind the essential fact that we both think that Clean Reader users are stupid poopy-heads.

---

[*] That's what "cunt" is, in Scottish vernacular—usage differs wildly across the anglophone world, and in Scotland it carries much less gendered misogynistic freight than it does in American usage.

Today’s shock political news is that a member of a political party has said that party will vote against the Queen’s Speech of a party it generally disagrees with should it be in a position to do so. This should be something so routine it doesn’t even need to be mentioned, but apparently because the party talking about it is the SNP, this becomes a grand constitutional matter, not an issue of regular politics in the House of Commons.

Indeed, according to the Tories, this would be “trying to sabotage the democratic will of the British people” which is a bit rich coming from a party that feels it has a divine right to unfettered rule of the country despite not having received even forty percent of the vote at a general election for over two decades. That the same British people would, in these circumstances, not have given any party a majority in the Commons while returning sufficient SNP MPs to give them this power, would be completely irrelevant. For the Tories, the democratic will is only relevant if it gives them power through the random workings of our broken electoral system, and is to be ignored at all other times. We should be prepared for lots of people telling us what the democratic will of the people is over the next few months, most of which will likely not fit with what the people actually said in the election.

Of course, this is only a story because the SNP are involved as it seems that them doing almost anything that any other political party would do – including getting elected – is somehow an affront to the established order. Part of this is due to the belief that the No vote in the referendum should have reset the system back to the old status quo, and so they’re not following the script and disappearing back into obscurity, and so the SNP are seen as somehow illegitimate representatives, their MPs different to the others. The message appears to be that the establishment is very glad that Scotland decided to stay as part of the UK, but that they’re not allowed to use that membership to elect a party that will explicitly push for their interests, no matter how good its proved to be at doing that.

In this context, it appears that the “democratic will of the British people” only includes those British people who don’t vote for the SNP. The people of Scotland have chosen to remain as part of Britain, and they have just as much right to have their say as everyone else in the UK. Everyone’s democratic will gets to be expressed in the election and the Commons afterwards, not just the people who’ve voted the right way.

Good news everyone! Party HQ have dropped the ‘shut up and deliver leaflets’ instruction to anyone wanting to do something other than election campaigning and allowed a special dispensation. Yes, you’re now allowed to drop your laser-like focus on the election campaign and discuss a whole other topic. Unfortunately, the topic HQ appear to have chosen as the only other one suitable for discussion is ‘why Tim Farron should never be party leader’.

Or, to put it another way, Farron-hunting season is officially open, and now Vince Cable’s decided to bring a blunderbuss to it. The first salvo of attacks obviously didn’t have the desired effect of making us mere members spontaneously denounce the Farronite tendency and resolve to redouble our efforts to promote maximum loyalty to the leadership, so Vince has now scattered buckshot across the sky in an effort to bring down the dangerously popular Farron.

Ignoring his own advice that using negative tactics against someone who’s popular tends to be counter-productive and that there’s no need to talk about leadership elections because we already have a leader, he told Buzzfeed that Farron wouldn’t be ‘credible’ as leader because he’s “never been in government and has never had to make difficult decisions” which means that every Lib Dem leader before 2010 wasn’t credible, and neither were most of the members of the Cabinet Vince joined in 2010 (including himself). If ‘being in Government’ is a barrier to becoming a credible party leader, it also makes the leadership a bit of a self-perpetuating oligarchy, able to veto any new entrants by not bringing them into the Government, then claiming they don’t have the experience necessary because they’ve not been in Government.

It’s nice that they’re already rehearsing their lines for the leadership election that they’re sure isn’t going to happen, but maybe they could refrain from speaking them in public for a few weeks? Perhaps they should listen to the wisdom of a former Party President:

@stealthmunchkin @caronmlindsay Just concerntrate on the election! It's important to get more liberals elected

— Tim Farron (@timfarron) March 24, 2015

I’m feeling somewhat like the notional child starving in the supermarket: paralysed by choice. I’ve got an uncounted number of books and comics on my bedside shelving unit thingy to read, and many more on my Kindle and iPad respectively. I have 50 tabs open on my browser, a list of unread things on Taskpaper, many years of Instapaper backlog that I’ve pretty much written off. A vast mental stack of television programmes, films, online videos that I’ve been recommended. Steam games, iOS games, 3DS games purchased and as yet unplayed.

That’s just the content breathe-in. I’ve got my regular commitment to writing the blog and recording and editing the podcast, then I’ve got several comics/other fiction things I’m slowly trying to write, things for the piano I’m trying to learn, things for the piano I’m trying to write, learning the guitar, preparation for the Cold War podcast Josef and I are hoping to do, a script for a video thing I want to do with my brother and a couple of websites that I’m thinking about building. Exhale.

I won’t deny that it’s a source of minor frustration to me that I have so much #content to consume, so many things I could and should be creating, and I find myself perpetually unable to focus on any one at a time, or at least, for any substantial period. Floppy-format comics are ok – short enough that I can read through without my attention wandering sufficient that I don’t finish; my nightstand, however, is still littered with books that are 1/4-1/3 of the way through. Substitute blog posts and longer-form writing for the equivalent creation, I guess.

I recall my dad telling me (back when he was still working at a quango, though I can’t remember which one) that he and the others in his office had to do psychometric tests of some kind. One of the findings was that he, and most of his colleagues, were “starters” – people who liked to initiate new projects, but not necessarily to see them through. I, as you may be able to tell from the above, have a little bit of a problem myself in this regard. This is even disregarding the fair few other things that are even further away from being fully-formed ideas so I didn’t mention them, or the number of things that I’ve started and discarded. I’ve been told by others that I’m someone who does A Lot Of Stuff, but almost none of my ideas become realised, fewer still are completed, and still fewer still in a manner reflective of my initial vision.

This isn’t a flaw, and probably doesn’t need “fixing”, but I think it needs managing (and better than I have been, especially recently). I’m not sure what form that would take, on either the input of the output end. I have attempted to impose schedules for things before, but their effectiveness is very erratic. For now, I might have to restrict my purchases of further books until I’ve read the ones I have, and resolve not to begin writing any more comics until I’ve finished at least one. I’ll just write down the ideas – hey, maybe I could start another list!

Over and out.

Hello ladies (and some others, but I think this is going to be mostly of interest to women).

If you are like me, you will be talking along to friends on Twitter, and someone you’ve never spoken to before will jump in to give you their very important insight. Most often, these seem to be cisgender, heterosexual white men, i.e. the group in society most used to assuming their view of the world is right and proper and that by imposing it on you, they are merely educating you.

This phenomenon is so common that it has a name: sealioning.

Arguing with these people tends not to work, they love arguing and eventually accuse you of being “illogical” or “emotional”, and declare themselves the winner. Asking them to go away doesn’t tend to work, because they just get cross.

Well I’ve discovered how to deal with them, and so far it has been foolproof. Introducing, call-centring.

Here’s the idea: you respond to their tweets, but you don’t respond to THEM.

I’ll show you an example. Let’s assume I’m talking to my friends about cats or something, and twitter user, @sealion_1990 jumps in:

@auntysarah: Oh wow, @my_friend just found this really nice picture of some kittens!

@sealion_1990: @auntysarah Actually … sealion sealion mansplain sealion

Now we invoke the call-centre. They play the customer. You play the bored and indifferent call centre hold system/computerised agent. Just like a customer service agent at a real call centre, IT IS VITAL TO STICK TO THE SCRIPT AND NOT ACTUALLY ADDRESS ANYTHING THEY SAY FROM NOW ON. First inform them that they are in the queue:

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 Thank you for your unsolicited opinion. It has been placed in a queue for consideration. Your queue position is … 9 billion.

Note the use of the .@ reply. This heightens the effect by humiliating them in front of your followers. They just don’t realise they’re being humiliated yet. What follows are actual responses to this technique, but I’ve changed the name. It helps to have a few pictures and vines on hand of you chilling, ignoring the phone, whatever. I keep a few stored ready to go.

@sealion_1990: @auntysarah it was solicited, otherwise you would not have posted it publicly for public response.

They often come out with something like this. DO NOT ENGAGE, hold your position:

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 All our operators are busy ignoring other unsolicited opinions. Your opinion is important to us.

Ooh, you aren’t playing his game. Now he’s getting irritated. He must sneer.

@sealion_1990: @auntysarah I take it you have nothing intelligent to reply back to

The assertion that he is “intelligent” and you just don’t understand. Silly little girl, you need to debate him on his own terms. Not going to happen, time for another canned response:

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 Press 1 to hear a beep and 2 to hear a different beep. Your opinion is important to us.

Anyone sensible would realise you were mocking them. Anyone sensible would likely give up now, unless somehow their ego was wounded and demands redress!!!!!!

@sealion_1990: @auntysarah no intelligence. You do a good R2D2 impression though.

Let’s throw in a vine. I have one of me humming the allegro from Vivaldi’s Spring. You know, the one call centres always use:

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 Please continue to hold. Your queue position is now… nine billion … and … one

(You may need to click the volume control to hear the hold music).

We bumped his queue position up by one, too. If he still doesn’t go away, he will say something like:

@sealion_1990: @auntysarah You don’t pass on ideas with rudeness

You have a number of options, you can keep going with canned responses, you can ignore him, or you can block him. What I tend to do is keep a few more canned responses in reserve, such as:

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 Our engineers have detected a strange whining noise on the line. Please continue to hold.

And

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 Ignoring your opinion is sponsored by Tissues for Cissues and Spaghetti Feelz in Menztears Sauce. Please continue to hold.

What pretty much always happens is that they get more and more frustrated until they just go away. If not, when you get bored, finish off with:

@auntysarah: .@sealion_1990 Please continue to hold…

Then block them, and move on.

This technique is like kryptonite to sealions, seriously. It completely flummoxes them and it has the advantage that unlike trying to ask them to leave you alone, or actually engaging them, it’s fun.

Go get ’em!

The two major referendums we’ve had during this Parliament – 2011’s on AV and 2014’s on Scottish independence – were both very different, but I think the after effect of both of them has been quite similar. In both cases, it was expected by many that the rejection of change would be the end of the issue for a long time, and things would go back the way they’d use to been. The issues that had led to the referendum being called would slowly fade away, and there’d be no need to consider any further change.

The result of the AV referendum was not just presented as a disaster for the Lib Dems, but also an indication that we would return to an age of two-party politics. After all, at that time Labour and the Tories were both up around 40% in the polls, and the growth in support for other parties hadn’t begun. The people had spoken, it was thought, and would now get over the idea that we could have multi-party politics in this country.

Unfortunately for that view, things haven’t proceeded in that way. The factors that led to the breakdown of old party loyalties which led to the 2010 election result that gave us the circumstances behind the AV referendum were all still in place, and a single referendum was never going to end that. The social factors that supported the old two-party system – the class-based cleavages – have been losing their power for years and that wasn’t changed by the AV campaign. Instead, what we’ve seen is a continued unravelling of party loyalties and the situation we’ve got now where reaching 35% in the polls regularly would seem like a commanding lead.

In retrospect, the most important electoral event of May 2011 is clearly the Scottish Parliament election where we had the supreme irony of a proportional electoral system delivering the single-party majority that our existing national system now seems unable to. That of course laid the ground for last year’s Scottish referendum which again was meant to settle a question for a generation or more.

Yet again, in the aftermath of the vote, the assumption was made that the issue was over and that the SNP would fade away again. That’s most clear in David Cameron’s speech the morning after, where he clearly thought the Unionist position was a lot stronger than it turned out to be. Again, the assumption was that after a referendum, the people would have spoken and the issue would be somehow resolved by this, yet the underlying issues that had led to the referendum happening hadn’t been resolved by it. If anything, the referendum result clarified them even more, and that’s led to the SNP’s rise in the national polls.

This is why referendums aren’t good ways of making decisions because they imagine that a result will ‘resolve the issue’ regardless of which way it goes. What referendum proponents neglect to understand is that they an only tackle surface factors, and because they’re concentrated on just one piece of an issue, they can never address the wider factors. Those advocating that we should have a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU ‘because we’d win it, and that’d end the argument’ should be aware that recent evidence suggests it would do anything but, and could well create even more issues in its wake.

I recently came across a review of two of the Just William books, written by Lincoln Allison in 2006:

William Brown first featured in a short story in 1919 and went on to be the central character in thirty-eight collections of stories. 

He shares his surname with Tom Brown and also a place in the great English catalogue of children's (mainly boys') writing which began with Charles Kingsley and Tom Hughes. (I'm not sure when it ended.) But otherwise they are opposites in every way; William is the alternative Brown, the alternative boy. 

Most of the central characters in the vast collection of English children's writing, including thousands of school stories, embody the Victorian idea of virtue to some degree. 

William does not: he does not "do" modesty, humility or unselfishness. His virtues, if you will allow them, are a love of liberty, a zest for life and a kind of honesty. He is more like Falstaff or Bottom than he is like Tom Brown. 

When compared with the Christian Socialism to which the Doctor converts Tom, William's political preferences are a dictatorship with himself as dictator - followed by anarchy if that isn't an option.

He concludes:

I'm tempted by the idea of the universe as a struggle between two eleven-year-old boys called Brown. Tom Brown, I think, stands for something rather sinister, at least potentially. William Brown stands for humour, freedom and the uninhibited enjoyment of both reality and fantasy. ¡Viva la libertad! ¡Viva Guillermo!

Today is the 144th anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune.

One of the most astonishing, inspiring, bitter, tragic, extraordinary, and powerful events in human history, the very nature of the Commune is the subject of intense and violent debate, and has been since its first barricade went up.  Conservatives, monarchists, capitalists, and traditionalists cite it as one of humanity’s most grave errors, setting the tone for more than a century of murder and oppression by bloodthirsty Reds; anarchists, socialists, communists, and leftists of every stripe all seem to believe that it was something remarkable, but argue over who it belongs to, whether it was a grand failure or a doomed victory, who was responsible for its downfall and who was to blame for its defeat, and whether or not it represents the ideal embodiment of their chosen ideology or the first and worst perversion of it.

The Commune was a legacy of the proto-anarchist Proudhon; it was a huge influence on the evolving ideas of Marx; and it was a foundational event for Lenin, who is said to have celebrated wildly on the day the revolution he triggered outlasted the lifespan of the phenomenal eruption of March 1871.  It is often cited as the very first revolution of the working class, as the first organized and at least somewhat successful attempt by ordinary people to throw off the rulership of both the monarchists and the bourgeoisie.  This is not entirely true; other attempts at self-governance had been made before, to varying degrees of success, and Britain, in the days leading up to its Civil War, had seen a number of attempts — by Lollards, Diggers, Levellers, and other like-minded groups — to establish a communal society where the peoples’ will would be the law of the land and establish “a common treasury for all”, where property would be a sin and private profit a heresy.

But while they opposed the hypocrisy and greed of the established church, the Diggers and their kin were essentially Christian in nature, believing their form of utopian proto-socialism to be a matter of Scripture and a manifestation of the true will of God.  The Communards held no such illusions, and if they were divided on other matters, they were resolutely anti-clerical.  The Church had not just failed them; it had lied to them, held them back, and even murdered them.  They no longer believed in pie in the sky.  They resented the gaudy, ostentatious wealth of the Church, and they loathed the fact that the only way their children could hope to be educated was at the feet of the priests and nuns who would serve up a rich helping of religious, monarchist, and bourgeoisie propaganda along with reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The desire to break the Catholic monopoly on education was one of the Commune’s most fascinating and unique properties.  From the beginning, it was a primary tenet of the Communards, who organized into self-governing bodies far faster than anyone could have possibly anticipated, putting the lie to theories of expertise and slanders about the incompetency of the working classes.  Another vital component was the Commune’s surprising commitment to feminism; at a time when universal suffrage was still a nascent movement and no major nation had granted women the right to vote, the Commune extended the franchise to all women, and they responded by becoming some of the most valiant and fearless advocates of the new world they envisioned.  Women took to the streets to spread the gospel of democratic socialism; they manned the barricades, fired guns, loaded cannons, and hurled fire-bombs; they educated children, made clothes, worked in shops and factories, and performed every task required of them, instantly leaving behind twenty centuries of sexual segregation.  Louise Michel, “the Red Virgin”, organized prostitutes — “the most pitiful of the old order’s victims” — into a nursing corps, and preached that the participation of women was not an incidental, but an essential, component of the revolution.

As C.L.R. James has pointed out, the most important aspect of the Commune is that it was “first and foremost, a democracy, elected by universal suffrage”.  There was no aspect of communal life that was not decided during those three glorious months by the people whose lives those decisions would effect.   And this was no democratic abstraction, no republic of easily corrupted representatives who lived and worked great distances from the people they claimed to stand for; this was a direct and immediate democracy of necessity in a city of nearly two million people.

Ravaged by war, impoverished by the machinations of royalty and rich, bereaved, besieged, and taken for granted, the people of Paris — almost entirely without planning, without plotting, with nothing more than a spontaneous manifestation of popular will and a breaking point for the amount of abuse they were willing to take that was finally reached — created the most stunning mass uprising that had ever occurred.  Less than ten years after Americans had shed blood by the tens of thousands to establish with finality the question of whether or not human beings could be legally kept as property, the citizens of Paris rose up and declared that all people should have all rights, that there could be no question of inequality of opportunity, education, liberty, or justice based not just on race or nationality, but on birth or class or wealth or station.  The Paris Commune  demanded the impossible a century before most of the rest of the world made fumbling steps towards civil rights,  and they got it.

Did the Commune ask for too much too soon?  Perhaps.  So did Jesus.  But it is to be remembered by everyone who looks at this remarkable event that it did not fail because it was not ready to carry out its own promises.  It did not fail because its people had not planned sufficiently, or because they lacked a program to follow or the collective will to follow it.  It did not fail because it fell to infighting, squabbling, or greed.  It failed because all of Europe, including countries that only weeks before had been mortal enemies, saw that it was entirely possible for ordinary people to govern themselves, meet their own needs, and strip the church, the crown, and the rich of the wealth and power they had held by force for so long.  They knew this could not be allowed, and so they did to the Communards what the lords did to the Diggers: struck them down and murdered them where they stood.  25,000 Parisians paid the price with their lives for proving that they could run their city better than anyone.

Today is the day to remember this extraordinary uprising.  But today is also the day to realize that it was only exceptional because we let it be exceptional.  Every day in every city, a chance is waiting to make the Commune happen again, and to rewrite it with a different ending.  The Communards did not fight because they were smarter or stronger or braver than we are.  They fought because they made the decision to fight, and while their defeat was bitter, their victory was unimaginably sweet.  We have lost the taste of that flavor of victory.  I do not hope much for the future anymore, but I still believe that if we taste that sweetness again, we will do great things to keep tasting it.

I usually don't use this space to just suggest products that I like, but if you own a Blu-Ray player, and you like the movie Blade Runner, than you should consider this 3-disk edition. It includes five different cuts of the film, and is available (in the U.S., at least) for a ridiculously low price right now.

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Can the SNP push Labour into third in 2016?

It’s been said that the creation of New Labour was indirectly Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement; that her government remodelled the whole political landscape so much that many of her policies were continued and developed not just by her own Conservative successor as PM but by the Labour one following him too. As with all these things, there’s an overly-deterministic element to such reasoning (had John Smith lived, his leadership would have been a far less radical departure from Labour’s history), but the fundamental point is right: really successful parties change not just themselves and the country they govern but their opponents too.

And by far the most successful party in Britain at the moment is the SNP, so it’s an appropriate moment to look at what their big gameplan is. Obviously, the number one long term goal remains independence but with the loss of the referendum and the halving of the oil price since then, that’s likely to be off the agenda for the time being so let’s set that aside and look at the strategy below that.

For the SNP, the big election is not the one in a little under seven weeks or so but the one in a little over a year. Having already done what was considered impossible and gained an overall majority at Holyrood in 2011, given the state of the current polls, Nicola Sturgeon can have her sights realistically set on not only repeating that but potentially doing even better than Alex Salmond did.

But there’s another prize to be won, potentially even bigger than forming the government – and that’s where remodelling the opposition comes in. Scotland has been something of a game of musical chairs for a while. Most top-level political systems if left unassaulted by external shocks will settle down into two main opposing camps. The SNP’s great achievement has been in redefining both aspects of that statement.

Scottish politics has become widely divergent from that of England and Wales. Obviously, there were always local aspects to it but prior to 1999 (and indeed, for a short time afterwards), politics there was still defined by the Westminster battle, between Conservatives and Labour, and hence – given the nature of the electorate – a consistent and sizable Labour dominance. By redefining which parliament was seen as the more important, and by overtaking the Conservatives, the SNP has changed the principle debate from Lab-Con to Lab-SNP. That achievement was arguably bigger than subsequently forming a government in that the one followed logically from the other. As soon as they’d won a seat at the top table and were not seen as unacceptable by too many people (which they weren’t but the Tories were), it was inevitable that the swing of the pendulum would at some point deliver them government.

However, the last five years have been so good for them (referendum apart), that they can now envisage going one stage further. Whereas they were once labelled by Labour as the Tartan Tories, they now lump Labour in with the Conservatives due to the referendum campaign. Neither claim had much merit and was based on the logical fallacy that my opponent’s opponent is necessarily my ally but that’s a little beside the point if people believe it. The ideal result for them in 2016 would be to win over so many former Labour voters on that ‘betrayal’ mantra that the Conservatives finish second, which would not only prompt a crisis in Labour but would validate the SNP’s claim to left-wing voters as being the best place to ‘stop the Tories’. Put simply, the long term shift would not be to replace the Tories as the opposition to Labour but to replace Labour as the opposition to the Tories.

Is such an outcome credible? It’s a stretch but not impossible. For a start, it’d need a Labour government in Westminster, both as an SNP bogeyman and as a drag on Labour’s own vote; it’d also need a leftwards shift in the SNP’s own stance, prompting the centre-right voters Salmond attracted to switch to the Blues, offset an additional swing from Red to Yellow; finally, it’d need a bit of luck in ‘events’. The first part of that game-plan is putting Ed Miliband into Downing Street.

David Herdson

This announcement actually happened a few months ago, but I’m surprised it didn’t get more publicity then: George Osborne is giving £50m towards supporting grassroots sport. This sounds like good news and surely this will help sports with little funding and support develop and build the infrastructure they need to retain people in the sport in the face of all the money that gets spent on the big sports.

Oh:

George Osborne has pledged £50m of Government funding to promote grass-roots football, in a move he said would make England’s national team “the best in the world”.
The Chancellor unveiled the funds as he hailed Abu Dhabi’s commitment to investing in the UK at the opening of a new £150m football academy by Manchester City Football Club.

Yes, not only is he giving £50m to a sport that has so much money sloshing around that teams can spend £50m on a single player, he’s announcing it as one of the global super-rich who now own large chunks of the game in England is announcing another huge spending of money that’s far beyond the dreams of most entire sports, let alone individual teams.

I’m sure English grassroots football will benefit from that money, but it would benefit much more from the FA enforcing a fairer distribution of income across the game, instead of letting it concentrate more and more in the upper echelons. Giving £50m of Government money to make up for the FA’s inability to support the grassroots isn’t my idea of money being well spent or a long term sporting economic plan.

Imagine what other sports could do with that cash. Grassroots cycling could use just a fraction of it to organise closed-road racing for young riders, giving them invaluable safe experience. Imagine the athletic facilities and swimming pools it could fix up or reopen, the underfunded boxing gyms it could support, the ageing gymnastic equipment it could replace, the community coaches in all sports it could train. But no, giving money to football gets the headlines, so football gets the cash, even if it doesn’t need it.

Thanks to some fine academic work by Andrew Mell, Simon Radford and Seth Alexander Thevoz, we now have what comes as close as possible to proof that there’s a link between donating large amounts of money to political parties and finding yourself with a seat in the House of Lords. I know that this is unsurprising news to many of you, on a par with a study into the Pope’s religious habits or bear’s defecatory practices, but it’s important evidence in making the case for a better democracy.

This is one of the rare areas of politics where I find myself in total agreement with Nick Cohen, especially in just how hard it is to explain the concept of the House of Lords to someone with no knowledge of British politics, let alone the practice of it.

“You want to know why they’re there? Let me see – there are still hereditary peers in Parliament for the unimpeachable reason that a long-dead ancestor slept with Charles II. We’ve Anglican bishops with nothing better to do, party loyalists appointed by leaders who expect them to remain loyal, and plutocrats who have given hard cash to a party and ended up – with the help of a process no one is anxious to explain – sitting on their haunches in the legislature of a democracy.”

Remember that one of the outcomes of the recent revelations about Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind was that they likely wouldn’t get their expected seats in the Lords when they left the Commons. Just imagine the future: an ennobled Jack Straw giving you the benefit of his opinions and making your laws forever, regardless of what we might wish. Now remember that the Lords is already littered with people like that who’ve bene utterly discredited, even sent to prison, and by letting it remain, we’re allowing our democracy to be thoroughly corrupted. Half of our Parliament is made up of legislators who have seats for life, can’t be removed by the people and gain their positions there through an opaque process where appointments are in the hands of a small group of people. It’s a perfect recipe for corruption and that corruption rots the rest of the system along with it.

There’s a lot more wrong with the British system than just the Lords, but we’re now past 100 years of trying to reform it and ending up with that traditional British fudge of a tiny symbolic reform that leaves the underlying problems in place and turns out to add even more problems as time goes by. Reform of the Lords isn’t working – the whole chamber needs to be removed and we should start again from scratch. Cut out the whole corruption and then work on sorting out the rest of the system.

Yes, it's coming up to that time of year again, so here's an appetiser.



I recently did an interview with renowned pagan author Yvonne Arburrow for patheos.com, which you can read here if you're so inclined, all about my tragic annual compulsion to debunk the worst of the Eostre fakelore that circuits the Net every Easter while trying hard to outline what the facts of the matter actually are.

In the course of the interview, I had a rant about the CSOF (Christians Stole Our Festivals) myth and why it's so pernicious:

Firstly, it peddles a facile and diminutising version of pre-Christian history. According to the CSOF line, there was one group of people called The Christians, and another group called The Pagans, and The Pagans had celebrations on the equinoxes and solstices, and these celebrations were usually about Fertility and about Goddesses, and along came The Christians and they forced all The Pagans to convert, and to make this easier they took all The Pagans’ festivals and Christianised them. All this is meant to have happened in some ill-defined but vaguely European space, during some unspecified time period when things were very muddy and bloody.

The second reason the CSOF line of argument is dangerous is that it’s flat out wrong. It treats Gregory’s letter as some sort of absolute rule obeyed by all The Christians at all times and in all places, rather than as the passing notion it actually was. In the particular case of Easter, it’s painfully easy to explain why Christians didn’t ‘steal’ it. The antecedent of Easter is Passover, Christ being seen as the ‘Lamb of God’ and the perfect Passover sacrifice, and the date of Easter was decided by the early Church in reference to that tradition (though there was a good deal of argument as to when the date actually was – google the Synod of Whitby, for example). For this reason, almost all countries call Easter some variant of ‘Pasch’. It’s only in a relatively small part of the world that people called it Easter, and the only reason why so many people call it Easter now is because of the dominance of the English language.

Today I'd like to elaborate on why the simplistic notion of 'The Christians' versus 'The Pagans' is so staggeringly unrepresentative of what actually happened in history. I'll be turning to our old friend the Venerable Bede as our primary source.

A lot of the CSOF myth, and indeed a lot of the Eostre speculation, comes from Pope Gregory's letter to the Abbot Mellitus in 601 CE. You're probably familiar with it; it's the one that describes converting pagan temples for Christian worship. But what almost always gets left out of discussions of this letter is the historical context. Which pagans, and which form of Christian worship, did Pope Gregory mean?


Christian Britons and Pagan Anglo-Saxons

Rather than a simplistic matter of The Christians versus The Pagans, we are dealing with multiple cultural groups and multiple iterations of Christianity. It's important to discern between the Britons who were 'Celtic' and the Anglo-Saxon invaders who were Germanic.

Celtic Britain already had a Christian presence by the 4th century. It was a province of the Roman Empire, and under Roman protection. We can't know how many Britons were Christian, but we do know there were enough of them for Britain to send three bishops to the Council of Arles in 314. After the Roman legions abandoned Britain, leaving it to 'look to its own defences', pagan Anglo-Saxons began to invade and settle the southern parts of the landmass.

To recap: a region that was originally (Celtic) Pagan became Christianised via Rome, but was then invaded by (Anglo-Saxon) Pagans. Clear so far?

Here's where it becomes interesting. The native British Church becomes increasingly distinct from the Roman Church. They have a different organisational structure, focusing on monasteries instead of bishoprics, and celebrate Easter on a different day from the Roman Church. In short, they practice the 'Celtic Christianity' of which you may have heard (though as I understand it, the popular conception of Celtic Christianity is heavily romanticised).

The pagan Anglo-Saxons expand their territory, and the Christian Britons make no effort to convert them. One can understand why. When a hairy Germanic pagan is overrunning your lands, with axe and sword, trying to talk to him about how he should abandon Woden and worship Jesus is not going to go down well.

Here is a map of how things stood at Augustine's time. Pagan Germanic tribes are all over the place and the Christianized Celts have been pushed back to the 'Celtic Fringe'.

While we're on the subject, here is a map of recently gathered genetic data that shows things really haven't changed all that much since then.



Pope Gregory Has An Idea

In 595 CE, Pope Gregory 'being moved by Divine Inspiration' gets it into his head that the pagan Anglo-Saxons who occupy much of Britain (let's call them the English) could really do with being converted to Christianity.

He duly selects the learned Augustine and a crew of monks, and presumably says something along the lines of 'Great news, guys! You're going to go to Britain and convert some heathen souls for the Lord! Off you go!'

Augustine and the monks set off from Rome, but they're barely out of the door before deciding that it is fuck this shit o'clock and they really, really don't want to go and try to convert any Anglo-Saxons. They complain that the Anglo-Saxons are 'a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation', and anyway they don't even speak the language. So they write to Pope Gregory and say 'thanks for the honour Your Popeness but we're not sure we're the monks for the job, please can we stay at home instead'.

Pope Gregory writes back to them, stating 'great labour is followed by the greater glory of an eternal reward', and basically telling them that they ARE going to go and convert the English whether they want to or not.


King Ethelbert, The Pagan With A Christian Wife

If the monks had compiled a list of 'pagan kings least likely to kill us on the spot', King Ethelbert of Kent would have been on the top of it. Accordingly, he was the pagan they went to first.

King Ethelbert was pagan, but his wife Bertha wasn't. She was Frankish and a Christian, and King Ethelbert had only been allowed to marry her at all on the condition that she be allowed to continue practicing her faith. She even had her own bishop, Liudhard. So Ethelbert was not only familiar with Christianity, he was accustomed to tolerating it. Certainly we can assume that things would have been somewhat frosty in the royal household if he'd mistreated a group of Christian missionaries.


Ethelbert Isn't Taking Any Chances

Eventually Augustine and his cohorts - about forty in all - land in King Ethelbert's territory. They still don't speak the local language, but Pope Gregory has managed to arrange some Frankish interpreters for them.

A few days later, King Ethelbert meets with them, but he insists on doing so outdoors. You see, Ethelbert is a good pagan and knows that if you invite someone into your house, you give them a degree of magical power over you. He doesn't fully trust these Christian foreigners, so he meets with them in a field.

Augustine and his monks approach the king, waving a banner with a silver cross on it, and carrying a big picture of Jesus that they've painted on a board. (What King Ethelbert makes of the latter, we can only imagine.) He tells them to sit down, they say their piece and he listens.

His verdict amounts to 'Well, guys, this all sounds okay, but to be honest it's all a bit new and strange, and I'm not just going to give up being a pagan after being one for so long like the rest of us English. But you've come a jolly long way, you're obviously sincere, and you're clearly serious about all this Jesus stuff, so we'll look after you and make sure you're okay. And you're cool to go and preach to our people if you like.'

King Ethelbert then gives Augustine's crew a place to stay in Canterbury, which was the main centre of his holdings, keeps them supplied with provisions and lets them preach as they will. As Augustine and the monks approach Canterbury, they wave their cross and big Jesus picture about and sing (paraphrase) 'Please God don't destroy Canterbury, Canterbury is really great, hooray for God,' no doubt with considerable relief.


Ethelbert becomes a Christian, but still remains unbelievably tolerant

The Christians set up shop in Canterbury, Ethelbert's wife Bertha goes and does Christian things with them, and in the fullness of time, King Ethelbert himself converts.

Now that the King has converted, a lot of his pagan subjects decide they're going to do the same. However, King Aethelbert notably does not require anyone to do so. In fact, his attitude is quite staggeringly accomodating. To quote Bede directly, adding some italics:

'It is told that the king, while he rejoiced at their conversion and their faith, yet compelled none to embrace Christianity, but only showed more affection to the believers, as to his fellow citizens in the kingdom of Heaven. For he had learned from those who had instructed him and guided him to salvation, that the service of Christ ought to be voluntary, not by compulsion.'


Augustine Levels Up

Pope Gregory is pretty pleased with the mission to England and makes Augustine 'Archbishop of the English'. Augustine asks Gregory for guidance on various matters, such as 'what am I supposed to do about the various different customs in the different churches?' and Gregory's response is interesting: he tells Augustine to gather whatever seems best from the various churches and teach these things as he sees fit. 'For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things.'

This is the point at which Pope Gregory writes his famous letter to Mellitus, proposing that pagan temples be converted for Christian worship, and that since the pagans are in the habit of sacrificing cattle, maybe they could be persuaded to sacrifice cattle to God instead. Baby steps, as it were. It's worth noting that Gregory doesn't mention Christianising festivals at all, just temples and the habit of sacrifice.


Augustine is warned about his miracle habit

Gregory also notices that Augustine has been performing quite a few 'great miracles' lately, and that these have been very helpful in converting the pagan English. Exactly what Augustine's miracles are, he doesn't say; but he does deliver an unmistakeable slap on the wrist, warning Augustine not to become full of himself, but to keep his mind on the job.

(Soon, we shall have an example of exactly what Augustine's 'miracles' entailed, and it is a doozy.)

Pope Gregory also sends King Ethelbert a pile of gifts, along with a letter encouraging him to be a good Christian king and convert more of his people, because look at Constantine, he was a pagan at first and he converted to Christianity and it worked out ever so well for him. The letter, to my mind, reads as if it were written with slightly gritted teeth and one gets the distinct impression that Ethelbert was happy to let others preach and convert, but wasn't really up for it himself.


In which Bede the Christian monk thinks a bloodthirsty pagan warlord is just the BEST

At this time there is an Anglo-Saxon pagan King called Ethelfrid up in Northumbria, who Bede writes of in glowing terms, calling him 'brave and ambitious'. Ethelfrid was famous for slaughtering Britons and expanding Anglo-Saxon territory. Bede is not at all keen on the Britons, largely because the British 'Celtic' Church didn't do things the Roman way, celebrating Easter on the wrong date and so on. Bede considers the Britons a 'heretical nation' for this.

Bede is full of starry-eyed praise for Ethelfrid, writing that 'he might be compared to Saul of old, king of the Israelites' if it weren't for the, you know, minor technical hitch of him being a pagan and all.

This is something people just don't realise about Bede. He was full of praise for a pagan warlord who slaughtered Christians, because a) both Bede and Ethelfrid were English, and b) they were the wrong kind of Christians.



The Great Anglo-British Miracle-Off

You will remember that while Augustine and his homies are doing their missionary thing over in the Anglo-Saxon side of the map, the Britons are still doing their 'Celtic Church' thing over on theirs. Tellingly, the bishops of the Britons outright refuse to help Augustine convert the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine isn't happy about that. It's time to bring the two churches together for the sake of a common cause. Augustine, who we will remember has been given a warning about his habit of working miracles, has something big up his sleeve.

With the help of King Athelbert, Augustine arranges a parley between the bishops of the British church and his own crew. This takes place on the borders of their territories, at 'Augustine's Oak'.

The discussion is not productive. It consists of accusations that the other side is celebrating Easter on the wrong day (this was a really, really big deal back then) along with tons of other you're-doing-it-wrong-no-you-are back-and-forth that Bede sums up as a 'troublesome and tedious contention'. Augustine's lot point out that look, EVERYONE ELSE in Christendom follows the Roman way, so why can't you? The Britons retort that they just prefer their own ways, thank you very much.

When it's clear that the debate is going nowhere, Augustine proposes a miracle-off. Let's let God decide which of our churches is the right one, he says. I challenge you Britons to a miracle contest. Whichever group is able to perform a miracle in the name of God is clearly the one God favours, and we'll all agree to do things that group's way in future, deal?

The Britons agree to this. One can sympathise; Augustine has essentially challenged them to a contest of faith, just like the Bible talks about in the days of Moses, and they can't exactly back down without losing face.

Right, says Augustine. Let's find some sick bloke, and we'll take it in turns to try to heal him. Ah! Here's a convenient Anglo-Saxon fellow who's blind! Try and heal him, go on, bet you can't.

(It is to Bede's credit that he records the nationality of the blind chap; he can hardly have been unaware of the implications.)

The Britons, who by now must be aware that they have been royally stitched up, nonetheless go through with it and try to heal the blind Anglo-Saxon with prayer. Alas, he is not cured. Now it's Augustine's turn. He prays. Success! A miracle! The blind man can see! Clearly, the Roman church is best and now the Britons have to adopt Roman ways. God has spoken.

This puts the Britons in an awkward spot. They tell Augustine that yes, clearly he's favoured by God, but you know what, they simply can't just change their ways on the spot without the consent of their people, so why don't they make a date for a future sit-down and this time they'll bring a lot more of their own crew. Augustine agrees.



Augustine's Epic Diss

The date and place of the synod are duly set. The bishops of the Britons are apparently worried that Augustine just might be God's chosen bloke after all and go and see an old hermit to take his advice. The hermit tells them that if Augustine is truly a righteous man and blessed of God, he will be humble and show them respect; they should make sure they turn up after he has, and if he stands up to greet them, they should acknowledge his humility as a sign that he's God's man.

The Briton bishops roll up to the synod. Augustine is sitting in a chair. He remains sitting in a chair. Fuck this guy, think the Briton bishops. They accuse him of being basically an arrogant arsehole.

Augustine, who doesn't seem to understand what diplomacy means, tells them that their Church does loads of things wrong when literally everyone else does it the Roman way, but if they'll just a) keep Easter at the 'correct' time, b) fulfil the ministry of baptism and c) help convert the Anglo-Saxons, he'll totally overlook all that other stuff.

This pisses the Briton bishops off even more. You can forget about being OUR archbishop, they tell him. Among themselves, they agree that if Augustine is this much of a dick to them when they haven't even recognised his authority, how much more of a dick will he be if he's their archbishop?

RIGHT, says Augustine, IT IS ON. If you won't have peace with your brothers, then you'll have war with your enemies. If you won't help preach the gospel to our Anglo-Saxon friends, you'll only have yourself to blame when they slaughter the bollocks off of you.


In which Ethelfrid slaughters the bollocks off of the Britons

Remember Ethelfrid, the Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian pagan king who is also Bede's problematic fave? He re-enters the picture at this point.

Bede tells us (with something suspiciously like relish) that Augustine's prophecy of doom to the British Church came true, and the British clergy were first against the wall.

Ethelfrid, a noted warmonger, is busy monging war in the Chester region. He has brought his truly enormous army to the city and notices a large group of Briton monks and priests who've gathered in a supposedly safe location nearby. What are those priestly types up to, he asks. They're praying, he is told.

Well then, says Ethelfrid, if they're praying against us, then that technically makes them armed enemies: 'Though they do not bear arms, yet they fight against us, because they assail us with their curses.' He gives the order to his army: kill the priests FIRST. So they do. Twelve hundred of them.

And Bede sees this pagan slaughter of Christians as the will of God. 'Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of the holy Bishop Augustine, though he himself had been long before taken up into the heavenly kingdom, that the heretics should feel the vengeance of temporal death also, because they had despised the offer of eternal salvation.'

In conclusion, it's really not as simple as 'The Christians' versus 'The Pagans'. The truth is much more complicated, much more interesting, and in places, much more blackly hilarious.

Leslie Knope: Why would anybody ever eat anything besides breakfast food?
Ron Swanson: People are idiots, Leslie.

Michael Bluth: What have we always said is the most important thing?
George-Michael Bluth: Breakfast?
Michael Bluth: Family.
George-Michael Bluth: Oh right, family. I thought you meant of the things we eat.

I almost never have breakfast on weekdays. Given the choice between even five extra minutes of delicious, nourishing sleep or some toast, I’ll always go for the sleep. When I get to work, I’m straight onto the coffee and now my brain considers this a meal.

Weekends are different. Weekends are for doing not-work things like ignoring the housework, failing to reply to personal emails and thinking really hard about going outside for a lovely walk. Therefore I end up going out to breakfast most weekends and am always on the lookout for somewhere new and interesting.

Louis CK introduced me to the glory of the bang-bang: going for a meal at one restaurant and then immediately going to another for a second full meal. This idea is insane; the episode of Louie featuring the Indian/Diner bang-bang was impossible and therefore hilarious. Lou’s a big dude but there’s no way he could have managed to eat that mountain of food. A breakfast bang-bang, on the other hand, is achievable and only slightly gluttonous.

I first read about the Brick Lane’s new Cereal Killer Cafe on Facebook, usually prefaced with the following comments:

• Look at those wankers
• Fucking hipster beards
• £4 for CEREAL?
• Seriously look at those FUCKING WANKERS
• I hate these fuckers
• They should be killed
• Etc.

The reactions truly baffled me. I thought the idea was actually pretty nifty precisely because it’s a bit silly and naïve and harmless. I like breakfast, I like cereal, I like going out to breakfast and therefore I concluded that I would like going to out to breakfast to eat cereal. The way some people were complaining, it was though Alan and Garry Keery were advocating puppy torture and I figured I must have missed something. I did briefly consider doing some mild research but then totally forgot about it and moved on with my life, only remembering a few months later when a similar outrage erupted regarding selfie sticks and I thought: hey, remember that cereal place people were hating on? And then I remembered the concept of the bang-bang and knew I was going to check it out.

The bulk of the anger towards the Cereal Killer Cafe is directed towards the pricing, but to be honest, most restaurant food is massively marked-up, breakfast in particular. Any breakfast you pay for will be more expensive than buying the constituent parts yourself and making it at home. Even the cheapest of caffs is still making a fair whack of profit from their eggs and toast. Beverages in pubs are also marked-up with cocktails costing well over a tenner for a relatively small volume of liquid so why is that okay and expensive-for-what-it-is cereal isn’t?

But it’s not just the mark-up, it’s the Brick Lane location and the gentrification of East London, which I know is a completely valid argument. It’s not just depressing when you can’t afford to do things in your own neighbourhood, it’s also alienating and humiliating. I began to worry that I wouldn’t just be eating cereal, I’d become part of the problem. For the most part of my time in Hackney living just off Chatsworth Road, I was on benefits and nearly all the cafes and restaurants were out of my budget apart from the Workman’s Café. When that shut down, I was genuinely heartbroken.

Now that I’m back in work and able to treat myself, I do but at the same time there’s always a voice in my head that wonders if this is okay, if it’s a valid use of my money, if I actually deserve it. So when I eventually did some mild research on the Cereal Killer Café, I was thrown into a loop of self-doubt followed by defensiveness followed by guilt and back into self-doubt again.

At one point when I was unemployed and suffering from acute anxiety, I found it very difficult and sometimes impossible to eat. It was a miserable existence and I don’t ever want to be that unwell again. But I also don’t want to ever forget that time, when I had no income whatsoever and every day I woke to instantly panic about how I was going to manage to get through the day. I want to keep it in mind so that when I am feeling panicked or worried, I remember that it was much worse and I overcame it.

I read this article where local people give their views on the CKC and reading that lead me to fall into another berating the Keerys for what it calls their “remarkable tone-deafness”. I found a review on the Independent which had one and only one comment beneath the line reading “These people are utter wankers”. I flip flopped and questioned myself for way too long before deciding I should just go and make a decision for myself.

I come from the kind of very American, very un-middle-class upbringing which meant that I regularly had Cookie Crisp cereal for breakfast. And yes that is pretty much exactly what you think it is: tiny chocolate chip cookie shaped sweetened corn-oat-rice product, in a bowl, with milk. My taste for sweet things has fallen away somewhat but from time to time I will crave Cap’n Crunch (with or without Crunchberries) or Fruity Pebbles and usually I pine for a second and then swiftly move on. A quick look at the menu showed me that both those childhood favourites were available.

Bang-bang? Bang-bang!

The first time I attempted to go around 11am, the queue was spilling out­side, and I thought: GOOD. I am glad this is popular! But I was too impatient so went back the next weekend around 9:30. There were only a few other people ahead in the queue which moved pretty fast.

The cafe décor harkens back to the 80s/90s with cereal memorabilia and displays of limited edition gems like Urkel-Os. Some people sitting at the breakfast bar in front were wearing onesies; almost too twee really until I found out that it was apparently National Cereal Day and patrons in their jim-jams got a 50% discount. Also, I was determined to find everything about this day FUN, dammit!

The menu is mostly American cereal with some domestic standards and a variety of different kinds of cow and nut milks, and though I was tempted by Reese’s Puffs (get chocolate in your peanut butter/peanut butter in your chocolate), I ended up getting a “cereal cocktail”. The Lion King contains Lion cereal, Coco Caramel Shreddies, Mars Mix and caramel milk. My dining companion had Don’t Have A Cinnamon (I know): Curiously Cinnamon, Golden Grahams, Apple Zings, honey and semi skimmed milk.

We went to the downstairs seating area which was crammed with more 80s and 90s cereal memorabilia, a bank of retro TVs and a window whose curtains had the same ears- of-corn motif as in the Simpsons’ kitchen (boss!) and settled down to eat our breakfast of champions with Huey Lewis and Amy Grant for a soundtrack. I’ve got to be honest: it was a pretty small bowl for £3.50. But I didn’t care: I was eating candy on my cereal for breakfast and no one could stop me!

It was just plain silly fun, the best kind of fun, and I am glad we went. I couldn’t help but remember that it wasn’t too long ago when a simple bowl of cereal would have been the source of much anxiety and stress; food was no longer enjoyable but a struggle and nothing tasted good. I don’t ever want to be that unwell again and the worry that I might get to that place again makes me realise that I have to be kind to myself. If that way is via marked-up cereal than so be it.

But that one small “large” bowl was never going to genuinely fill me up. Louis might sneer at this bang-bang lite but a true two main meals style blowout is definitely out of my league. Perhaps to assuage my guilt at contributing to harmful gentrification, I knew I’d follow up my visit to the Cereal Killer Café by going to the famous Brick Lane establishment Beigel Bake just a few doors down.

It was a wise decision – the peanut butter bagel I had (for 90p) was fresh and chewy and a sensible step down from the sugar fest of my cereal cocktail. The queue for Beigel Bake also frequently spills out onto the street and I hope this remains the case; I hope the Cereal Killer Cafe does well too, though I’m sure that if it does shut down there will be a sea of schadenfreude and it will sadden me – HA HA the wankers FAILED! but I can’t do anything about that any more than I can stop people feeling alienated by gentrification. I can however try to remember that we only have one shot in this life so you might as well, eat, drink and be merry as much as humanly possible. Now please pass the Frankenberry and hazelnut milk.

Over on Facebook a few weeks ago, Dale Herbest put this question to me and I thought I'd answer it here…

I agree with you that the song "When You Wish Upon a Star" has an ultimately misguided message but how do you feel about the song "Rainbow Connection" from The Muppet Movie? While it has a similar message to WYWUAS, it doesn't seem (to me at least) to be as naïve or as overly idealistic. RC seems to have a more practical moral that has equal appeal to both the realists and idealists of the world. Any thoughts?

I like "The Rainbow Connection" but I'm not entirely certain what its moral is. In fact, back when that movie first came out, I asked a few different friends about it and got varying answers, one of which was "Who cares? It's Kermit singing so I love it."

The others ranged from "Anything can happen if you wish for it" to "Wishing is a waste of time." After discussing it with friends and thinking about it a bit, I decided the correct answer was "Who cares? It's Kermit singing so I love it."

Generally speaking, I am against telling people — especially people who will believe it and carry it to ridiculous extremes — that anything is possible in life if you want it badly enough or try hard enough. The career I have now was possible and attainable. Becoming a professional jockey — not that I ever so fantasized — was not, especially after my height topped six feet. We all have limitations of physicality, talent and opportunity. There are also numerical limitations. A microscopic percentage of those who dream and strive and Wish Upon A Star to become President of the United States will ever get anywhere near that achievement. There simply are not enough openings.

Great things are possible…and the key word in that statement is "possible." It's fine to have a fantasy but, you know, if a guy decides he's never going to settle for any woman in his life who isn't Kate Upton, he's going to get awfully lonely.

"The Rainbow Connection" asks, "Who said that every wish would be heard and answered when wished on the morning star?" Well, a lot of people say that as they prey on people with dreams, offering to help them make those dreams come true…for a price. I've heard way too many stories of wannabes handing money they can ill afford over to teachers and coaches and agents and managers and spiritual leaders and others who profit by promising that which they cannot deliver. And the money sometimes isn't the worst part. It's raising false hopes and leading aspiring writers or actors or whatevers down false paths.

If the point of that song was that wishes do not all become reality, then I think it's a much better song (moral-wise) than "When You Wish Upon a Star." The latter is a lovely tune but back when Jiminy Cricket sang it, it did make a difference who you were. Your chances of attaining your dream were pretty low if you were black, even if your dream was just to use the same water fountain as white people in some states. There was also a cap on your dreams if you were a woman and, truth be told, a lot of white males weren't about to get their dreams, either.

I don't think most people who heard "The Rainbow Connection" paid a whole lot of attention to its lyrics which, like I said, I'm not sure I understand because the last part seems to say you'll find your rainbow connection (i.e., the path to your dream) if you hang out with the lovers and dreamers. There's certainly nothing wrong with loving. Loving is a very good thing and I don't know how anyone can survive without it.

And there's nothing wrong with dreaming as long as you don't go through life half-asleep. I just see way too many people around me who confuse wishing and dreaming with actually doing something…including facing reality.

(TRIGGER WARNINGS: Rape and other sexual violence, with detailed descriptions of victim-blaming and negative attitudes towards survivors; also mention of suicide. NOTE: In terms of the legal stuff, I’m referring to the UK throughout, although the underlying attitudes are present internationally)

The world is obsessed with proving that survivors of sexual violence are liars.

If you were in a relationship with the perpetrator, they’ll call you a liar – despite the high prevalence of relationship abuse.
If you consented at some other time, they’ll call you a liar – apparently that means you’ve given up your freedom and autonomy forever.
If you “acted normal” afterwards, and only spoke out later, they’ll call you a liar – even though abuse takes time to process, or you could have feared retribution such as being repeatedly called a liar.
If there was no sign of a physical struggle, they’ll call you a liar – even though freezing or “friending” the perpetrator is the most common survival response.
If your statements contain even the slightest inconsistency, they’ll call you a liar – even though that’s exactly what trauma does to you.
If you were drinking, they’ll call you liar – apparently you don’t have the right to drink AND maintain bodily autonomy.
If the perpetrator was drinking, they’ll call you a liar – they’ve changed their minds, turns out alcohol actually absolves you of all responsibility and also magically erases the damage done.
If you were wearing clothes more revealing than the patriarchal world would approve of, they’ll call you a liar – it seems you should have known that the awful crime of “wearing what you want” is punished with sexual violence.
If you in some way don’t conform to an often impossible, racist, transphobic, ableist, fatphobic beauty standard, they’ll call you a liar – they’ll say “who would want you?!”
If you’re a male survivor, they’ll call you a liar – because “men’s rights activists” tend to ignore the fact that men are far more likely to suffer sexual assault themselves than they are to be falsely accused, and only even vaguely acknowledge you exist when they want to shut the damn feminists up.
If you enjoy sex, they’ll call you a liar – apparently they don’t think consent makes a difference, which frankly says a lot about them.
If you’re a sex worker, they’ll call you a liar – see above, and I’m assuming these people also think it would be okay for someone to drop a load of legal textbooks on my head because, like, isn’t that what you DO?!
If you’re mentally ill/neurodivergent, they’ll call you a liar – they’ll call you crazy, they’ll say you’re living in a fantasy world, they’ll say all sorts of ableist things, they’ll gaslight you because it’s more convenient for them if it’s all in your head.

I’m zoning in on the Eleanor de Freitas case here. In short, this woman, who had bipolar disorder, made an allegation of rape, which the CPS refused to prosecute. The accused man then took out a private prosecution against her for speaking up, and the CPS took that case; Eleanor de Freitas had been receiving counselling for rape trauma, this support was cut off, and she ultimately took her own life. I wrote a few tweets about this awful case the other day, and received a reply from an obviously-fake-news-account directing me to “proof Eleanor de Freitas was lying”; it was a professional-looking dot-com domain, certainly enough to fool people, and the only “proof” it contained was… that she was mentally ill, that the police didn’t like her very much, that she bought sex toys the next day, and that she was allegedly a sex worker.

None of those things say anything about whether or not a perpetrator raped her, but in the eyes of many, these failures to comply with patriarchal norms are “proof” and she’s a liar.

You’re all liars, they say, because the legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty exists. Even though the attitudes above mean that the police often “no-crime” sexual violence, so there’s no opportunity to go to trial. Even though making false accusations is also a crime, and there suddenly everyone forgets about the legal presumption, going so far as to set up websites dedicated to portraying the accuser as guilty, on no real evidence, without a trial, when they’re already dead due to how survivors are treated by the justice system as it stands. Even though when a perpetrator of sexual violence is proven guilty, they’ll still claim it’s a miscarriage of justice and set up websites to clear his name – Ched Evans, anyone? These people don’t really care about the legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty; they only care about the societal presumption of liar liar liar liar liar.

This is the dominant attitude of society, which means it’s also the dominant attitude of our judges, our lawyers, our CPS, our police, our juries, and the media they (and we all) consume. The conviction rates for rape and sexual violence are shockingly low. Is it any wonder, then, that feminists (and others) have lost their faith in the justice system, and taken the stance of believing everyone who speaks out about sexual violence against them, providing one voice of “I believe you” in amongst the constant noise of liar?

Some people are far more concerned about men being falsely accused and “having their lives ruined” even when found innocent. Honestly, I’m not sure this actually happens – it seems to me that if it’s high-profile enough to be newsworthy, they’re portrayed sympathetically (because the accuser is a liar, obviously), and indeed, anonymity for those suspected of sexual violence is actually being considered, even though the preferential treatment here above suspects of other crimes perpetuates the liar stereotype, and it is often the case that one survivor speaking out against their perpetrator gives others the courage to come forward (because maybe, just maybe, they’ll actually be believed).

But if you really are still so concerned about innocent people suspected of sexual violence, how about ending victim-blaming attitudes, ending the liar myth, combating rape culture, and creating a society and a justice system that provides verdicts we can trust?

A petition to the Home Office Select Committee to review their recommendation on anonymity for suspects accused of rape and other forms of sexual violence can be found here.

Tagged: consent, feminism, rape culture, sexual violence

I am following with some fascination two related stories. In each case, a man was convicted for murder and later shown to be innocent. In one case, the wrongly-convicted man was finally freed after 30 years in a cell that from its description sounds like the place you'd place a prisoner of war if there was a drought that prevented you from waterboarding him and you had to make him crack without it. He was the more fortunate of the two men. The other one was executed.

It used to be that people in favor of the Death Penalty got hysterical calling you a liar if you suggested that the U.S. Justice System had ever executed an innocent person. These days, after so many exonerations due to DNA testing, I don't hear that asserted much. Instead, the argument has devolved to something like, "The occasional wrongful execution is just a price we pay for the system that serves us so well."

I think it's arguable that a system that kills the wrong person is serving us well. For one thing, it means the guilty go free. You know what the Perfect Crime is? Moe kills Larry and then Curly is convicted and executed for the crime. Not only does Moe get away with it but the authorities will deny, deny, deny that they killed the wrong guy and will do everything they can to prevent Moe from being investigated or prosecuted.

And of course, killing an innocent person is wrong for other, rather obvious reasons.

Here are the two stories. In 1984, a man named Glenn Ford (no, not that Glenn Ford) was convicted of killing a jeweler. Ford was the lucky one of the innocent men in these two stories who were found guilty. He was released after 30 years.

This happened in Louisiana and there are laws in that state to compensate the victims of wrongful conviction. The state is fighting his payoff and recently, the lead prosecutor in Ford's case — the guy who sent him to Death Row — wrote a powerful apology in support of Ford being compensated. Read the above linked article if you can but be sure to read the prosecutor's apology.

It's a remarkable letter. This world would be a far, far better place if everyone who does something wrong was capable of writing a letter like that.

Here's the other story. It's took place in Texas and it's about Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004. He'd been convicted of setting fire to his house to kill his three young daughters who were trapped inside. The "science" that proved at the time he did that has been pretty thoroughly debunked and other exculpatory evidence — hidden back then by prosecutors — has emerged. Which of course doesn't do Mr. Willingham a lot of good now.

You may be hearing a lot about this case in the unlikely event that Texas governor Rick Perry becomes a possible candidate for the Republican presidential ticket. Just before that execution, Perry was presented with evidence that, depending on whom you believe, either proved Willingham's innocence or raised substantial doubts. Either way, Perry declined to halt the execution and while that might never cost him an election in Texas, it might matter elsewhere.

The prosecutor in that case is currently under investigation. It is charged that he won the case by coercing witnesses to lie and by hiding that exculpatory evidence. He may well be found guilty but the punishment is not likely to fit the crime.

There have been other stories like these two lately…too many of them. It makes you wonder how many innocent people are in our prisons…and remain there because they cannot get their cases reopened.

I just saw this news item…

A Catholic cathedral in San Francisco installed a watering system in an attempt to soak homeless people who try to loiter and sleep near its doorways, radio station KCBS reported on Wednesday.

I'm so glad they're doing this because all that stuff about priests molesting children and the church covering it up didn't do quite enough damage to the faith. It is so in keeping with the teachings of Christ to treat the needy as an annoyance that needs to be shooed away like stray animals. Also, this will help Bill Maher in case he's short one "New Rule" for this Friday's show.

The number of Americans who claim No Religious Affiliation is higher than it's ever been and almost certain to get much higher. I don't necessarily believe this is a bad thing as long as everyone is free to choose their own church or lack thereof. I just think someone should realize that it isn't because folks say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and it isn't because kids can't pray in schools. It's because of religions that are diminished by the human failings of their representatives.

In other news designed to diminish religion, Pastor Creflo Dollar of the World Changers Church International is telling his followers they need to donate more so he can buy a new $65 million private jet. His old one was getting a bit shabby and God, he says, wants him to have a new one.

It takes what my people call chutzpah to demand that the poor people who believe in you should ante up for something like this. Heck, it takes chutzpah just to name yourself Pastor Dollar.

I thought of this the other day. Recently when Leonard Nimoy passed, there were these silly (and sometimes, hysterical) insults of William Shatner because he announced he could not attend the funeral. He was in Florida for a charity event and felt obligated to not run out on it, especially since he believed — and no one seemed to doubt this — that Nimoy would have understood and endorsed that decision.

Still, Shatner was pilloried across the 'net by folks who insisted that he could do the charity event and then hop on a plane and be back in L.A. in time to pay his respects to his Trek co-star. Some seemed to not bother checking the schedule of flights from Palm Beach to LAX, which is not a hard thing to do online. Others insisted Shatner should have just sprung for a private jet or perhaps gotten Donald Trump, who was involved in the charity dinner, to arrange it.

These people were all wrong. Why? Because none of them knew when the Nimoy funeral was. They all assumed sometime between Noon and 2 PM. Ah, but the Nimoy family wanted to thwart the Westboro Baptist Assholes who had announced their intention of picketing the ceremony. To accomplish this, the time and place of the funeral were kept secret from the press.

The where was easy to figure out. Even I guessed it: Hillside Memorial. Nimoy was Jewish and that's where most Jewish folks in L.A. are buried. (Jack Benny was buried there. Al Jolson was buried there. Even a few Evaniers are buried there.) The Westboro Baptists were ready to gather with their stupid signs just before Noon so they'd be poised and ready to offend at a 12 PM or 2 PM memorial.

But it didn't do them any good. Only invitees knew the funeral was at 9 AM that morning.

Shatner obviously knew it. Even a private jet would not have gotten him there in time but in order to protect the secret, he didn't explain why he couldn't fly back in time. He didn't even point it out after the event. He just swallowed the attacks and whatever damage the whole thing may have done to his reputation.

We hear all these tales of arrogance and ego about William Shatner and I have no idea how much truth there is in them. Some, I assume. But this time, it seems to me the guy was a mensch. Even if he'd even Tweeted, "Those of you criticizing me have no idea when the funeral is," he'd have given it away.

Wednesday Budget Day Election Day Minus Forty-Nine:


So, for the last time in the first fixed term Parliament, Master Gideon did a thing.

Liberal Democrat policies once more featured strongly (and anonymously) in the form of future rises in the personal allowance towards the minimum wage and a promise of an end in sight of austerity.

But most of what he did was mess things about. A little. He cut some taxes a little; cut some spending a little less; made the tax system a little more generous to favoured industries/more complicated with more loopholes. And made several bad jokes. Mostly about the unfortunate Mr Milipede's kitchen arrangements.

When he wasn't cracking our sides with his rib-ticklers, he gave us not so much substance as a full meal, more a sort of taster's trolley to whet our appetites for the shape of Parliamentary things to come.

Most of the actual tax arrangements are, of course, post-dated, setting the sort of traps for a future Labour Chancer– in the decreasingly likely event of there being such a person – just as Mr Allstar Darling did for him, with the "for one month only" 50% tax rate (which did indeed successfully blow up in Gideon's face). The promise of a little less squeezing of the pips on higher rate taxpayers (in the assumption that the Venn diagram of higher rate taxpayers and Tory voters is quite a large overlap) gives a sweetie to his base today that might reward a second time if incoming Hard Labour have to reverse it to make ends meet after the election and post Financial Review. Likewise, the £1000 tax free interest is a giveaway to the "haves" that makes the tax system yet more needlessly complicated (with interest rates at ½% you can "have" up to two-hundred grand in the bank before paying any tax on the interest). And aside from the Chancer's personal delight in being able to string two catchphrases together do we really need yet more money injected into the housing bubble? I'm just surprised he didn't rename the newly in-out-shake-it-all-about ISA his "long term economic savings plan"!

Meanwhile he sketched out a – suspiciously "Coalition flavoured" – direction of travel, adopting that Liberal Democrat pledge to bring an end to austerity and offer a promise of better days to come. His compromise of beginning to increase spending on public services "after four more years" falling mid-way between the Lib Dem position of "after three more years" and the Tory one of "after hell freezes over". Cutting the lifetime allowance for payments into a pension was also a Libby Demmy way of raising a few more tax dollars from the richer end of the spectrum.

This is, as we know, typical Tory strategy: use the Lib Dems as a sort of THINK TANK from Planet Nice to generate socially acceptable policy and use this to detox the brand (while pretending to smile and nod along to the wingnuts, and occasionally unleash a "Go Home Van" to keep them drooling happily).

Just because he's EXACTLY as scary-right-wing as his Romulan haircut suggests, don't ever think Gideon isn't PRACTICAL.

(And, in many ways, another Coalition is actually the best way for GIDEON to keep his own job: if they lose, he'll have to come third to Boris and Theresa in the ensuing leadership bloodbath; if they win on their own, then he might have to think up some policies of his own without Danny to hold his crayons for him!)

And look at how he did bang on about how the Coalition had brought economic success.

Obviously that's a GREAT advert for letting the Tories RUIN it by running the country off the rails on their own!

Being in Coalition has given him GREAT COVER for making it all up as he went along (or in fact letting Nick and Vince and Danny make most of it up for him, and then copying their homework). For all that Gideon the Chancer is a man who's made much political capital out of sticking to "Plan A", it should be apparent that we are by now on something like the "F Plan" (the diet nobody sticks to) or the "G-Plan" (given his wooden delivery). Whatever, he's in danger of running out of letters!

"Plan A" only lasted about a year. That was the "stick to Alistair Darling's disastrous plan to cut all capital spending" Plan. Fortunately the widely underrated Mr Danny managed to persuade Gideon to go on an Obama-esque Keynesian spending spree. That would have been Plan B. Plan C was the disaster of the OMNISHAMBLES budget, quickly walked back to Plan D. The REAL disaster being that budget had contained some attempts to simplify some of the tax system, and there's no way Gideon was going to try THAT again! And even last year we were still on Austerity Eternal of Plan E, but it appears that that didn't test well with the voters.

The only thing "Long Term" about the Conservatories "Long Term Economic Plan" is how long they've been ramming the stupid message down our throats!

Not that Hard Labour have much to crow about.

(It won't stop them. That Mr Allstar Darling was on the radio last weekend crowing about his own last budget – because, as he himself admitted, nobody else would – and saying that the Coalition's plan has arrived us exactly where he predicted the economy would be… slightly overlooking the fact that this must mean his own plan would have missed the target by miles and landed us in much worse straits! And also rather undermining Hard Labour’s case that they’d have done anything at all DIFFERENT!)

But in the absence of having bothered to pay any attention to what Gideon was saying, Mr Milipede delivered the speech he'd memorised anyway. I KNOW it's the hardest job in politics, replying to the budget with no notes or notice, but do you think he could at least TRY to remain on topic?

And if "long term economic plan" is becoming the most BORING big fib in British politics, then surely there's some sort of mutant hybrid of Godwin's Law being spawned on the other side: "the longer a debate goes on the closer to 100% gets the probability of Mr Milipede claiming it will lead to the privatisation/dismantling (the meaning of these terms being indistinguishable to his audience) of the NHS".

So today Mr Milipede invented the Tories "secret plan to fight inflation"…

No, sorry, that's "secret plan to wreck the NHS"; it's just he's so clearly and painfully obviously been watching too many episodes of his "West Wing" box set. It's all that free time he has not doing any work on actual policies.

But PLAGIARISM, Ed? Again?

I mean, bless him, he's only got one trump card, but he does keep playing it… in fact, it looks like he's only got one card AT ALL, at least only one that doesn't say "the same as the Tories but, er, nice" (see also what Rachel the Reever wants to do with welfare and Tristram the, er, Hunt wants to do with Education.) But it's clear that his schoolboy debate club tactics are no good when the country is calling for a STRATEGY.

The worst part of his day was probably the moment where you can see the dawning realisation creep into his sad eyes that the Conservatories are going to win, to beat him, beat him probably quite a lot. It was probably the time when he laughed at the second or third second kitchen joke.

Even until recently I had expected Labour to improve, and the Tories at best to hold their ground in numbers of seats. How could the Conservatories do anything OTHER than go backwards after the PAIN and the AUSTERITY and the BEDROOM TAX? But today, Miliband looked like a loser. No, worse, he looked like HE believed he was a loser, and that sort of thing is INFECTIOUS.

And Gideon looked like HE thought he was a WINNER.

Because Master Gideon's real talent is luck. The sort of luck that lets him get away with it.

Because this recovery isn't really a result of ANY plan – long term or otherwise – by this Government. It's mainly driven by the Saudis response to American fracking, pumping oil like it's going out of fashion (because it is!) driving down energy prices.

What the Coalition has actually done is a series of smart economic tacks across the wind, sheltering most people from the worst of the storm of the recession, while the rest of Europe has been battered by the ongoing Euro crisis, and while the rise of China and India drove a huge spike in energy prices and food prices, all of which delayed any chance of real recovery. We’ve been keeping more people in work – at the price of depressing earnings; keeping down homes repossessed; shifting the burden of taxation a few notches up the income scale. When the Lib Dems were stronger, we also kept benefits rising with inflation.

That doesn't mean that the austerity was WRONG or didn't work. If nothing else, thanks to the Coalition Britain was at least in a position where we COULD take advantage when the wind changed in our favour.

But what we've also done, again largely Lib Dem policies, is laid the groundwork for FUTURE economic strength: the pupil premium, and add to that free school meals, already giving kids a better education; the apprenticeships scheme, not just getting young people into jobs, delivering two million more quality training places, but kicking off a total reappraisal of the worth of vocational verses academic further education; even the hated tuition fees cum sort of graduate tax has delivered more young people from less well-off backgrounds into higher education.

You can, as Cap'n Clegg is fond of saying, still do a lot of GOOD with a bit of goodwill and three-quarters of a trillion pounds!

All of which means THIS is where the fight gets DESPERATE.

Liberal Democrats, we might have thought that we could go quietly into Opposition, sit the next Parliament out, lick our wounds – which will be many – and rebuild our tattered reputation under the cosy leadership of Saint Tim, while enjoying the no-doubt-hilarious spectacle of a minority Labour administration giving new definition to being propped up with a (lack of) confidence and supply (of demands) from the SNP.

WE MAY NOT HAVE THAT OPTION.

The Tories are already planning how to wreck democracy: that infamous "black and white ball" they held, that wasn't to raise funds for the General Election. They've already GOT the funds to fight the General Election. THAT was to raise funds for the SECOND General Election.

Remember, our slogan is "Stronger Economy; Fairer Society; Opportunity for All".

It's NOT because we'd deliver a fairer society than the Tories and a stronger economy than Labour. (Though we would. But that's OBVIOUS.)

It's because we'd deliver a FAIRER society than LABOUR and a STRONGER economy than THE TORIES!

Labour: the Party of I.D.iot cards, 90 day detention, dog whistles on immigration, cutting benefits for young people, introducing ATOS, introduction Work Capability Assessments, introducing tuition fees (yes, that burns), cash for peerages, cash for Bernie Eccleston, Iraq… no WAY are Labour the Party of "fairer society".

But equally, the Tories: the Party of throwing our relationship with our single biggest trading partner into doubt, the Party of toying with GBrexit, the Party of slashing immigration and all the benefits that come with it, the Party of slashing benefits(!), the Party of tax cuts for Dead Millionaires (promised again, this week), the Party of blowing dirty great wads on Trident… no WAY are the Tories the Party of "stronger economy".

People, if you DON'T want the LUNATICS to take over the asylum, if you don't want the drawbridge pulled up and the curtain run down on five centuries of Britain being the greatest trading nation on Earth, we CANNOT let the Tories win! Labour are about to surrender. It's up to the Liberal Democrats.

No pressure, then.

In this post:

Master Gideon = Gideon known as George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Mr Allstar Darling = Alistair Darling, his Labour predecessor
Rachel the Reever = Rachel Reeves, Labour Shadow Welfare Minister
Tristram the Hunt = Tristram Hunt, Labour Shadow Education Minister
Mr Milipede, reverting to Mr Miliband = Ed Miliband, probably-doomed leader of the Labour Party
Cap'n Clegg = Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats
Mr Danny = Danny Alexander, Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary (i.e. second in charge) at the Treasury
Mr Vince = Dr Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and widely respected as Lib Dem economic spokesperson and stand-in leader

I wrote this for somebody as a favour, to fill some space.  I thought I might as well post it here.  It isn't really a Shabgraff piece, but it exists.


William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.  It wasn’t the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or any of the other candidates sometimes suggested.  But how can we be so sure?

We have the accounts of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  His rivals, detractors, friends and colleagues had no doubt.  Ben Jonson wrote in his published diaries about his criticisms of the plays - right alongside his love and admiration for his friend Shakespeare, their author.  Nobody questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his own work for centuries.  It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that a brilliant but eccentric woman called Delia Bacon wrote a book in which she heavily hinted that the true author was Sir Francis Bacon.  She convinced a few people – including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud (who never believed anything silly, of course).  The early-to-mid 19th century was an age still influenced by the Romantics, who had invented the idea of the Artist as a lone creator, driven by the spirit, scribbling away in a garret, listening to the Muse whispering in his ear and writing for the sake of Art itself.  William Shakespeare – a professional actor, jobbing hack, and sharer in the going concern that was the Globe Theatre – didn’t fit this Romantic ideal.  Delia Bacon preferred her more upper-class, better-educated, self-consciously intellectual namesake.  Trouble is, aside from the total lack of any evidence at all connecting Bacon to any of the plays or poems, we also know Sir Francis Bacon’s writing style, his range, his concerns, and his opinions.  They don’t fit the plays.  At all.  The same is true of the current most-favoured candidate, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the shy bard depicted in the recent (and very silly) movie Anonymous.  We have extant examples of de Vere’s poetry.  It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t compare to the style and quality of even Shakespeare’s earliest and worst sonnets.  The Earl also wrote a few comedy plays.  None of them survive, but they are mentioned by a contemporary critic, Francis Meres.  Meres also mentions Shakespeare.  The context makes it perfectly clear that Meres thinks of them as different people.  (This also rubbishes the notion that deVere would be precluded from writing plays by his social position – the excuse often used to explain the Earl’s theorised decision to use an actor as a front man.)

It’s often said by ‘Anti-Statfordians’ that Shakespeare lacked the education he would have needed to write the plays.  But Shakespeare, as the son of a local alderman, would have been entitled to attend Stratford’s King Edward VI grammar school.  Shakespeare’s plays are recognisably the work of someone with an Elizabethan grammar school education – a grounding that would look more like a Classics degree from Oxbridge today.  Anti-Stratfordians often point out that, unlike other playwrights (Christopher Marlow, for instance) Shakespeare didn’t attend University.  But neither did Ben Jonson, the most ostentatiously learned playwright of Shakespeare’s time.  Anti-Stratfordians are fond of saying Shakespeare owned no books.  What they mean is that we have no record of his library.  But we have no record of the contents of his wardrobe either.  Does that mean he owned no shoes?

Shakespeare’s plays are stuffed with idiomatic Warrickshire words, spellings, local names and local knowledge.  Shakespeare puts in jokes which refer to his father’s profession and status – glove-maker and alderman – and conducts elaborate wordplay on his own name: ‘Will’.  It’s difficult to imagine how or why Francis Bacon or Edward deVere, Earl of Oxford, would do any of that… unless they were covering themselves with pathological consistency.  Meanwhile, the wackier fringes of Anti-Stratfordianism have ransacked Shakespeare looking for secret codes that reveal the names of the true authors, and never found anything that can’t be explained better as coincidence and/or wishful thinking.

Quite apart from anything else, about twelve of the plays Shakespeare authored or co-authored were definitely written after Oxford was in his grave.  Amazingly, Anti-Stratfordians don’t let this stop them.  They ignore the scholarship which dates the plays, or they claim byzantine conspiracies in which accomplices secretly added topical references to plays which Oxford left for posthumous performance.  For some reason.  And all without a shred of evidence.  Even more extreme are the manoeuvres gone through to prove Marlowe wrote the plays.  Marlowe was killed in 1593, before thirty-four of Shakespeare’s plays were written.  The death of Marlowe is certainly mysterious, and may have been an assassination linked to his near-certain role as a part-time spy, but there’s no evidence that he faked his own death.  And again, we can analyze the differences between Marlowe’s work and Shakespeare’s.  Marlowe is the only candidate talented enough to be remotely plausible, but his style is still quite distinct.  Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe, and borrowed from him.  That’s sufficient explanation of their occasional similarities – which we notice all the more because of their many differences.

Anti-Stratfordians say that mainstream academics and scholars don’t want to admit the truth because it would spoil their lucrative Shakespeare industry… but Anti-Stratfordianism itself is a lucrative industry!  However, the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare seems to owe more to snobbery than profit.  The son of a glover is not good enough to satisfy some people.  (By the way: Jonson was the son of a bricklayer, yet, as far as I know, nobody claims he didn’t write his own plays.)  Some people simply find it hard to believe that some of the greatest works in the English language were written by a lower middle-class nobody from the rural midlands whose father was a tradesman, who never went to university, and who also seems to have liked money and been something of a social climber.  People want Shakespeare to be a tortured visionary, or a suffering artist, or a glamorous aristocrat, or a questing intellectual, or some combination of all these.  But the bankruptcy of this becomes apparent when you consider that Bacon was involved in witch trials which included torture, and Oxford was a murderer who got away with it because his victim was a mere servant.  It’s odd that such men should be considered preferable to a man who, at worst, lacked a diploma, had a bit of a brummie accent, avoided taxes where possible, and could have been nicer to his wife.  But that’s who wrote the plays.  The factual record admits of no other reasonable conclusion.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the evidence for Shakespeare, or the inanities of the Anti-Stratfordians.  For further reading: The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate, Contested Will by James Shapiro, Shakespeare Beyond Doubt edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, and The Shakespeare Authorship Page.

ADDITIONAL 14/04/15: See also Shakespeare, In Fact by the late Irvin Leigh Matus.  This book takes the trouble to engage with actual Anti-Strat arguments and check their facts... and shows, in the process, that they're not just factually wrong but actively distort their sources.  Indispensible if you care about this issue and enjoy (as I do) the guilty pleasure of reading Anti-Strats being debunked.

Fifty days until the General Election. Fifty days of nothing but ‘why Britain is terrible’. Labour say it’s terrible now they’re in, so put back in the people who made it terrible in the first place. Tories say it was terrible when they were in, so don’t let them back in. UKIP say Britain has been terrible ever since we let any of ‘them’ in and hang up their ‘No blacks, no Polish, no gays’ signs. And the Lib Dems say it’ll be a bit less terrible if we’re a bit in. So, today, only things I love about Britain.

1 – My greatest Briton
…and Earthling, and citizen of the Universe, of them all, my husband, Richard Flowers

2 – Love and marriage
Having the right to marry the person I love, if they want to too, or not to marry at all

3 – That he did want to
…and that we did, after waiting only twenty years (to the day)

That’s all I need, really, but there are forty-seven more, including food, Doctor Who, more food, the Liberal Democrats (the whole bally lot of them), so much food… And that’s all just the other stuff that was at our wedding!

4 – Doctor Who
…of course

5 – Being a nation made up of several nations
…all distinct and all having each in common, and being a people that has always been made up of many peoples and still mixing in people from everywhere else

6 – Being a nation where we all have multiple loyalties and identities
…by definition, and not letting people tell us what one thing they think we are

7 – Being always open to change
…whether it’s new people in our streets, new words in our language (often from someone else’s) or newly being comfortable with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and all sorts of other people who no longer have to be like everybody else

8 – My parents
…My Mum, who wasn’t born here but has always put her all into wherever she is, and my Dad, who was born in Glasgow, did some more growing up in Watford, and made a life for his family in Stockport, because we’re lots of different places and all one country too

9 – Inspirational heroes
…The four greatest British heroic myths: King Arthur; Robin Hood; Sherlock Holmes; and World War II

10 – Doubt
…and asking awkward questions

11 – Great big cliffs
…and windmills on hillsides

12 – Great crashing waves
…and nudist beaches when it’s bloody freezing

13 – Picturesque villages
…like Aldbourne, East Hagbourne, South Oxhey, Little Bazeley-by-the-Sea, Summerisle (but I’m more of an Escape From the Country guy, so…)

14 – Thrilling cities
…like London, Manchester, Edinburgh

15 – Stockport Town Hall

16 – The Beatles
…and especially George Harrison who, like me, swung wildly from terribly earnest to taking the piss, but who unlike me played the most gorgeous slide guitar ever heard – plus the movie of Yellow Submarine

17 – Electronic music
…from the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, The Human League, Heaven 17 and Delia Derbyshire

18 – Kate Bush
…and whatever the hell she does

19 – Punk rock
…Especially Tom Robinson and, right now, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the wish that I could make my lists scan as well as Reasons To Be Cheerful

20 – Dame Shirley Bassey

21 – The Avengers
…Possibly the most British thing ever, and which wasn’t just style and subversion but which mattered – introducing to a mass audience the idea of intelligent, independent women who flung men over their shoulders. A fantasy of Britain where old-fashioned tradition and high-tech, sexually equal modernity went hand in hand (a hugely successful Conservative-Liberal coalition, you might say)

22 – The BBC

23 – Quatermass
…combining British ingenuity and a wish to build rocket ships with sheer naked terror (but doing it anyway)

24 – The Clangers
…encouraging us to love the alien and gently laugh at ourselves

25 – 2000AD
…the comic, not the year, particularly, which turned out a bit samey

26 – Carry On Up the Khyber

27 – Alastair Sim
…in drag

28 – BRIAN BLESSED

29 – Shakespeare
…A great many of his lines, anyway (and Queen Elizabeth the First, at least according to Blackadder)

30 – The works of JRR Tolkien
…even the ones scribbled on bits of toast and painstakingly reconstituted by his son. Mmm, toast…

31 – Clasping strange new foreign foods to our bosom
…over the centuries, making them our own so we couldn’t imagine life without them, like – the potato – and tea – and chocolate

32 – Chicken Korma

33 – Roast lamb

34 – Scotch eggs

35 – Pies
…Pies. More pies. And especially appropriate today, Pieminister pies

36 – Margaret Thatcher, Tony Benn, Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage
…and the gladly exercised right to say thanks but no thanks, never have, never will

37 – William Gladstone, David Lloyd-George, Paddy Ashdown, Nick Clegg and Jo Swinson
…and the gladly exercised right to say yes, and I will again

38 – Being more or less democratic for quite a long time

39 – Mostly giving up an Empire with less fuss than is usual

40 – The NHS
…which on balance makes me go “Aaargghh!” less than it helps stop me going “Aaargghh!”

41 – Fulfilling the UN target of giving 0.7% of our national wealth in overseas aid and development
…a target set a year before I was born. It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve finally met it (one of only about half a dozen countries that does), and in the last few weeks set it in law created by the Liberal Democrats

42 – The gap between rich and poor narrowing
…at last, over the last five years, after widening hugely ever since the 1980s

43 – The Rule of Law
…meaning that those in power get frustrated by the law applying to them too

44 – Signing the European Convention on Human Rights
…And not just being part of it, but Winston Churchill commissioning British lawyers to create it, in order to protect and spread our values

45 – Traditional British values
…like creativity, eccentricity, tolerance, generosity, fair play, standing up for the underdog, and universal, indivisible freedom

46 – Not having ID cards
…or being snooped on by the state at will, and the Liberal Democrats constantly being on guard whenever everybody else suddenly thinks that would be a good idea

47 – Making lists instead of doing anything
…making tutting sounds instead of hitting anyone, and grumbling but never giving up

48 – Inventing the train and the Internet
…even when each sometimes goes off the rails

49 – Many of the things we used to have but don’t any more
…like welcoming immigrants, Woolworths, Texan Bars, how Blackpool was in my childhood memories, The Daleks’ Master Plan, Nick Courtney, Conrad Russell and my Grandad

50 – The future
…even more than those I’ve loved and lost, and that there will always be many, many more new wonderful, beautiful, innovative, unpredictable and aggravating but loveable things to put on a list.
And that any list will be quite different for you, or even quite different for me tomorrow (I thought the best way was to write the lot off the top of my head), but still blatantly and brilliantly British.


So in fifty days’ time, why not vote for a Britain that offers more things to love than merely against the bits you don’t?


Here’s Nick Clegg on things he loves about Britain. I applauded him delivering this speech on Sunday and suspect he may have spent a bit more time and thought crafting this version than I did mine, but I agree with most of his, too.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow Work and Pensions secretary has clearly decided that shadowing Iain Duncan Smith involves becoming as much like him as possible, going by this Guardian interview:

However, Reeves said Labour did not want to be seen to be the party of the welfare state. “We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,” she said. “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

Then, while plugging the interview on Twitter we got this from her:

Labour believes in strong safety net, work for those who can and support for those who can’t

Reeves is one of Labour’s rising stars, and like most that get placed in that category in any party it means she’s capable of delivering a speech, while having had any possibility of thinking outside of the political consensus thoroughly stamped out of her. Part of that consensus is accepting all the tenets of workism as a given, and assuming there’s nothing more important than work (look at how much MPs of all parties love to boast about the ridiculous amount of hours they work) and so it’s only natural that everyone should work. Consider the unspoken implications of ‘work for those who can': it’s not a question of what you wish, but what someone in Whitehall decides you can or can’t do. Only working people matter and deserve to be represented, so if you don’t work you don’t count.

That’s the consensus, and Reeves and Labour aren’t going to challenge that in any way. They’re going to assume that work is going to stay the same in the future, and that everybody needs some of it to be seen as worthwhile. What it completely fails to recognise is that in a world of rapidly increasing automation, the idea that everyone should have a job in the traditional sense, let alone that there’ll even be a job for everyone, is looking more and more outdated. The mainstream political consensus doesn’t want to acknowledge that, because it would involve asking lots of difficult questions and accepting that the future isn’t going to be just like the past but with faster broadband speeds.

I’m not surprised to see Labour proposing to just double down on what the Tories are promising, but it just reveals the sheer paucity of the political debate in this country as we approach what’s supposedly an important and pivotal election. There’s no vision, no acknowledgement that things are going to be different in the future, no attempt to challenge the consensus and suggest things could be done differently. Instead, we’re just told to work harder and hope we don’t fall through the cracks to end up where no one wants to speak for us.

Don’t look to the future; it’ll only make you cry.

Someone on Twitter earlier was making some… uninformed statements about an autoblocking system (it allows people to pool their ability to block people, which might be useful if you’d, e.g. become the target of a group who had tremendous concern for ethics in games journalism) to the effect of “it’s violating my freedom of speech”. He further suggested that people in the UK might try and find a solicitor(!) to have it shut down(!!!). Maybe he should have consulted with the bad biscuit man, who I’m given to understand has legal qualifications (and a prodigious IQ to boot).

Clearly, his speech is not being restricted; he can continue to say whatever he wants, and anyone who wants to listen can listen. Twitter quickly piled in with the reductio ad absurda: private Twitter accounts, spam filters, people without Twitter accounts, you can imagine how they continued. The idea is sort of a logical extension of the sea lion phenomenon.

While his complaints are trivially childish and nonsensical, I believe they are instructive. They cut to the heart of a lot of debate and discussion (not all, certainly, but a fair old bit) I see around the subject of free speech, in that they’re not really about free speech. Believe it or not (Dan) I think free speech is, ceteris paribus, a good thing. I don’t think people should, beyond the obvious caveats, be prevented from saying things¹, and moreover I think that such disallowal is quite rare (though regrettably increasingly less so).

That does nothing to mitigate claims of disallowal, of course: the “you can’t talk about [x]” formula beloved of the rightwing press, usually as a prelude to talking about that thing at length, is still going strong. And that, and the complaints of the silly Twitter man and those like him are not about freedom of speech but rather about the non-provision or withdrawal of concessions, privileges or indulgences to which the aggrieved parties feel (wrongly) entitled. Freedom of speech is distinct from freedom from consequence, or obligation to listen, or to provide (or ensure provision of) a platform². More tomorrow.

I can text you a pile of poo, but I can't write my name.

The Standard ran a story claiming that vulvic piercings might be illegal in England because of new regulations brought in. Is this true? Probably not.

This original piece certainly doesn’t seem to have all its facts right. The first paragraph talks about “new NHS rules to be introduced next month”, and helpfully doesn’t give a link to the regulations in question. But what this seems to be is described at an NHS England page as a new requirement “since September 2014”. It says

all acute trusts are required to provide a monthly report to the Department of Health on the number of patients who have had FGM or who have a family history of FGM. This information will be anonymous and no personal confidential data will be shared as a result of the information collection.

The statistics are divided into four categories, as promulgated by the WHO: three numbered types for specifics procedures, and then a catch-all “other” category 4, which includes

Other: all other harmful procedures to the female [sic] genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g. pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterizing the genital area.

You’ll notice nearly exact same wording at the NHS’s site. These statistics are collated monthly and the returns from the first month (September 2014) have already been published, so why exactly this is being presented as a new story is puzzling. It’s probably not a good idea if this has ended up including genuinely consensual piercings, but the NHS does collect lots of statistics about perfectly legal things.

But the Standard story then goes on to say

It means that each of the [people] will also be classed as a potential crime victim and that those responsible for carrying out the piercing could be deemed guilty of an offence under legislation banning FGM.

This is where it definitely overreaches. Internal rules at the NHS mean squat in terms of criminal law. The operative legislation here is the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, and what matters here is what it says, and how that is likely to be interpreted by the courts. There’s not been a lot of case law here - in fact, there has only been one prosecution under the Act, and that was for one of the numbered procedures, infibulation. So what matters is what this means, in section 1.1 of the act.

A person is guilty of an offence if he excises, infibulates or otherwise mutilates the whole or any part of a girl’s labia majora, labia minora or clitoris.

I don’t think a piercing is a mutilation.  I find it very difficult to believe that a court would either.  Of course, the CPS are hardly trustworthy in that respect, and this is sufficiently ambiguous that it needs be clarified, but (a) nothing seems to have changed recently in the law and (b) piercers still seem to be happy to do this, right?

a surgical operation [...] which is necessary for [...] physical or mental health,

So it appears that genital piercings to reduce dysphoria are OK even if they were banned in the general case.  This also appears to specifically allow SRS procedures that would otherwise be included in one of the three main types.