The Daily Novel

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.

The storm continued through the night, over-filling my huge Bohemian ashtray on the terrace. It is not a 90 mph gale but it sounds and feels like one. My small bungalow is creaking and complaining like an old boat in a typhoon and it sounds as if it wants to take off any moment. But so far I have survived despite the soaking I got on the prom yesterday.

So I decided that if I can survive this I can take up camping again. Went straight online to book my ticket for the first UK

WordCamp

in Birmingham on the weekend of 19 July. Actually this event is not taking place under canvas. It is in a posh new conference centre, The Studio, in the heart of the City. Or rather what’s left of the heart of the City, which has been vandalised since my youth by the new architecture. More Clockwork Orange than getting back to nature. But at least you now have a choice on the restaurant menus that goes beyond roast beef and two veg. And most of the many pubs now serve food and some even have carpets on the floor. The younger generation just don’t realise that Brummies have never had it so good. Back in the 1950s I had to go out to the transport café at Northfield to get a bite to eat on a Sunday night after putting the university newspaper to bed.

But is imbued with the spirit of camping as I knew it. The work gets done not by orders from the boss but when the spirit moves the group of organisers, who are doing it not primarily to earn their bread, but because they are committed to this new world of blogging. And because it’s fun grappling with computers who throw spanners in the works whenever mere human beings seek to create global villages.

I was reminded of this just now when I tried to buy my ticket on the new online booking system. I only got as far as this message:

Ticket purchasing temporarily off-line

If you are new to this site do not give up. Put it in your diary. I have been watching the efforts made to get this event going by email. And several times I have feared that they would never get it together in time. But they have. Sponsors have appeared. The programme has been drawn up. The T-shirts are ready. The venue has been booked, backed by personal cheques from some of the organisers.

Although there is no authority hierarchy this is not government by committee. It is a management method based on individuals learning to work together as a group. A method well-suited to the twenty-first century and the new realities of the blogosphere. Because it is new, this method is distrusted by the majority, and dismissed daily by articles in the mass media suggesting that anyone who tries to create new ways of organising people is either hopelessly idealistic, mad or a Californian New Age junkie.

For any sceptics who happen upon this blog, I will end with a couple of anecdotes about the real world of the organisations who govern all our lives.

For the past week I have been trying to get my motor scooter back on the road with an up-to-date tax disc. I had to abandon my attempt to do it online via the DLVA site, because I have changed my address. So I resorted to the telephone, a piece of technology that was invented in the nineteenth century. For the last four days I have been ringing up and going through the hierarchy of options, but still ending up with the same frustrating message, something like this:

‘Your details have changed so it will be twenty-four hours before you can use this service’

DLVA, of course, was run by civil servants, and’ as we all know from the Daily Mail civil servants cannot manage anything efficiently.

So on to my second anecdote, BT, which Margaret Thatcher created out of half of the corpse of the old Post Office. They have sent me yet another bill for my phone in my London flat, despite the fact they have totally failed to connect the line. I cancelled the order last September but they still keep sending me bills, adding £12.75 each month for a service they have not provided.

Now, can you get more inefficient than that?

Needed a breath of fresh air before dinner. Got more than I bargained for. Even though the sun was shining on the Williams sisters at Wimbledon down here on the Dorset coast, summer was having an away day. The wind had been howling around my house all night and it continued all day, bringing a lot of rain with it. More like November than July.

I arrived at the prom at the same time as a quite spectacular wave, which filled my boots and gave me a mouthful of salt water, My mobile phone got seriously wet, but I managed to get one picture of the scene after the big wave.

Back at the ranch I was forced to change before dinner, although I have no visitors. I washed my mouth out with a malt and water. Don’t know what I am going to cook for dinner but the desert is taken care of by this cake produced by my sister.

Sir Charles Wheeler, who died yesterday aged 85, was frequently described as ‘the journalists’ journalist. Understandedly because, although he made his reputation and spent most of his working life with the BBC, he learnt his journalism, not on the BBC training scheme, but on the job. He joined the Daily Sketch as a copy boy in 1940, and like James Cameron, with whom he shared many characteristics, spent part of the second world war doing a desk job in Fleet Street.

But above all he was one of those journalists who was a human being first, and within the heavy constraints of BBC journalism strove to report honestly what he saw and how it made him feel, not in an emotional way, but coolly and without fear of the consequences when he tackled people in power. In his reporting he drew on his experience of life as much as from what he learnt in Fleet Street and the BBC.

As a youth he experienced at first hand the realities of how Nazism took power in Germany, living in Hamburg where his father was working. In 1942 he joined the Royal Marines. He was a combat engineer in the Normandy landings. He made his mark in the intelligence unit run by Ian Fleming, thanks in part to his fluent German. Like many journalists I have known, his work for the intelligence services provided an excellent training for the work of serious journalism.

But Wheeler, again like James Cameron, was a late developer. When he joined the BBC World Service in 1947 it was as a sub-editor, correcting the copy of other journalists doing the reporting. He did not begin his reporting career until 1950 when he was already 27. He was posted to Germany in the dying years of the Adenhauer government, which did not give him many opportunities for exciting news. It was not until he was posted to New Delhi in 1958 that he began to cover major stories, like
the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet. He first made the headlines on a trip from there to Ceylon, as noted by Harold Jackson in his Guardian obituary:

‘The greatest furore came after a trip to Ceylon (which became Sri Lanka in 1972), where the government threatened to leave the Commonwealth after Wheeler had called its prime minister “an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a cabinet of mediocrities”. The British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was forced to issue a public apology to defuse the crisis.’

I first became aware of him when he moved to the BBC’s Washington bureau in 1965, and turned himself in to the most perceptive British reporter covering US politics. He arrived there when Lyndon Johnson was President in the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy. He covered the hectic years of the Civil Rights movement and the Watergate scandal. He listened to everyone, Presidents, congressmen and the people he met out and about in America. But he made up his own mind about how to angle the story, never trying to curry favour with whose who held the most power.

John Tusa, a former head of the World Service, in his tribute in The Guardian summed up his qualities thus:

‘I think he was the audience’s journalist, because he put them at the head of his priorities……Why should any journalist try to follow Charles’s example? Because he put fact before effect, thought before impact, intelligence before emotion; because he put us, his audience, before himself, the intermediary. His reward: to be admired, listened to, trusted and loved.’
He went on working regularly long after retirement age, particularly for Newsnight. He was still working a few weeks ago on a television programme while suffering from lung cancer. He was born the year before the BBC was founded. He earned his spurs in radio but he was equally successful on television and was one of the band of BBC people, who fought to bring serious journalism, rather than sound bites, to the television screen.
From his UK base in London he lived through the rise of the LCC to the much bigger GLC and noted the consequences of its abolition. He witnessed the first rise and fall of Ken Livingstone when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC. And he lived just long enough to see the second fall of Livingstone, when his son-in-law, Boris Johnson, beat him to become the new Mayor of London.

Imperial College is in the news for the second time this week, because of the brutal murder of two French exchange students who were studying there, but living in the more affordable area of New Cross. Imperial College sits next to the Albert Hall in one of London’s highest rent areas. The students, including the post-graduate researchers, have to find their digs elsewhere.

This is not the fault of Imperial College.

But their decision to stop Majid Ahmed from studying there to gain his medical degree is totally their responsibility. Ahmed won a place on merit, but later on he wrote and told them that he had a criminal conviction. He had served his time and repented. He wanted to make amends by devoting his life to healing the sick.

Imperial interviewed him and decided that, although he would be quite acceptable to study any other subject, he was not suitable for a medical degree, because of the ethical standards which doctors must abide by in caring for the vulnerable.

In blunt terms Imperial College rejected the penitent sinner. They don’t seem to be aware of the several doctors, who have been un-penitent sinners. Shipman is one name that comes to mind.

Imperial College is one of the most elitist of British educational institutions. They were part of the old London University, so they had the luxury of teaching only science subjects. They did not have to confront the paradoxes and uncertainties of the arts and the social sciences. Because their students could take other courses at London University, which knew about such things.

Imperial College prospered. And it spawned some of the finest scientists and engineers this country has produced.

But today, it is a very inadequate university in its own right. It does not have the range of Arts subjects, which have give science students the opportunity to increase their knowledge of other parts of human achievement.

The new rector, Sir Roy Anderson, has come to Imperial after being the chief scientific adviser for the British Ministry of Defence. Before that he was a distinguished medical man and an expert on infectious diseases. But from 2004 he was working for the Tony Blair government which went into the war with Iraq, etc, etc.

I hope that he will reconsider the Imperial decision to reject Majid Ahmed. Elitist institutions like Imperial can give enormous help to people like Ahmed, who, on
his own account, got in with a gang of near criminals. He now wants to help other people.

That surely, Sir Roy, is what education should be about. Helping those who do not have priviledged parents, to make a decent fist of their lives.