The Furrowed Brow
is the place where, if you can, you should speak your mind on anything of a serious nature.
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It looks like poor wee Wendy Alexander's well and truly gubbed, doesn't it? After this episode, she may be able to cling on as Leader of Scottish Labour for a while; but she'll never possess a shred of credibility ever again.
Wendy is so desperately, achingly, blindingly intelligent and brilliantly capable that there is no doubt that both she and her wee brother would have risen to the very top of the Labour Party even if their dad hadn't been a bosom pal of Donald Dewar's.
Yet in a very short period of time, both their careers have met their respective Trafalgars; Wendy's sunk, and Douglas is badly holed beneath the waterline.
There is a lesson in all this for those who believe themselves to have a destiny; the Alexander siblings seem to believe theirs is to rule other people.
The lesson is this; you might indeed have a destiny. Just not the one you think.
Martin (1) - A very cogent missive from a balanced observer. Clearly the chip on both your shoulders must help.
Something for those with furrowed brows.
At 06:28 PM on 01 Dec 2007, Ed Iglehart wrote:
Up and Down Wall Street, Our continues.
At the risk of boring you (which we've always considered the worst sin a journalist can commit, right up there with plagiarism, shaking a politician's hand and stealing a lame old lady's cane), we must again point out that the credit crisis is threatening to radically and fundamentally transform the investment landscape. Pure and simple, we've had three decades of mostly bull markets fed by cheap and abundantly available credit and an insatiable lust for leverage. That's fast coming to what we suspect will be a crashing end.
Enjoy. The appended commentary...and Socialism on Wall Street at namelink. ;-)
Salaaaami
ed
The net of law is spread so wide,
No sinner from its sweep may hide.
Its meshes are so fine and strong,
They take in every child of wrong.
O wondrous web of mystery!
Big fish alone escape from thee!
-- James Jeffrey Roche
posts 1 and 2 -- if we accept (as I think we must, on the evidence we see) that once they embark on a career that involves telling other people what to do on a daily basis someone can become firmly convinced that the rules don't apply once one has got to a certain level of power, that theft is no longer theft if it happens in more than four figures, fraud is not fraud if it involves any statement made by or to a government, lies are not lies if they are told to more than a hundred people at once or repeated three times, and most certainly that whoever actually did something blatently wrong can never be held to be responsible so long as he or she says that they were sincere when they did it (or has a subordinate who can be forced to carry the can), is anything going on at the moment in any parliament really anything to get excited about?
Chris - "if we accept (as I think we must, on the evidence we see) . . ." - No, I really don't think we must.
Intermittent Wossit @5, please note my use of words.
'If we accept that ... someone *can* become' -- not 'must' or 'will', but can. I accept that power can corrupt, though I may not go so far as to say it always does. It would be very surprising if it did not, at least to some extent.
Inability to observe recent examples of behaviour amongst at least some of those in positions of power must surely leave the unobserver in the category of people who, in the immortal words of Colin MacInnes in the late 1960s, 'have the social awareness of a cockroach'. (The complete quotation, if anyone wants to find out what sort of person *he* felt that meant, is to be found in 'Absolute Beginners': the book, not the film.)
ntermittent Wossit @5, please note my use of words.
'If we accept that ... someone *can* become' -- not 'must' or 'will', but can. I accept that power can corrupt, though I may not go so far as to say it always does. It would be very surprising if it did not, at least to some extent.
Inability to observe recent examples of behaviour amongst at least some of those in positions of power must surely leave the unobserver in the category of people who, in the immortal words of Colin MacInnes in the late 1960s, 'have the social awareness of a cockroach'. (The complete quotation, if anyone wants to find out what sort of person *he* felt that meant, is to be found in 'Absolute Beginners': the book, not the film.)
'As Milton Keynes turns 40, plans have been unveiled for its modern-day counterpart - 160,000 new homes to be built on the scruffy marshland and former industrial sites that snake along the Thames.'
So that will be the idea to build 160,000 new homes on a flood plain?
Hmmm, do I detect a certain lack of joined up thinking here? Or is scruff marshland something will not flood.
Hello, wake up, smell the coffee and take a reality check before it's too late.......pleeeease.
It seems it's not just here in Blighty that dubious methods of political funding continue....
Cash-Poor GOP Recruiting Wealthy Candidates
Tells millionaires they're 鈥渘eeded鈥 to preserve plutocracy.
;-)
ed
Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic.
-- E.F. Benson
Chris - By all means feel compelled to accept your own analysis but don't assume that "we must, on the evidence we see . . ". I don't want to be included in your "we".
As for "inability to observe", I think you confuse observation with discursive analysis.
Why do relatively well paid MP's, with expense accounts, need such large funds to campaign to become the Deputy Leader of their party? Can they not e-mail their supporters with their views and campaign material. Meanwhile encouraging their WEALTHY supporters to contribute towards investigations into British travellers to 3rd world countries seeking child sex. Is there not an award they could be given for such charitable giving, such as the thanks of a disadvantaged child - or is this not the sort of award the donors want. Signed "Carol of Purley"
(8)
DIY - actually, there really oughtn't to be a problem with building *houses* on a flood plain - just so long as the first floor is not on the ground, (or rather, to be slightly more Anglo Saxon, if the ground floor is a car port).
Roads, however, will be flooded habitualy.
I would like to thank Eddie Mair for his exemplary broadcasting style.
My bane on news programmes is when the interviewer introduces the interviewee, conducts the interview, and then says "Thank you Mr/Mrs xxx". This is SO frustrating!
I may have been busy and missed the introduction, then been intrigued by the interview, but who was the interviewee? Is Mr/Mrs XXX a Trade Union or Government spokesman? The tenor of the message can often depend entirely on knowing where the speaker is coming from, and often this is not apparent in the interview.
Eddie Mair is the ONLY presenter who always tells us who he has been interiewing. Yes, the others do sometimes, but not always.
It astonishes me that 大象传媒's presenters are not required to tell the listeners who they have been interviewing, and I mean not just a name, but position too.
Any chance they could learn from Eddie Mair?
Lorimer Burn
Fishers, I read your post at 4 the other day but didn't really take it in as it was all one long sentence. Having seen your subsequent discussion with Intermittent I've had another look. I have to say you do seem to be suggesting that everyone must agree with your interpretation of the 'evidence' and later, asserting that, because he disagrees with you, Intermittent has the the social awareness of a cockroach. I find that rather unhelpful, to say the least.
Ap (14) - I wouldn't worry unduly - my skin is much thicker than that.
Chris seems to consider Colin MacInnes as a great socio-political sage. The "social awareness of a cockroach" line is one that he has quoted quite a few times over the past months when talking about views on government, banks, etc.
Nikki (12):
That's brilliant! Yes, every house on a flood plain should be built with a ground-floor garage, which would also stop what happens round my way which is that pavements have become car-parks. Even the houses with driveways have cars parked on the pavement as well. One house a few doors down from me seems to be a four car family, one more car than bedrooms by my reckoning. The result is that people have to walk on the road and the pavements have to be resurfaced every 3-4 years.
If we're going to be (heh) flooded with these rotten machines, then house-builders must have a duty to see that there is space on each property to park them.
(And I'd like to see traffic cops going round having a word in the ears of these selfish people and telling them to get their cars off the pavements, but that's another rant.)
What Is Progress?
Posted December 4, 2007
The numbers show that this should be the real question at the Bali talks.
When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist. Let me show you why.
-- Guardian 4th December 2007
Always worth reading George's rants
xx
ed
Life is like a 10 speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.
-- C. Schultz
Save Legal Aid!
The legal aid reforms proposed by the government of cutting the budget of 拢2bn has serious implications for the public as well as the legal profession.
Two million legal aid clients, some of the most vulnerable members of the public, could have the fundamental principles of access to justice and right to legal representation jepordised by the government. This could manifest into a two tier legal system which violates the principle of equality under the law.
Lawyers are also suffering from the cuts. There is a growing division between barristers and solicitors pay for the same cases. Solicitors are being paid more that the barristers working on the same cases.
Private barristers chambers and solicitors firms, who specialise in legal aid cases, are taking on other cases in other areas of the law rather than criminal because of the lack of pay. In the long term, there may not be enough criminal defence lawyers around to cope with the number of criminal cases. Some legal sets could even go out of business as a result of these legal aid cuts.
I urge Jack Straw, who was once himself a barrister, to reconsider the proposal and to keep the best funded and most comprehensive legal system sustained for the future.
This re Dairy price fixing
"The provisional OFT report from September said the collusion saw customers being charged 3p extra for a pint of milk and 15p extra per quarter-pound of butter.
The overcharging also led to customers being allegedly overcharged 15p per half-pound of cheese, the watchdog said."
Have we gone back to the 1970s?? Did I dream it, or didn't we have greengrocers hauled over the coals for daring to sell in lbs?
Mind you, I guess it sounds better than
3p extra per 568ml
15p extra per 113.5g
15p per 227g
On Wednesday evening I had the very great pleasure of seeing the CBSO Orchestra and Choir deliver Stravinski's Rakes Progress as an Oratorio at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham.
The soloists were splendid but the evening was made by the powerful Chorus that swept majestically into and out of every scene.
They were the Roaring Boys, Louis Mc Neice - like celebrating Bagpipe Music, the whores explaining how gold fell into their laps, the mad decrying the endless sameness of their lives and perhaps most spectacularly the crowd at the auction who bought up Rakewell's possessions with hysterical street cry bids. One screamed 'Thirty three!' gesticulating like a child throwing down her teddy bear.
It was superb entertainment. The music that odd Stravinkian mix of melody and drama. A story wonderfully told.
For my part so much had changed since first I saw the Firebird danced by Fonteyn at Covent Garden and the Rite of Spring there too on tickets that a school teacher had given me at the beginning of the 1960s.
When as a science student I had read Spender and Isherwood and accepted, as I was told, that their 30's Marxism contained a proper critique of Naziism and the international capitalism that created it.
WH Auden who wrote the Rake libretto was for me a part of that group.
Perhaps one didn't hear of them now because new voices needed to be heard. In marching through Chiswick from Aldermaston and later berating Labour for not opposing America in the Vietnam war there were other voices. From Country Joe and Janis Ian to George Melly and Adrian Mitchell.
Indeed I still knew no more than that when I read the libretto in the programme and asked a damn fool question at a pre - concert talk last Wednesday.
Wasn't there a great deal of social criticism in the opera I asked and did Stravinski think true love the only answer.
There was none I was kindly told.
So I checked and found that Auden had gone to America in '39 boarding the ship as an uncomfortable Marxist and disembarking as a right wing Republican. (He thus escaped some local difficulties in Europe).
The 1951 libretto (the German version by his lover Chester Kallman (?)) is indeed deeply conservative. Tom had a TrueLove he eschewed. Most of us don't.
Our job then is to keep our hands from being idle, to work diligently in the Counting House and to avoid the romantic traps of youth. Stop dreaming lad, you will wake up a Rake not an Auden or Stravinski. You commit the classic romantic errors. You think beauty something the eye beholds, pleasure the measure of all things and love a romantic part for the young Adonis and Venus.
It is difficult however not to bring social criticism to the libretto.
Why are investment decision in the hands of young Rakewell?
Why are the whores whores?
Why are the crowd bidding up the price of the effects of the notorious and, in the case of Baba, of the notorious themselves, spending their money riotously, foolishly, and having speculated wildly with Tom in his crazy investments?
Baba is a bearded lady. As a celebrated courtesan, her fortune comprises gifts from her world of rich cosmopolitan lovers. As a spectacle she can be peered at in St Giles. As Tom's wife she is hell. At the auction she is sold off to the highest bidder.
How can all this be anything but the fault of the way we organise ourselves? Isn't it here that the criticism of everything having a common measure - money or if you will, utility - is to be applied? Not surely at the door of young dreamers.
How could these sad old men, so talented and with such reputations that their works are still performed, have come to this pass in 1951.
The young we are told can typically expect to be without talent. Not like Igor and WH who were right to dream of course.
1951 was the year the Tories got back into power after Labour's superb 5 years of public sector creativity - in education and health of course but also in steel, coal, water, telephony, and transport.
It was 6 years after the war that Auden sat out in America and in which Stravinski's family's erstwhile comrades sacrificed 20 million to save Europe from fascism.
Stop press. (As I say I found other voices in the 60s). Igor too went to America in '39, I find.
How wicked is this libetto.
In 1945 my father's generation forged socialism here from the tragedies and heroisms of the second war. And Igor and WH neglect to point out the cruelty of markets in '51?
Perhaps the saddest thing for me is that I helped form part of the criticism of that Socialist Generation (As Beer in his seminal work calls them).
Despite David Caute's warnings that in (rightly) criticising Wilson for not adopting a socialist programme we were in danger of losing the gains of '45 - '51 I went ahead and did exactly that.
Was that idle hands? Should I instead have been in the Counting House?
I don't think so. I think our problem was in part the Audens and the Stravinskis of this world who were on the run from social justice and socialism and infatuated by their own abilities. (Igor did not return to Russia at all until 1967)
Their radical reputation allowed them to subvert the message of socialism. Like Amis they sought a tyranny of 'talent' at a time when a little honesty from them would have taught us that all are potentially Igors and WHs.
Nonetheless.theirs was a significant contribution to the atmosphere of radical thought in the 60s among the young which crucially failed to celebrate the non -profit making culture, the anti -market positions, of the industries in public ownership and of the local authorities - from libraries stocking WH's poems and Igor's scores to publicly funded concerts in every town and city in England.
Sadly we left open the door to Thatcherism in our ignorance and our stupidity. And I will always bear the burden of guilt for that.
As for other confusions I leave those to another comment on another superb CBSO presentation. For some, about democracy for example persist and are hugely relevant in these anti war days of today.
Meanwhile I merely point out that our current radicalisation should make sure it protects what precious little socialism remains in the world today. No doubt Cameron would sell off the 大象传媒 and force Birmingham to stop hosting cultural feasts like The Rake.
People of my age group 55 - 85 are like interlopers between the (now passing on) generations burned by markets in the '30s, who knew no other, and our current crop of children of Thatcher who think socialism a joke.
The Rake showed us how much is to be done, how difficult is the journey back to socialism and how far we are from those days of the late forties so splendid to us all.
Except of course Igor and WH!.
Sadly.
Our continues.
;-)
Salaam/Shalom/Shanthi/Dorood/Peace
Namaste -ed
Save the bales!