The Daily Novel

The political landscape can change in twenty-four hours. So it has been today.

Yesterday the Tory press was talking about devious plots by Labour contenders to get rid of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. That was yesterday.

Today, one of the people who was supposed to be plotting, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, declared that he was unhappy with Labour’s recent record and that the leadership needed to have a new platform if it was going to avoid a devastating defeat in the next election.

Miliband did this, not by a devious plot, but by writing an article in The Guardian, which is the only serious left of centre national newspaper in Britain. This is not a plot. It is a statement to the electorate.

And that statement is that one of the three top people in the present government is not happy with the present direction of the government of which he is a part. In the British tradition foreign secrectaries usually resign before they make statements of this kind.

Most of the media comment this morning focusses on the delight of the Conservatives that Labour is ripping itself apart. But a full reading of the article Miliband wrote in The Guardian shows that Miliband is only saying what most Labour ministers, MPs and activists believe.

The crux of the article is this sentence.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

Miliband’s message has been privately welcomed by many. And despite what many of the pundits are saying there is no reason why Labour should not conduct an orderly election in the autumn. Miliband may, or may not, win it. There will be other challengers, probably including Jack Straw and Harriet Harman.

That will be good for the party and good for democracy. My picture is from the Daily Mail. Not the most flattering portrait of the challenger. But not a surprising choice. The Mail would prefer a much less left wing prime minister.

As readers will have noted from the appearance of my blog on the Durham Miners, learning the new version of WordPress takes a long time. I did finally manage to get the pictures in but the typography is far from perfect.

Perhaps I was unduly distracted by our summer party which in part a celebration of our first year in Charmouth. To get in visitors had to battle their way through a building site. The landscape lot are half-way through a two-month reconstruction of my very steep drive. The point of the exercise is to make it easier to get my scooter in and out.

Meanwhile this is what is necessary when I feel like taking a spin through the country lanes.

A fellow guest at the breakfast table in our B&B in Barnard Castle was surprised when we said we were going to the Durham Miners’ Gala. ‘I thought there were no miners left’, she said, as her husband went on reading his Daily Telegraph. She could not have been more wrong. By the time we arrived at lunchtime the car parks and the streets were full and the procession already stretched from hill by the riverside gate right across town to the vast field, where the picnic is held while stirring speeches are made.

Most of the Durham miners favour the blass or silver bands but the branch who arrived at the same time as us favoured the bag pipes.

Further down the hill we found a more typical group marking time while they waited for the path to clear ahead of them.

On the reviewing balcony of the Royal County Hotel more gold chains were on display than I had seen in many a long year. The swing against the government has not yet wiped out Labour’s Durham mayors.

In the field the tea and booze was already flowing and the brass and silverware was spread all over the grass.

Afterwards we visited the miners’ favorite Sunday playgrounds in the Pennines, including the waterfall at High Force.

And finally to the tranquillity of the river at Romaldkirk where this young girl was sitting quite as gracefully as the mermaid in the harbour at Copenhagen.

It is the greyest of grey dawns. Black cloud hangs over Stoneborrow Hill. Chesil Beach and Portland Bill are invisible. Two blackish birds are pecking on the terrace. Nothing on the bird table but they are pecking hopefully. Probably magpies. At least they are not crows or albatrosses or other birds of ill omen.

The weather mirrors my mood. My nephew Jim and his two sons have managed to find a patch of reasonably level ground in the back garden for their tent, but it is flapping in the wind and I fear it will blow down before they wake up. And the storm, forecast for Thursday, could easily begin in a few minutes.

Although I currently have no work obligations I have totally failed to maintain my intention of a blog a day. I have still not published that review of the moving diary of the manic depressive young woman or the new David Lodge novel. The Durham Miners’ Gala remains un-reported as does my impressions of the first UK WordCamp.

The only blog I have managed in the last few days was a rant about Gordon Brown. I am not alone in thinking he is making a mess of running the country but who am I to say so, when I cannot even write a blog a day. Worse than that I am not even sure I know anything worth writing about and I don’t even know what I believe.

Yesterday, Kate and James came over from Totnes to show us their new baby. The women were taking turns to cradle it. I insisted in demonstrating that a mere man was capable of learning this skill. She was asleep. She looked Chinese. Inscrutable. And looking as if she knew already far more than I did.

Meanwhile Lucas, who is not quite two, showed none of the murderous tendencies the great Sigmund led us to expect. He entained us all with a rattling good story, triggered by the digger he had seen in our drive as he came in. He told us in vivid detail how he drove his digger, what he picked up in the shovel, and where he put it. He held his audience and carried them on and on. He is already a better story teller than me. When I last saw him a month or so ago he said only two or three words. He seems to have learnt the whole language in a few weeks. And boys are supposed to learn to communicate much more slowly than boys.

No scientist that I have read has come anywhere near explaining just how that happens. And just why learning the first language is so different from learning a second langage. Maybe Darwin and Richard Dawkins have got it wrong and that we could all speak in many tongues if only we had faith.

But so far the only children we have found brought up by wolves had only learnt to howl.

The Sunday newspapers are full of stories about plots, including cabinet ministers, to get rid of Prime Minister Gordon Brown following Friday’s poll result at Glasgow East. Although Labour had an excellent and popular candidate, voters of all parties united to deliver a 22 per cent swing against the government. The winner was the Scottish Nationalist Party, the only party with any hope of toppling Labour in what was in 2005 their 25th safest seat.

Alex Salmand, the SNP leader, led a high profile campaign to get his own supperters to the polling booths. But the trendy new young leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties played it softly softly. In consequence most of their supporters either stayed at home or delivered a tactical anti-Labour vote.

Of course this would not happen in a General Election. And of course Scotland is different from the rest of the country. But this result coming on top of Labour’s defeat at Crewe shows unmistakedly that Labour has lost the confidence of its industrial heartlands. And the saddest fact Brown has to face as he goes off for his annual holiday in Conservative territory in Southwold in Suffolk is that this final blow has been delivered by his fellow Scots.

The reality of the situation in the Labour Party could not be further away from plotting by fiercely ambitious men or women eager to knife their leader in the back. Because, of course, any potential contender knows that the chances of Labour winning another term of office in 2210, when it will have been in office for thirteen years, are very slight indeed.

Neither is the party plagued by the huge gulf in ideology and policies that plagued the Labour Party in 1950s and 1960s, when the Party leaders included Hugh Gaitskill and Roy Jenkins on the right and Nye Bevan and Tony Benn on the left. The differences between Brownites and the Blairites are minute by comparison, both in domestic policies and on foreign affairs.

New Labour is currently failing because of the economic cycle. New Labour came to power on an economic upturn. So that Blair and Brown won back the support of the professional leftish classes, who torpedoed Labour when they deserted to form the Social Democratic Party, now merged with the old Liberal Party.

In fact, New Labour has been in everything except name, a social democratic party, whose policies are broadly similar to those of the social democratic parties in Europe and to the Democratic Party in the US.

Although Gordon Brown, unlike Tony Blair, has been committed Labour throughout his life, he has totally lost touch with his roots. His worst mistake was the abolition of the 10 per cent tax rate, which hit those who could least afford to be hit when the economy is going into the most serious recession in the lives of any first time voters.

Almost everyone in the party sees that, except Gordon Brown himself. But as he walks around the Suffolk marshes during his summer break he may well come to see the impossility of rebuilding the Labour Party in a swamp.

He can still rescue his dignity, and perhaps his place in history, by iniatating a leadership election in the autumn. That is the best way of avoiding plots and back stabbing.

And that is what democracy is all about. Let the party and the people decide in an open contest.

Meanwhile it is business as usual. And Brown had no trouble in putting on a big smile when he met with Barack Obama in the garden behind his Downing Street office. Maybe he was hoping that some of the Obamania, which was raging through Europe all last week, would stick to him. (The photo is from Getty.)

Went back to my computer after dinner. Never a good idea. This evening discovered that Holly has labelled me the oldest participant at the first UK Word Camp 2008 held in Birmingham last weekend. I think she is probably right. But how does she know? Participants were not required to state their date of birth when they booked their tickets. And how old people look is very different from their actual age. It is not only me who gets it wrong in guessing people’s ages.

This fact was brought home to me very vividly recently when on Saturday, 12 July, I had a front stand at the Durham Miners’ Gala. I got to my position, struggling breathless through the crowds, directly opposite the Royal County Hotel, where various dignitaries with gold chains were waving to the marchers in the early afternoon.

Just after I arrived one section of the Miners came by, with a banner showing a picture of that hero of the British working classes, Tony Benn. To my amazement, there leading the march with the zest of a fifteen year old was the man himself. No doubt about it, because I met him several times during my journalistic life. Sadly the crowd was so dense that I could not get out my mobile phone soon enough to take his picture.

Benn is now 83, which is seven years older than me, looks young in limb and young at heart. Much younger than the chaps in their mobility carts, who plague the pavements of Charmouth and Camden Town. Who probably took early retirement from their highly paid management jobs at around fifty. And are still not old enough to get their Senior Railcard.

So how come he looks so young? Is it because he has been addicted to tea all his life (he needs at least 25 cups a day to keep going)? Contrast me who is seriously addicted to cigarettes and drinks far more than the recommended glass of the doctors.

Or is it because that this workers’ champion had an extremely priviledged upbringing amongst the English upper middle classes. He inhaled the fresh country air whereas I inhaled the stink of the Black Country.

Or is it because he always stood up for what he believed in? Even though he was labelled as the leader of the loony left by the media. Today he does not seem so loony. Even moderate British Conservatives are not all sure that the Iraq war was a good idea.

This is just a short taster. I hope to be around to write Benn’s obituary. But I would not bet on it.

Below are the most recent pic I can find of Tony Benn, date unknown, and the other pic of me taken by Holly last weekend.

Who looks the oldest? You decide.

The Daily Novel is up and running again, thanks to what I learnt at the first UK WordCamp in Birmingham last weekend, and from subsequent emails from some of the participants. I can now once again put the names of The Guardian and the Washington Post in italics.

And I can indent my quotes.

Code is poetry. So long as you spend the time to get it right and you have some help from others who have travelled the same road.

I now have a wonderfully clear screen with type large enough to read easily. I can put in pictures, and when I have learnt it, audio and video.

The pic below is of me sounding off at the Birmingham WordCamp. It was taken by Holly one of the select band of about six female campers who had to make their voices heard in a room dominated by sixty men.

Barack Obama got it just right tonight talking to Larry King on CNN. He told him that the New Yorker cartoon did not bother him. He had developed a thick skin in fighting this Presidential campaign. But he said it was an insult to Muslim Americans.

Quite right too.

The cartoon, see below, depicts his wife as a gun-toting Black Power terrorist of an earlier age, when her only offence has been to admit that she had difficulty in being proud to be American. In voicing these honest sentiments she reflects the reality of America’s black, coloured and Latino community. They are mostly the poor struggling to survive in George Bush’s America, even more difficult than it was in Jack Kennedy’s America.

Barack Obama himself is portrayed in what is presumably meant to be Muslim dress. In fact, he looks more like Pandit Nehru, the Hindu leader of the India that emerged from the British Raj. Much more like him than Jinnah, who emorged as the leader of the first Muslim state, created in 1948 when the British folded up their Indian Empire. Jinnah, like the present leader of Pakistan, was more devoted to the western way of life, than he was to the Pakistan poor.

Which is why Bangladesh, which was part of the original Pakistan, is now an independent state, and one of the poorest in the world.

Nehru, by contrast, was a respected international statesman, who strove to establish an independent India, which was not the slave of the west, so he maintained relations with the then Soviet Union, during the Cold War, when Stalin was regarded as far more dangerous to the American dream, than Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden combined.

People younger than me may not have got this message.

But people younger and older than me will I hope see the thrust of Obama’s response. The insult is to America’s Muslims, not to Barack Obama. After all, we know he is a Christian, not a Muslim. And we also know that he has spent most of his life as a law lecturer at Harvard.

Not downloading stuff from the internet about how to make plastic explosives.

The fears of America’s Latinos and many Clinton supporters is that America’s first black President may in power become an Uncle Tom, cowtowing to the white rulers.

The hope for Western liberals like myself is that if achieves office he will behave more like Pandit Nehru. And help to heal the internal splits in America and the even larger schisms in the world at large.

Meanwhile, even George W Bush has had enough of sabre rattling. According to a Guardian exclusive he is considering sending American diplomats back to Iran, instead of starting yet another war.

But the real insult is to those many Americans, who, unlike Obama, are devout Muslims, but who do not espouse the doctrines of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

Arrived in our London flat to find no fewer than 19 letters from BT reminding us of the total now overdue of £126.50 all posted in the first few days of July. The mind boggles.

As long-standing readers of this blog will know this money is the accumulation of monthly phone rentals for the phone in our flat which we moved into an August 1st last year, when we sold our house in the next street. BT were supposed to transfer our old number, which we had had for 39 years, to the new flat. They failed. But early in September they connected the line to an entirely different number, much to the irritation of a Gospel Oak neighbour whose number it had been for 17 years, and who suddenly found that HIS phone had gone dead.

Phone calls from him and us managed to reverse that. And BT assured me that they would now connect my old number. They didn’t.

By this time I had spent about fifty pounds in mobile phone bills together with emails. At this point I decided that I was wasting far too much time, so I cancelled my order by email. To my astonishment BT then started to send me bills for the telephone on my old number, asking me for the monthly rental.

Inside the flat the phone is totally dead. But if you ring from outside it rings as if it is connected for a long time, and then stops: not even a message saying you have dialled an incorrect number.

At this point I wrote to my contacts and told them I was going to use my mobile in London and that they should scrub my old London number out of their address books.

I wrote two or three blogs on this last Autumn and even alerted the BT press officer suggest he get BT’s new chairman, Sir Michael Rake, to do something.

To no avail. BT continues to send reminders by post. Apparently they don’t take any account of phone calls or read their email. Instead they spend the shareholders’ money on snail mail.

This is a real irony. Because when the Post Office was privitised BT took all rich profit prospects whereas the loss making mail remained a separate entity.

So perhaps Sir Michael Rake and all the other highly paid BT men have been stricken by bad conscience and are deliberately paying out money to the poor postmen.

Or, perhaps, they are just grossly inefficient.

BT’s letters are putting money into the Pos

What a load of crap a lot of the sports journalists write these days. (Well, I sympathasise, they are probably asked to produce their copy before they have had time to think.)

All that stuff about how this final would lack a competitive edge because the contestants were sisters.

Have the sports journalists forgotten their own families? The competition between siblings is far fiercer than that between strangers. Although the rules are different. The elder sister in our society is expected to adopt a caring role to her younger sister. Which might have inhibited Venus’s competitive edge. But the younger sister is expected to be grateful for the caring attitude of her elder sister. So Serena also had familial inhibitions. But they fought it out and one of them won. This time.

The sports journalists have complained about a lack of excitement in women’s tennis. They are faced yet again with having to write about the Williams sisters, instead of telling us all about the new stars, and their detailed personal history.

(Blogging note. When I started my blog I intended not to write about things I did not know about. But given the reality of the modern world I know far more about Venus and Serena, then I do about my next door neighbours in Gospel Oak, where I lived for over 40 years.)

So I will go on. This year I have watched Murray, as the UK hope, behaving in a most un-English manner. Scowling at the umpire just as McInroe did, yelling and showing his muscles, as evidence that he had trained for this. If he listens to his coaches next year his biceps may be even bigger.

But that does not mean he will get to the final.

Contrast the Williams sisters. Who have refused to do what numerous coaches and the Wimbledon hierarchy suggests. Work out every day. Let your lives be devoted to becoming tennis champions.

But since the Williams sisters just happen to have been born in the US of A, not in the old Soviet Union, where Russian grunters like Shopalov, were ‘groomed’ to subject their individuality to the greater good of the Soviet state. Not in the new China, where the new totalitarianism is not driven by an urge to get back to the verities of the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. It is driven by the need to feed the starving. And produce products which the west will buy. And for less money than out west.

Of course, I am talking politics, not sport.

You think they’re in different categories?

As McInroe would say, ‘You can’t be serious.’

The Williams sisters not only fought each other in the women’s singles final, they beat all the opposition and won the women’s doubles’ final as well. But this does not get the kind of media coverage that the singles get.

So this is undoubtedly a triumph for American women’s tennis. Which this year is far better than the women of any other nation. And it is also a triumph for the nation which produced them.

And, as part of the audience, I can vouch that they play just as good tennis as Federer and Nadal, who are battling it out on the centre court all day, as I write this blog.

But back to the Williams sisters. They are a credit to America. Not least in that they have resisted the advisers who have told them to train all year. In effect to devote their whole lives to tennis. They insist in continuing to be individuals, despite the pressures.

They win because of the talents they were born with, but above all they win, because they believe they can win. They have a belief in themselves. Where does this come from?

Certainly not from the American culture, where their fellow blacks are much poorer than many of the most boring and inept whites.

In an interview with ABC Television recently one of the Williams sisters said how much she admired Barack Obama and how she hoped he would make it to be President.

But, she said, she could not vote for him, because she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and her religion urged her to stay clear of politics.

But it clearly has given her a strong sense of self, which the dominant American culture does not accord to blacks or coloured’s or Jews, unless they bow down and worship American consumer capitalism. That culture is still unwilling to elect a woman as President, as Hillary Clinton has found in her campaign.

So I have news for George W Bush. The enemy is not the Muslims. Not the Taliban. It is another Christian sect, which supposedly prays to the same God as George W does when he kneels down with British Prime Ministers like Tony Blair. (Not Gordon Brown, because although he worships the same God, he arranges his schedule so that his meetings with individual human beings are restricted to two minutes.)`

There just is not time to kneel down!

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, decried as a cult by the mass media on the rare occasions they write about them, is in fact an international conspiracy far more effective than the CIA, the old KGB and the Papal hierarchy.

Although I have been here in Dorset for less than a year, they tracked me down here. (Not because I told them, as I told the University pension fund, who still write to me in Gospel Oak.)

They have clearly marked my card. Because, even when I am writing an article, I don’t tell them to get lost when they come to my door. I explain to them just why I don’t to follow their God, or indeed any God.

So I am fodder for the flock. I am, after all, prepared to listen to them. But whatever I think of their beliefs, they have helped the Williams’ sisters to have confidence in themselves. Despite the messages which the American culture sends them daily.

Contrast the Church of England in whose doctrines I was schooled. In 2008 they are shooting at their present leader, because they don’t want to have priests who are female or openly gay.

Since I know the Church of England, this is a joke.

They can’t be serious.

Yet they are.

Despite the fact that the priest in my local church here in Charmouth is a woman. And despite the fact that my local neighbourhood church in Gospel Oak has been used by the Church of England for many years as a living to give to gay vicars, because it is in NW3, where even the faithful mostly don’t think that spiritual guidance is determined by sexual promptings. So you do your priestly job in Gospel Oak, without the parishioners being bothered to tell the Daily Mail that, actually, when it comes to going to bed, your preference is for a bloke, not one of the tabloid bimbos.

So my message to the Williams sisters is that you no longer need religion for your sense of self. So I hope you will both follow your own instincts and vote for Obama.

For the sake of the America I love. And for the sake of the planet in 2008 where America is, temporarily, the most powerful nation on earth with by far the biggest armoury of weapons of mass destruction.