The Daily Novel

Bournemouth

In the late afternoon the sun broke through the billowing clouds and a strong wind whipped up the waves and buffeted those UCU delegates venturing out for a fag.  Inside the hall the carefully prepared proposals of the leadership for dealing with the vexed and heated issue of a boycott of Israeli universities were blown blown off course by a thumping vote from the delegates.

When the debate began it seemed that everything was going the way the leadership wanted. The compromise entitled Policy on International  Greylisting and Boycotts, was passed by an overwhelming majority of delegates, with only a few hands raised against. This approach meant applying pressure on Israeli universities and asking for changes but not moving to a boycott unless these measures failed.  Even then imposing a boycott would require a further motion by UCU Congress in a year’s time.

This was Resolution 28. The tiger in the tank was Resolution 30, which condemned Israel’s ‘40-year illegal occupation that denies educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shooting and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students’.  It condemned ‘the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation’, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions ‘for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions’.

Resolution 28 went on to demand immediate action by circulating the Palestinian proposals to all union branches, by organizing a UK-wide campus tour  for Palastinian trade unionists and by urging all union members to consider the moral implications of llinks with Israeli universities.

It was a long and well argued debate with speakers for and against following each other. There were still several available from both sides when the vote was taken to put the motion to the vote. The hall was electrified as a forest of hands shot up to support the rebels. The tellers were called in and they confirmed what we already knew; 158 for the boycott and 99 against. Nearly two-thirds of the delegates had over-ruled their own executive.

They had also, in one sense, cancelled out the near unanimous support they had given for Resolution 28 which in effect had committed the union not to go for an immediate boycott. What happens now is that the members will have to decide on the issue.  So it will be a few months before we know whether the General Secretary is right in thinking that most members don’t want a boycott. Or whether the rebels are right in thinking that their policies are backed by their members.  This is not always easy to know in the union movement, particularly when university teachers have so little time to attend meetings, so that policy can be decided by a committed few, whose views may not reflect the majority.

The rebel victory projects a public image of dis-union on the first day of the new  union. And no doubt some of the tabloid press will see a thousand Arthur Scargills leading university students down the path of left-wing fundamentalism. In fact the difference between the two sides is not as wide as it seems. 

Two speeches to give you the flavor of the debate.

Richard Seaford from Exeter University argued with eloquence and passion that it was a boycott of institutions not individuals. He spoke with conviction about how many Israeli academics he had worked with. And claimed that the boycott would still enable him to invite them to Exeter.  He ended with a plea to delegates to:

Make a small contribution to the growing movement for change in the climate of opinion which will bring a lasting and just settlement in the middle east.

Michael Yudkin of Oxford University argued quietly and firmly that a boycott would conflict with the duty of academics to encourage dialogue.  It would also harm the Palestinian cause by hurting the Israeli academics, who he claimed provided the main opposition to the Isreali government. He reported that 358 Israeli academics had signed an on-line petition opposing the occupation.  He advised members to read a new research study which found that the boycott against South African universities was not important in defeating apartheid. He argued that rather than tell foreign governments what to do we should take on our own:

How many British universities have passed motions opposing British occupation of Iraq?

I was impressed with his arguments. My own worry is that the Israeli boycott issue diverts attention from the damage done to British universities by a series of government measures.  And I hope that delegates are going to tell the education minister just how mistaken their policies are when he comes to Bournemouth on Friday morning. 

Bournemouth

The splendid from views Bournemouth pier are shrouded in mist this morning and the town is drenched in drizzle. But  inside the conference hall the spirit was upbeat at the first Congress of the University and College Union. The merger was the result of ten years work to bring together the Association of University Teachers, which represented the older universities, and NATFHE which dominated the former polytechnics and the further education sector.  In the last twelve months the brotherly spirit was sometimes ruptured by the infighting which took place in election of the first General Secretary.  Victory went to Sally Hunt, who as the AUT candidate had to win NATFHE votes because they had more members than the AUT.In her speech this morning Hunt focused on the future and ‘the need to build a new union fit for the 21^st century. She said:

We meet in a political and industrial environment as challenging in its way as any faced by our predecessors.

She has no doubt as to who the enemy is and she pulled no punches in describing the effects on academic life.

This government increasingly sees us as instruments of economic policy………and ignores the wider benefits to  society that universities and colleges provide.They intervene in the curriculum in the name of quality.They direct funding towards some and away from others in the so called skills revolution.They choose to protect some subject areas while throwing others to the wolves.There has never been greater government interference in our professional lives than today. And yet while government wishes to increase its control it wishes to do so by contributing progressively less from the public purse.That is why students now pay top up fees in our universities.That is why adult learners are paying progressively more for a second chance.And that is why we face the beginnings of privatisation in both sectors.

She then gave some telling examples of the how the government is shooting itself in the foot.

Take health where community care is prioritized, yet our members, who train our nurses are made redundant to fund NHS deficits.Take science where despite warm words from ministers we are still shutting labs here almost as fast as they are building them in China.And take lifelong learning – at the heart of the government’s agenda so they say – yet the latest cuts have seen a 17 per cent reduction in adult learners last year.On the ground, the reality of government policy for too many of our members is job insecurity, increased casualisation and higher workloads.

She then turned her attention to the need for the union to focus on these educational priorities.

I counted forty five different motions and amendments on our agenda this week which call for campaigns of one kind or another.

To be effective, the union needed to prioritise.  She particularly does not wish the union to be sidetracked by another academic boycott of Israel. Hunt believes that the majority of the membership don’t want it.This afternoon, when the Israel issue is debated, she will find out what the delegates think.

It is 3 AM. I have just had a dream unlike any dream I have had in my life. Very lucid and rational. No emotion. Science and reason. Like a good explanatory lecture. Or a work of perfect journalism reporting honestly on how it is.

The content was to do with the current state of play in the project that has been occupying most of my time and energy since the beginning of February;  selling the house in Gospel Oak, buying a small house by the sea in Dorset and finding a small flat in the next street.

The dream thoughts came from someone unspecified who is in possession of all the facts, including what was going on in the minds of the various people, who have considered, or are considering, buying the house. Including one, I did not know about, who was prepared to pay 1.5 million, a higher bid than any I have had.

I had no visual image of the dream character who was talking in the dream. But I had a clear impression of the kind of person he was. Although he was claiming the kind of knowledge that is claimed for God, he did not seem at all Godlike. More like a patient lecturer explaining things to a group of students. 

He was telling me that the various potential buyers were having many different thoughts about whether to buy or not to buy. Mostly these thoughts were not to do with my house, what is right and wrong with it or even how much I am asking for it. They were to do with whether this move fitted in with what they wanted to do in the next phase of their lives.  The dream lecturer was telling me that there was very little I could do about it. No amount of skilled interviewing by me would reveal all the factors involved. Because there are so many things involved in the decision to move house that even the potential buyers themselves cannot be sure of precisely what drives their decision.

In thinking now about this dream it helps me to understand a bit more about the nature of dreaming and what use to make of these sleeping thoughts. The dream is of no use at all in predicting whether the present firm bidder will actually sign on the dotted line in a few days time. It is of no help to me in knowing what I need to find out from him that I do not already know. 

But it does tell me quite a lot of useful things.But using the dream is not as easy as it seems. First, there is the practical difficulty. Even as I lie in bed I realize that the memory of the dream is fading, even before I have gone to my desk to write down what it told me. Even if I were in a sleep laboratory, with a researcher by my bed ready to take down my immediate report of what happened in the dream, I would not be able to prove to the satisfaction of a scientist that what I was telling him was just the actual dream, rather than my waking thoughts about it.But thanks to my training as a journalist I can make a decent stab at no embroidering the actual dream.  Of censoring myself when I move away from the dream itself. 

When I say it was much more like a thought than most of my dreams, I mean it was the kind of thought when several thoughts come into the mind in a single instant, which I sometimes write of as a stream of insights, but that metaphor does not convey the reality. Because a stream suggests a flow, whereas this kind of thinking, whether in dreaming, or when awake,  is when we think many things in the same moment. 

A better metaphor is what happens when we look at a picture and take in many things at the same time. But, as I have already written, this was not primarily a visual dream, but it did contain one episode when several bid prices for my house flashed up a series of written down figures on the whiteboard in my head. Most of these figures were the actual bids for the house (and I have the letters from the estate agent to prove it). This is important because the dream is doing quite a good job of reminding me of the facts.

So it leads me to the thought that perhaps it is useful to focus on the way dream thoughts and images are just like waking thoughts and images, rather than different from them. Like some waking thoughts they do demonstrate the extraordinary and varied abilities of the human mind, which processes things in a ways that no computer yet built has got near to equaling.

And it leads me back to a thought I, and others, have had several times before.  That man invented God to explain this kind of thinking, vision or insight, which is so different from everyday reasoning. And it reminds me of one of the problems of having a manic depressive temperament.  When you try and describe something like this, which I still find amazing, people think that it just a sign of mania. And that makes me discontented with what I have written. Particularly the headline, ‘Any dream will not do’. I could just as well have taken any dream and made similar points.

What I am writing has in essence been written by many poets, novelists and playwrights. Andrew Lloyd Webber said it much better.

I close my eyes, draw back the curtains,

So I know for certain, what I always knew.  

He was right.

Any dream will do.

Off to the country on Saturday for a shot of tranquillity to get me into a better frame of mind for yet another week of buying and selling houses. Chose to go to Rye to visit with two of my favourite Americans, Henry James and William James. Since they are both dead I thought I had better not to rely on them to satisfy my bodily needs, so I got us invited to lunch by an old friend of mine who is lovingly restoring an Elizabethan house in the town.

 Justin Jukes is a working class lad from Lancashire who has developed a taste for the fine things in life like the best food and wine, beautiful old British houses and French chateux, theatre and good conversation at the dinner table.

 Since I had driven straight down from London my bladder was bursting when I was introduced to the other guests, already assembled around the table when we arrived at 1 PM. I was pointed in the direction of the loo around a winding corridor, where I was faced with a choice of three doors. The first door revealed a cupboard. The second door led me into the Elizabethan laundry, occupied by a twenty-first century washing machine and tumble drier. But no loo.

 At that point my mobile phone went off. It was one of the men from Benham & Reeves who informed me he had rather better news. One of their two current bidders for my house had trumped the other one. Both a bit below the guide price whereas the new estate agent has already come up with one man who is prepared to pay that.

I told the B&R man that I would think about it.

 In truth I did not want to think about it at all. I felt I had stumbled into a Chicago basement and had been led to the poker table to sit down with four seasoned pros, each wearing dark glasses and with cigarettes dangling from their lips. Although I can hold my own at solo whist and bridge I have rarely won a hand at poker, even when playing with British amateurs.

The food and wine and conversation lifted my spirits. And in the afternoon I went to take a walk around the Lamb House garden one hundred yards away. I did not find tranquillity. There was a gaggle of visitors. And even my inner conversations with these two brothers, founding fathers of American literature, psychology and philosophy, were frustrating. Though their writing has helped me in my life-long struggle to understand human behaviour, and to understand the differences between Americans and Europeans, I realised that the James brothers had not been much help in teaching me about financial realities. They did not have to bother about money because they came from rich and influential families. So my visit to their house yesterday left me feeling disgruntled and not a little envious.

 Back at Justin’s house I repaired to the garden for a fag and to drink in the view from this hill town to the Kent marshes and the river leading down to Rye Harbour. His daughter, Lucy, followed me into the garden, and asked if I would like to see a demonstration of one of the three forms of dancing she was learning; ballet, modern or tap. I asked for tap, mentioning that she would need to change her footwear.

 She took off her trainers and barefoot executed the first tap dance I have ever seen done on grass. She moved with enthusiasm and grace and with that intensity of youth learning complex manoeuvres. I felt an extremely privileged audience of one with a grandstand seat.

 Later Justin showed me the change to the house of which he is most proud. He has installed a cinema in the cellar. In front of the wide trap doors, through with the smugglers brought in their loot in the sixteenth century, he has installed a cinema screen. In front of that are two rows of cinema seats from a 1930’s Odeon.

 The Elizabethans would have been a bit bemused by the technology. But I am sure that they would have got as much enjoyment out of the film of Olivier’s Henry the Fifth, as I did when I first saw it on the back row of the stalls in the 1950.

 So I figured, as we glided back to London in the Toyota Prius, powered fairly ecologically by a mixture of electricity and petrol, that my grandchildren may not have it as bad as I often think. Human beings might not destroy the planet. They might not kill each other with the many available weapons of mass destruction. It is not impossible that human creativeness and ingenuity may find ways of saving the planet and of inventing products and ways of living which lift our hearts and minds and divert us, at least temporarily, from our urges to satisfy our lust and gluttony.

To the Magdala Pub, which is two or three hundred yards from my house in Roderick Road. To get there I have to walk up my street and across the footbridge on to the Parliament Hill Fields part of Hampstead Heath. Then up the steep hill that is Nassington Road and down the street, Parliament Hill, to the pub which is near the bottom. I am so knackered by the physical labours of preparing for our house move that I have to stop at least three times in Nassington to get my breath back.

 It is a few months since we were last there and they have tarted it up. The biggest bar now has a brand new red ‘No Smoking’ sign on the door. Unsurprisingly the other bar was crowded with all the tables occupied. We sat down at a large  round table, where a man in his forties, with a neat short beard, was sitting sipping a pint of lager. He was clearly enjoying being on his own and was lost in his own thoughts. But I was tired so we sat down with the usual a ‘Do you minds’.

 There followed a period of awkwardness during which I was trying to decide whether we should pretend to be alone and talk to each other, or to engage him in conversation. So I started talking about history of the pub, which is the one at which Ruth Ellis was drinking the night before she shot her lover and wrote herself into the history books as the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

 Gradually Alan came out of his solitude and began to warm to the subject and to us. Though he was not born until 1960 he had lived with this chunk of local history all his life. His grandmother lived in Nassington Road and was a friend of the then publican. He told us how a few years after the murder she had seen the publican late one night drilling a hole in the wall of the pub which was then advertised as the bullet hole from Ellis’s gun. In fact, she ran down the street and shot her lover a hundred yards further down the street. He also told us that the picture of Ruth Ellis painted in the newspapers of the day was quite inaccurate. Far from the ruthless femme fatale who had shot her young lover and deserved to be hanged, she was a battered woman. Her boy friend used to beat her up. This story has since been told in the film, Dancing with a Stranger, but Alan had been told it by his grandmother, who knew both Ellis and her lover.

 Alan now lives in a rather posher area on the other side of Belsize Park off Fitzjohns Avenue, so he rarely comes to the Magdala these days. So it was a bit of a co-incidence that he happened to be sitting at the only big table with room enough for us to sit down on this particular evening. As he began to warm up he disclosed his huge nostalgic longing for the familiar scenes of his childhood.

 Gospel Oak was a very special area, he told us, and a wonderful place to live. He and my wife reminisced about how beautiful the old British Railways footbridge was before it was modernised by Thames Link. He and I exchanged fond memories of the cameradie on the No 24 night bus, coming back in the small hours after a late night out in the West End.

 He then asked where we lived. He was gobsmacked when we told him, Roderick Road. Because he had been born there a few houses away from our house on the same side of the street. Which led to a long exchange with my wife about all the teachers at Gospel Oak. He loved them and particularly the headmaster, Ron Lendon, who had done him a personal kindness. His parents were very short of money at the time and when the school arranged a trip to France and Belgium he had to tell Lendon that he could not go. Somehow or other Lendon managed to find the money to enable him to go. It was the first time he had been abroad and he still remembers it vividly.

 My wife told him that my own children, who were at Gospel Oak school eight or nine years later, never got to go overseas. The only school trip she could remember was to Dorset.

 We did not dare tell Alan that we were in the process of deserting Roderick Road and moving to Dorset. But I was glad to have met him. And it will make me less anxious over the next few days when I have to face another stream of would be purchasers of our house.

Three apparently well-educated middle class mothers with children at private schools have withdrawn at the last minute from buying my house on the grounds that their children would be at risk because the house next door is owned by Camden Council who use it as a hostel for single men. The Council manager responsible carefully vets the men who are to live there, because they know it is a residential street with many young children. There is a serious shortage in Camden for housing for single men, so this house satisfies an important social need.

In vain have I told the purchasers that we rarely even see or hear the residents in the house, and that none of them have been a threat to my grandchildren, who come and stay regularly at our house. Nor have they been a threat to the house on the other side, which is owned by a professional couple with two young children.

In vain have I told them that my tranquillity has rarely been disturbed in Roderick Road, which a very quiet street for the middle of a city. On those rare occasions when my tranquillity has been disturbed, the people exhibiting bad behaviour have been the owner occupiers not the Council tenants.

Residents in Roderick Road do not need to send their children to private schools. There are two excellent state primary schools in the neighbourhood, Gospel Oak and Fleet. My own children, and the children of my friends, who are mostly professional people like myself, were educated there. They benefited hugely from being brought up amongst children from a wide range of class and ethnic backgrounds.

These withdrawals have threatened my own bid for the Dorset bungalow. And I do not want to go want to be messed around a fourth time. So my first thought was to ask my estate agent to carefully vet prospective purchasers for my house. And not to send any people to look at it, unless they are quite happy to use the state school system. Then I remembered that two of my best friends who actually believe in council housing went to private school. So I decided to ask him to make sure the  people he sends actually want to live in a street where the classes mix happily together and which has one of the best street parties anywhere in London.

What this story from the web site of Wolverhampton Wanderers reveals is not quite that. They are reporting a BBC Midlands poll for the greatest Midlands football player.

Billy Is Top

The late Billy Wright, Wolves legend and England captain, has been voted Greatest Midlands Footballer ever in a BBC poll.

Billy, who died in September 1994, secured more votes than Stoke’s Sir Stanley Matthews, or Gordon Banks, Aston Villa’s Gordon Cowans and Birmingham’s Trevor Francis.

Although Billy Wright was my local hero and I rarely missed a match of his at Molyneux, I don’t agree with verdict of the BBC Midlands viewers. The greatest of them all, in my opinion, was their number two, Sir Stanley Matthews, whom I only saw occasionally when he was visiting as the right winger of first Stoke City, then Blackpool.

There are no footballers today who display the sheer artistry of Matthews. Because the game has changed. There is much more teamwork and positioning. Matthews was the supreme individualist. He danced around player after player with a suppleness ballet dancers envied. He juggled the ball from foot to foot mesmerising his opponents, and leaving them, and the crowd, breathless with admiration.

He was a teetotaller and a vegarian, but I don’t hold that against him. He went on playing professionally until he was fifty. And he lived well into the age of Beckham, dying aged in 2002 aged 85. He was variously called The Magician and The Wizard of the Dribble. Follow this link to a good story with pictures in Wikipedia.

So now we know on the highest authority, we belong to the greatest nation on earth. Prime Minister Tony Blair told us today speaking in his Durham constituency to the local party faithful but with more than an eye on the world television audience. It was a speech of grace and charm and it was demonstated that Blair himself excells in that most British quality, self-deprecation. We may not be the greatest nation when it comes to military might, political influence or even prowess on the football field, but when it comes to self-deprecation we are second to none.

These were his concluding paragraphs. All short and crisp. First, what he said about himself.

People often say to me: it’s a tough job.

Not really.

A tough life is the life the young severely disabled children have and their parents who visited me in Parliament the other week.

Tough is the life my Dad had, his whole career cut short at the age of 40 by a stroke.

I have been very lucky and very blessed.

You cannot be more modest than that. All those achievments he had reminded us of, were not due to any personal merit. It was just that he had been lucky and blessed by the God who rated humility as the greatest virtue.

Then he included us all in his validitory.

This country is a blessed nation.

The British are special.

The world knows it.

In our innermost thoughts, we know it.

This is the greatest nation on earth.

It has been an honour to serve it. I give my thanks to you, the British people, for the times I have succeeded, and my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short.

The tone was self-deprecatory yet at the same time the content reminded us that we are the greatest now thanks to ten years of New Labour. All that prosperity we have been enjoying we would not have got if we had elected John Major and the Conservatives, was the clear implication.

All he had done, he had done, because he believed it to be right, ‘hand on heart’. Just an ordinary bloke doing his best.

Nothing about his mastery of the art of spin-doctoring, on which the historians will doubtless rate Blair amongst the greatest of them all. He was, however, roundly criticised for announcing in the run-up to the last general election that he would not complete his term as Prime Minister. Some commentators felt that if he did not intend to serve a full term he should have resigned before the election. Most commentators said he was weakening the party by not announcing a resignation date, and spoiling the chances of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, succeeding him.

But the sharpest lobby journalists were saying way back in 2005 that Blair would not go until he had completed a full ten years as Prime Minister. This year they were saying he was going to stay until July. If he had resigned earlier this year, and given his successor a chance to establish himself, and give a fresh slant to New Labour, the party might have done better in this month’s local elections. And his successor would not have to deal with a Scottish nationalist as first minister in Labour’s old heartlands north of the border.

They said he had stayed too long. Today he wrong-footed them again, by announcing that he was acutally resigning on 27 June, four days before the month he had been determined to hold on for.

Of course he got the attention of the television, the web pages and tomorrow’s newspapers will be full the Blair legacy and the forthcoming election of the new leader.

Buried amongst the business pages will be the other story that came out today. The Bank of England has put up interest rates to the highest level for six years. Because inflation is getting out of hand. The shine is coming off the spectacular boom and the new leader will have to be prepared to take more unpopular measures on the economic front.

If the new Prime Minister is Gordon Brown, as seems virtually certain, he will have his hands full trying to extricate us from the unpopular war in Iraq, deal with the growing disquiet at the civil liberties implications of the war against terror, and deal with the aftermath of the cash for honours scandal. On top of that he takes over when the Party has been in power for a long time. But at least he will be out of the Treasury before the bad news comes. So history may remember him as highly successful Chancellor, and forgive him if he fails as Prime Minister, and loses to David Cameron in the next election.

I am not making any predictions. Few people thought John Major, the Conservative’s stop gap choice after Margaret Thatcher was ousted, was capable of winning a General Election. But he did.

You can read the full text of Blair’s speech by following this link to The Guardian.

Just back from my first session on the Royal Free Hospital’s pulmonary rehabilitation programme, which is going to occupy me for two hours two days a week for the next ten weeks. They found me a place quickly after my GP declared in February that my lungs were one hundred years old, thanks mainly to smoking twenty Camels a day for more than fifty years.

I was not optimistic about this first diagnostic session, since I had already smoked four fags before I arrived, dealing with British Gas and other inevitable stresses of modern life. Much to my astonishment I managed the walking test without getting seriously out of breath.  In the final stages I had to walk more briskly than I commonly do, but it was all on the level. The result would not have been as good if I had done it walking up Parliament Hill.

Nevertheless it lends hope that my lungs could be rehabilitated if only I can get myself into a state where I no longer need to smoke. That is not going to happen until I have got over the stress of moving house.

So it is now back to chasing the lawyers to get all the paper work done before Spring moves into Summer.

Comment today about Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy the Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones News Service is all about whether Rupert’s ambitions will be frustrated by the ruling family owning shares in the paper, which is America’s equivalent of the Financial Times. And which was the first American paper to secure a national readership, leading the pack in printing in several regions of this vast nation, which does not have anything like the British national press.

Thanks the the influence of Reagan and Thatcher, slavishly followed by Tony Blair, journalists have ceased to question whether the destinies of giant corporations, which determine the lives of thousands of employees as well as the ‘consumers’ of the products they manufacture.

The doctrine of the free market has become so much a part of the fashions of the times, that few people are prepared to question it. And to debate how to deal with questions of today’s breed of robber barons acquiring power far greater than their forerunners, Rockefeller and Carnegie in the US. Murdoch has huge power internationally. He is the leading player in the UK in both the tabloid and the broadsheet market with The Sun and The Times. In the US his Fox TV channel has captured the lion’s share of the market, leaving CBS, NBC and ABC, which used to dominate US television news, gasping for breath.

Whether he succeeds or fails is now a financial story. What will the investors do?

It ought to be a policical issue. Does the much vaunted free press of the western world have any validity if it is dominated by a small number wealthy tycoons? Murdoch, of course, is not only motivated by greed. He is a good Christian and in favour of the family. But Murdoch’s family is hetereosexual and comprised of males and females who join together in Holy Matrimony. It disparages, with varying degrees of criticism, from the measured tones of The Times to the rabble rousing of The Sun and the News of the World, that quite large section of the population, which are homosexual or who are single mothers, daring to try and bring up children on their own, after their husbands have fled the nest, and, like Rupert himself, found himself a younger woman.

Murdoch is attracted partly by the Wall St Journal’s web pages, which they charge for. He not only wants to dominate the printed page. He wants to dominate the web as well, which is why he bought MySpace. This ought to be a story for all those columnists who campaign for the free press. But, like the politicians, they  are strangely quiet.