The Daily Novel

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According to Larry Elliott of The Guardian Gordon Brown is ready to embrace the bloggers of the world. He says Brown, who appeared on the panel with Rupert Murdock, says the days of decision making in smoke filled rooms are over. Politicians had to involve the public and recognise the importance of the internet.

“A few years ago the debate was about whether the media controlled politicians or whether politicians controlled the media.

“Now it is about how we are all responding to the explosive power of citizens, consumers and bloggers.”

I would like to think that the blogging community had ‘explosive power’. But I doubt. I think the big companies, who are well represented at the World Economic Forum, have quite a lot of power over the consumers. And I think the new internet millionaires, including companies like Technorati and Google have a big say in a big say in which blogs get read.

The big companies, including the old media companies, are in a much better position to learn the tricks of meeting the criteria established by the search engines. And they have the money and manpower to attract bigger audiences. The millions of individual bloggers cannot compete in terms of supplying information. They can express their views, opinions and feelings. But how they come to them is still largely dependent on the reports by the mainstream media.

The coolest party was given by Forbes Magazine, which represents old media money. And it is big money. Steve Forbes, the nephew of the man I used to work for, is and he can afford to give away $7 million to political parties.

Sorry about the blank page this morning. Not sure what went wrong but I sorted it out by trial and error.

I cannot afford to employ my own corrections editor but I am committed to journalists correcting their mistakes of spelling, facts and judgments. So I must say here that I was quite wrong in suggesting that George Bush would change his tone and actions following the kick in the teeth the electorate gave him. His speech on Thursday evening was as belligerant as ever. Clearly he believes that he is right and that the American people, including many of his own advisers, are wrong.

The situation in Iraq is likely to get worse in the first months of his final two years in office. And the law of numbers means that more American troops in Iraq will mean more body bags flying into Washington. No doubt the White House will continue to try and minimise the publicity. But American mothers speak out when their sons get killed. And the Amercian press, whatever its other faults, will continue to give them space in the regional and national newspapers. And a platform on national and international television.

The fault lines between American and British foreign policy are now clear. And they will widen when Gordon Brown takes over as British Prime Minister. Brown will not be Bush’s poodle. He has already started to talk about his many friends amongst the American democrats.

Brown is likely to continue to be far too close to big companies than the Labour left would like. But, while it was probably true that in the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth century that war was good for capitalism, it is not true today. Then, heavy industry dominated, based on iron and steel, and including ship building as well as armaments. Even that high priest of consumer capitalism, Henry Ford, could switch from making cars to making jeeps and tanks when war happened.

Today American consumer capitalism has a different bias. While some American companies have benefited from Iraq construction contracts and the makers of military aircraft and missiles have gained orders, business as a whole is dominated by consumer products and services. And war is not good for selling television sets, computers and mobile phones.

The Wall Street bankers of today retain many of the same characteristics of those I used to lunch with when I lived in New York. First, they are very strong on pragmatism. (Have the scientists discovered the gene for it yet, which clearly finds a happy breeding ground in the American psyche?). Second, they are very international. They know the realities of Iraq, Iran and the Middle East.

Then, as now, many of them have Republican sympathies. They remember that Lincoln bit about not being able to fool all the people all the time. And they are perpetually worried about the administration spending so much money that it destabalises the economy. So many will add their voices to those democrats on Capitol Hill who are not going to give Bush a welcome when he comes cap in hand asking for more money to fight his expensive war.

It won’t happen quickly because of the huge executive power of the American presidency. But it will happen. Because the roots of American democracy are very deep. And the constitution, including all those Congressional committees, provides well-proven mechanisms to deal with Presidents who get too big for their boots.

As I continually remind my students, it was not the Washington Post which brought down Nixon, although they started it by their persistent investigative journalism. It was the Congressional committees which sent him packing.

Democratic government, like huge ocean liners, cannot change course quickly. But so long as the constitutional powers are not usurped, the will of the people does eventually prevail.

I am struggling to present my blog in a way which fits in with Technorati, which seems to be the main influence on the ratings.

I may temporarily be making things worse. So please bear with me while I deal with these technical problems.

You probably know several, because research has proved that there are a lot of them about. But they do not walk around with badges labelled ‘Help the manics’ or ‘Manic depressives of the world unite’. They do not go around in gangs with other manic depressives. Nor do they walk Hampstead Heath at night looking for other manic depressives to bond with.

So the first thing you need to realise about manic depressives is that they are difficult to spot. This is because there is still a taboo about mental illness in our socitey, so the manic depressives themselves do not advertise their condition. For very good reality reasons of self preservation.

Not a few journalists are manic depressives but I cannot remember a single case in the hundreds of would-be journalists I have interviewed of anyone outing themselves at the interview stage. Contrast them with the gays, who have gradually over my lifetime been accepted by most people as being different, rather than sick or wicked. These days they even boast on their application forms of membership of gay societies. 

Some manic depressives do not even realise themselves that they are manic depressives. They are all aware that they have swings in mood, between elation and sadness that are greater than most people they know. But they do not consider themselves to be suffering from mental illness. Unless they have been sectioned and officially diagnosed by the hospital psychiartrists. Or unless they have talked about their condition to a listening GP who has helped them to understand and manage their condition either with the help of the talking therapies, or, as a last resort, pills.

Many manic depressives develop their own kind of coping strategies for surviving, even prospering. So, if the extended family is still with you, look at them afresh. Odds are there is at least one who will score very high on this ten point scale. There are likely to be several amongst your friends and neighbours. And when you go back to work keep your eyes and ears open as you go to the water cooler. Lots of manic depressives actually do quite well in the work world. Your boss might even be a manic depressive.

I am getting a lot of spam, which starts off as a stream of consciousness, but when you scroll down, it turns into an ad for stock market investments or yet another offer of Viagra. Presumably it is a device used to get through the spam filters.

I got hooked on this example this morning. It starts:

And as DeBono will tell you, “The purpose of thinking is not to be right but to be effective. ” Coming up with a new idea is almost always only half the battle. Bennetts and the other students recently presented their findings to the engineers in true corporate fashion, dressed in business attire and meeting in the . at least twice if you can. It means doing things like getting out to the movies and theater often.

I let this slip into my own stream of consciousness. Not difficult because for a short time in the 1960s Edward de Bono and I were both courting the same woman. I wondered if he is still alive. Google took me right to his authorised web site. There he was staring right at me. Recognisably the same man, though fatter in the face. And what was worse the first paragraph tells me he has written 62 books translated into 37 languages. That really depressed me. I have only one published book and it was never translated into any foreign language, not even American.

It reminded me of how I grinded my teeth in envy in the 1960s. There was I working 14 hours a day (well, some days) for The Times, circulation 400,000. There was de Bono, a sort of academic who had written a book on lateral thinking addressed particularly to businessmen. Somehow or other he managed to get it serialised in the Daily Mirror, circulation five million, for a fat fee. This is what he has to say about his latest book.

H+
- more I am getting more messages from people who have read my latest book “H+” which is a design for a new religion. It is not so much a new religion as a way of life which can be added to any system belief. I had a message from a minister of a church in Melbourne to invite me to talk in his church. He told me that all religions needed to add “H+” to their existing framework and belief system. “H+” is positive and about achievement. There are small daily achievement possibilities that you set for yourself and get a sense of achievement. The ‘H’ stands for Humour, Happiness, Hope, Help, Health and Human.

I can’t write another word today. But maybe if I read the book and start working on those small daily achievements I might write something halfway decent some day.

If you ignore the gobbeldy gook in the comment posted to my post yesterday on Sir Richard Doll and click on the writer, Many Angry Gerbils, you will find yourself on an interesting web site. In the article they posted yesterday there is lots of information about organisations that channel money from big business into innocent sounding organisations, that help sell the their products.

The one that caught my eye is enchantingly called Arise, which is short Associates for Research into the Science of Enjoyment. It’s purpose is to promote ‘everyday pleasures, such as eating chocolate, smoking, drinking tea, coffee and alcohol, contribute to the quality of life.’  And, surprise, surprise it turns out that Coca Cola and the big tobacco companies have been pumping money into it.

I entirely agree with the line taken by Gerbils that we need full disclosure of such payments and that journalists should be probing into their funding and not just publishing what they say as if it was disinterested science. But I have a couple of points, neither of which will be popular.

The first is on smoking. It is not bad science to say that smoking improves attention and memory and has calming effects. It does and there are perfectly decent research studies to demonstrate it. There are also studies that show smoking helps depressives. As a smoker I know this. It is also not ridiculous to question how addictive it is. It is most definitely not as addictive as drugs like heroin. From my own observation there are many people who do not become addicted to tobacco, even after smoking regularly for many years. So they can give up without going through the kind of cold turkey that addicts suffer when they come off heroin. Which is why the anti-smoking campaigns have been so successful.

The people who are still smoking are addicted to it. They know it is bad for their health. But they also know, that unlike heroin, it helps them to cope with their daily lives. The current position, vis a vis smoking, is that despite the efforts of the tobacco companies, most articles in the newspapers I read dismiss the possibility that nicotine has any beneficial effects. This is not likely to help the addicts to stop. And it will not prevent some children starting.

Human beings are not only influenced by who pays them. We all still follow the rest of the herd much of the time and for very good reason. We do not want to be trampled on by all those hooves as we struggle to go in the opposite direction.

So switch from smoking to why almost no-one is challenging the dominant model of the limited liability company responsible to shareholders as the best form of organisation for big business. John Lewis, which as I pointed out yesterday, is almost the only big corporation in Britain based on a different model.

John Lewis is doing so well that it expects to beat its previous record of £85 million weekly sales by the close of business today. The Guardian has a big article about it by Julia Finch, the City Editor. In it she quotes a supplier: The very mention of John Lewis used to prompt me into a stream of expletives. It was unlike any other retailer. It was completely out of step with the rest of the market and seemed to be run entirely for the benefit of its staff rather than for its customers. There has been a revolution in attitudes.’

The implication is that John Lewis’s success comes from abandoning the ideals of the founder and behaving just like every other company. Which of course fits the conventional wisdom of the day. But I have yet to see the evidence for it, apart from the lone whistleblower who posted a comment last week, but has not yet got back to me.

It now opens on Sunday and Monday, true, which the staff resisted for a long time. But that reflects a huge change in national attitudes which it would have been foolish to ignore. But it has always been commercial. ‘Never knowingly undersold’ was the slogan of the founder, John Spedan Lewis. When he said the firm should be run in the interests of the employees, he did not mean at the expense of the customers. He meant instead of shareholders.

Sarah Boseley, the health editor of The Guardian, has a good scoop today on Sir Richard Doll, the man who first established that smoking caused lung cancer. She reveals that he made in the 1980s he reviewed two controversial chemicals so favourably that the industry used his work to defend their safety. One was vinyl chloride, widely used in the manufacture of plastics, the other was Agent Orange, used in the Vietnam war. He made these reviews while he was taking large sums in consultancy fees from the chemical firms making them.

The revelations have made a considerable dent in the reputation of Sir Richard, who died last year, because many scientists believe the widespread use of chemicals may be a major cause of the soaring cancer rates we face today.

Doll made no secret of his many lucrative consultancies; indeed he publicised it by giving much of the money to found Green College in Oxford University. But he did not make the formal disclosure to the courts, which today’s rules would require.

Boseley’s coverage, which is full and balanced, is an important one, because the underlying dilemmas are still with us today, and they are not eliminated by tougher disclosure rules. The scientists who know most about chemicals and drugs are often those whose research has been funded by big companies. In many court cases, between companies and individuals, who have been harmed by chemicals or drugs, the scientists are paid to give evidence for the companies, and mostly they can pay much more than the individuals, or groups of individuals on the other side.

In my view the best safeguards are professional codes of practice, backed by discussion between peers, which help new entrants to the profession to understand the snares and understand the need for old-fashioned honesty in this cynical age. The scientist must refuse to distort the evidence by omitting to report on harmful effects that he knows about. In the last resort he must be prepared to turn give back his big fee and withdraw.

Not too different from journalists, if you think about it. There is no shame in working for a right-wing newspaper if you are left-wing, but there is shame in not reporting evidence that you have discovered of behaviour that is illegal or otherwise clearly against the public interest. But the journalist does have one easy way out; he can leak the story to Private Eye.

We shall never know whether Doll was influenced in his judgment by the fees he collected. But my own belief, based on two or three conversations I had with him, as well as the voluminous articles today, is that he was honestly mistaken when he wrote those reviews.

If you want to contact me privately instead of posting a comment you can email me at xcitybob@blueyonder.co.uk. This address is at the bottom of the Who writes this blog page.

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