The Daily Novel

The newspapers on both sides of the pond generally gave Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden, the 65 year old senator from Delaware, as his vice-presidential running mate, the thumbs up. The London Sunday Times headlined their story:

Barack Obama opts for ‘bare knuckle fighter Joe Biden

But when you read the story you find that it is in fact favourable to Biden. This particular bare knuckle fighter is also the widely respected chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, who has considerable knowledge and experience of the world’s major trouble spots and knows many foreign prime ministers personally.

Obama certainly needs a boost for his campaign. His lead over John McCain in the polls has dwindled away to almost nothing in recent weeks, as McCain has cashed in on American worries about the the threats overseas, particularly the belligerant actions of Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Although he has halted the march of the Russian tanks on the Georgian capital Tibilsi, Russian troops are still on Georgian soil.

And, as the Sunday Times points out, the fight for the President’s job is going to get dirtier and dirtier as the election approaches. According to their reporter, Republican activists are already suggesting ‘Osama bin Biden’ car stickers.

The Mail on Sunday also has a negative headline.

Obama picks senator who ’stole’ Neil Kinnock’s speech as his running mate

This story harks back to 1988 when Biden was forced to abandon his own presidential campaign after it was revealed that his speech highlighting his working class roots was a plagiarism of a speech by Britain’s then Labour leader. But the Mail story goes on to tell readers that Biden and Kinnock are now firm friends. According to the Mail,

Lord Kinnock said last night that the last time they met the senator introduced him to aides by saying: ‘Do you know this guy? He used to be my greatest speechwriter.

The Observer highlights a slip of the tongue by Obama when he introduced Biden to the crowd of 35,000 in Springfield, Illinois yesterday. Obama introduced him as the ‘next President’, before quickly correcting that to ‘the next vice-president of the United States.

The slip, I think, probably does reflect the relationship between the two men. They have become friends since Obama joined the Senate foreign relations committee, but Biden is vastly more experienced. Which suggests that Obama meant what he said when he claimed to want a running mate who would not be a yes person.

The Observer also notes Biden’s impeccable working class credentials and trade union links. Biden is a working class Irish Catholic, still something of a rough diamond, which is a sharp contrast to Obama, whose speeches make it clear that despite his own humble origins he has lived most of his life as a teacher at that most elite of American universities, Harvard. And, now, as in Jack Kennedy’s time, there are still plenty of American voters who distrust ‘eggsheads’.

Most of the papers report that the choice gives some ammunition for McCain, because at the start of this Presidential campaign Biden made a speech in which he characterised Obama as ‘not ready’ to be President and said that a President did not have time for on the job training.

The analysis article in the Washington Post emphasises that Obama’s choice is pragmatic and that it will help Obama get those Hillary Clinton supporters amongst the working classes of the industrial heartlands to the polls. That article also suggests that the choice has a powerful emotional appeal, because both the personal biographries of both men demonstrate that the American dream - that any citizen whatever his or her origins can aspire to become President - is not entirely a myth.

Justin Massingham, a friend of my daughter, dropped in yesterday to do the tenth of his forty swims to raise £40,000 for the National Eczema Society. This most irritating disease blights the lives of around one fifth of children. And as yet nobody has found a cure, although there are some ointments which alleviate it somewhat. His plan was to do the tenth swim at Burton Bradstock. But it took him most of the day to get here from his ninth swim in East Dorset. Two trains and a cycle ride in drizzly rain from Axminster on the A35. By the time we got to Burton Bradstock at 4.30 PM the wind was working itself up to a serious gale. The waves were crashing over the beach. Everyone else was obeying the warning notice about Burton Bradstocks undertow. Justin decided that discretion was the better part of valour so we joined the other holiday makers sheltering from the rain in the beach cafe.

This morning the sun was shining so down we went to Charmouth Beach. By the time we got there the clouds had obliterated the sun and and the waves were big enough to splash over the car park. But in he went through the breakers and managed a half-way decent swim across the bay. Not quite forty minutes.

Our pictures, which I enhanced in Photoshop, demonstrate what a gloomy August we are having. The weather was worse than it was last December when hundreds gathered for the annual Charmouth Christmas Day Swim; in fancy dress not wet suits. But appalling summer weather seems to bring out the best in British people. Lots of mums and dads managing to put on smiles as they herded their kids back to the beach in between the showers. Looking on the bright side. After all there was no need to carry water to fill the moats around the sand castles.

We dispatched Justin from Axminster, where he caught a train to some place in Wiltshire where he is going to swim in a river. You can find out how to sponsor his swim, and help all those kids with eczema, by following this link to his web site. Below is a picture from his site of him with his daughter, Martha, who suffers from eczema.

The Guardian splashes this morning with a story that is bad news for those, like me, who would like to see a change in the leadership of the Labour Party sooner rather than later. It is based on the results of the latest Guardian/ICM opinion poll.

The headline, like most newspaper headlines, leaves no room for doubt.

Change of leader would not help Labour beat Cameron

But if you read the story carefully what the poll results signify is not quite that.

The pollsters asked who would made the best Prime Minister between David Cameron and Gordon Brown and between David Cameron and David Miliband. While it is true that currently Miliband has been the most talked up contender for the crown in the last few weeks, ever since he wrote that article in The Guardian without a single mention of Gordon Brown, it is by no means certain that Miliband would win a Labour Party election. Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas all have their supporters across the supporter. And there is also the possibility that if the Party decides to have an election some other candidate might emerge, whose name has not been trumpeted by the media. There is no shortage of potential leaders who have ample ministerial experience as well as grass roots support.

The results of the Cameron versus Brown, show 42 per cent for Cameron, 21 per cent for Brown and 23 per cent for neither. Those for Cameron versus Miliband show 40 per cent for Cameron 19 per cent for Miliband and 18 per cent for neither.

So The Guardian headline is justified by the fact that Cameron’s lead over both Brown and Miliband is the same at 21 per cent. But what are we to think about the fact that when asked the Cameron/Miliband question 23 per cent said nothing at all, whereas in response to Cameron/Brown question, only 14 per cent said nothing at all?

First, we can say definitely, that when given a choice between Cameron and a new Labour leader, Cameron’s vote falls from 42 per cent to 40 per cent. We can also say definitely, that the Milibandwagon is an invention of the media; his 19 per cent vote suggests that many people have not even heard that he had a band, still less are prepared to march behind it.

This is not so surprising. Although Miliband holds one of the three most important ministries, and is highly regarded by many Labour MPs and his cabinet colleagues, he has not had a high public profile. Even allowing for that, however, the message is unmistakeable. Not many people see him as a potential prime minister.

It is, however, too soon to write off his canditure. In he first blog I wrote about Miliband well over a year ago, I noted that he comes over as very cerebal. Not two brains, but three brains. This combined with his youth - and he looks even younger than he is - makes him seem closer to a very clever schoolboy rather than a leader of men and women.

If he is serious about his leadership bid he needs to get out more. On to the streets talking to the voters. Not easy to find the time, because his day job demands lots of reading of foreign office papers about the situation in Georgia, in Pakistan, in Iran, etc, etc. The Cold War is definitely back, and it will need all the efforts of European leaders like France’s Nicholas Sarcozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel, to stop it developing into a hot war between the still beligerant George W Bush and the new Stalinism of Vladimir Putin.

The Guardian/ICM poll does, however, contain a glimmer of hope for Labour. Cameron’s Conservatives lead Labour by 15 per cent which would mean a Conservative majority of over a hundred MPs in a general election. But compared with he last Guardian/ICM poll, Labour’s vote is one per cent higher at 29 per cent. The Conservative vote is also one per cent higher. But support for the Lib Dems is unchanged at 19 per cent and support for the other parties is down by one per cent.

To Axminster bright and early to stock up the larder and fill my wallet. Just as I was stuffing the notes in my wallet there was an angry voice in my ear.

‘This machine has been skimmed. Cost me £400.’

A young man pushed past me.

‘Look this is how they do it. See this hole here.’

He pointed to what he said was a hole on the right hand side of the machine and then felt underneath the top left of the machine, which, he said, was where they put the camera. He could not feel anything so he went storming inside to take it up with the Tesco management.

He was back in a trice.

‘They say its nothing to do with them. I have to ring the bank.’

So he wrote down the number of the Royal Bank of Scotland and went off to his car to ring them on his mobile. On his way he told me.

‘It’s them Roumanian scumbags. I wouldn’t have them in the country, even if they weren’t skimming cash machines. I would have them all shot.’

Back at home there was a new worker on my drive, probably in his middle fifties. He had just moved here from Oxford where he had lived for all his life. He loves it here.

‘It’s just like coming home’, he told me.

When I asked him what he meant, he told me that Oxford has changed. Now swamped by immigrants. He’s right of course. A couple of days ago I read an article reporting that nearly all the post-graduate students at Oxford University are foreigners. Which is a direct result of the education policies begun by Margaret Thatcher and continued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Reduce goverernment spending of education by bumping up the fees for overseas students.

When I told him that I had just moved here from Camden Town, he gave me a friendly smile.

‘Then, you’ll know what I mean.’

I hadn’t the heart to tell him that the Roumanian scumbags were moving in.

After all I feel very much at home here myself. In ethnic terms Dorset is much like the Wolverhampton of my youth before the West Indians arrived. And maybe that’s one reason why it feels like coming home for me too.

But I also feel nostalgic for my twenty-seven years at City University where my days were enlivened by teaching students of every colour from all the major countries of the world.

…..according to one of those round robin emails I received today. It did not promise I would win a million dollars if I sent it on to twenty others. It was written imperfectly, as if it was the revelation of someone who had suddenly discovered a truth. Though it did have a link urging me to sign up for a premium Flicker service costing real money.

So maybe I should post this in Business and Politics as an example of how money is extracted from the unsuspecting in 2008.

But what the hell, I liked what it said. So I sent it to seven names in my contact book. Except that there were not seven names in my contact book, because I have not yet spent the necessary time to restore it, since my motherboard blew up a few months ago and I had to buy a new computer.

Below you can read what Anonymous wrote. Probably American. Or it could be that most people who learn English these days think biscuits are cookies.

Old Age , I decided , is a gift

I am now , probably for the first time in my life , the person I have always
wanted to be. Oh , not my body! I sometime despair over my body , the
wrinkles , the baggy eyes , and the sagging butt. And often I am taken aback
by that old person that lives in my mirror (who looks like my mother!) , but
I don’t agonize over those things for long.

I would never trade my amazing friends , my wonderful life , my loving
family for less gray hair or a flatter belly. As I’ve aged , I’ve become
more kind to myself , and less critical of myself. I’ve become my own
friend.

I don’t chide myself for eating that extra cookie , or for not making my bed
, or for buying that silly cement gecko that I didn’t need, but looks so
avante garde on my patio. I am entitled to a treat , to be messy , to be
extravagant.

I have seen too many dear friends leave this world too soon; before they
understood the great freedom that comes with aging.

Whose business is it if I choose to read or play on the computer until 4 AM
and sleep until noon?

I will dance with myself to those wonderful tunes of the 60&70’s , and if I
, at the same time , wish to weep over a lost love. I will.I will wal k the
beach in a swim suit that is stretched over a bulging body , and will dive
into the waves with abandon if I choose to, despite the pitying glances from
the jet set .

They , too , will get old.

I know I am sometimes forgetful. But there again , some of life is just as
well forgotten. And I eventually remember the important things.

Sure , over the years my heart has been broken. How can your heart not break
when you lose a loved one , or when a child suffers , or even when
somebody’s beloved pet gets hit by a car? But broken hearts are what give us
strength and understanding and compassion. A heart never broken is pristine
and sterile and will never know the joy of being imperfect.

I am so blessed to have lived long enough to have my hair turning gray , and
to have my youthful laughs be forever etched into deep grooves on my face.
So many have never laughed , and so many have died before their hair could
turn silver. As you get older , it is easier to be positive. You care less
about what other people think. I don’t question myself anymore. I’ve even
earned the right to be wrong.

So , to answer your question , I like being old. It has set me free. I like
the person I have become. I am not going to live forever, but while I am
still here , I will not waste time lamenting what could have been , or
worrying about what will be. And I shall eat dessert every single day. (If I
feel like it)

FRIENDS FOREVER!

Forward this to at least 7 people and see what happens on your screen . You
will laugh your head off!!!!!!!!!

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Despite the rain and the chilly wind outside and the lure of the Olympic Games inside, many of the hardy inhabitants of Charmouth trooped down The Street to the annual Flower Show. Janet went to look at the flowers. I went to take a few pics of whatever took my fancy.

There were many cups and plates to be won, and some of the regulars, who had no doubt been working on their entries all summer, managed to win two or three.

My own first prizes went to a category meant to evoke the spirit of All that Jazz and Rhapsody in Blue. Given the appalling quality of my pictures I need to tell you that All that Jazz had a miniture jazz band around it.

It was not until I got there that I realised there was a photography competition as well. This is a picture I took yesterday which I might have entered in the Men at Work category. Since I took it the drive has been covered with red scalpel bits, many of which were transferred to the hall floor as I went to and fro. Tomorrow’s visitors will have to leave their shoes at the door Japanese style.

George W Bush has joined not a few of the world leaders at a sporting event in Beijing. He takes the opportunity to make a fierce attack on China’s human rights record. Which is bad.

But he does it in the week when the world is wondering not about the human rights record of the China of a few years ago.

They have on the news the results of America’s abuse of human rights at Guanatimo Bay. After several years of detention the US has brought their first case, against the man who is guilty of being Osama bin Laden’s chaffeur.

Although the Americans have been using tortures, like water boarding. As if detention itself were not a sufficient incentive to get people to confess in order to get out of their prision.

I am not a fan of China present, or of much of China past. But America has a substantially good human rights record, which has been soiled by George W Bush.

The present threat from China is not violations of human rights, regrettable though they are.

It is the fact that China, in its imitation of American consumer capitalism, is the biggest threat to global warming.

The cheap consumer items which they produce, which are selling so well in Western democracies, are produced by an economy which creating more smog than any other country.

That is what George W Bush should have been saying this week.

But of course he could not take that line. Because his own supporters are also high on the list of those who are moving the planet to global warming. And they don’t want to change their habits.

Because it will affect their profits.

China today is not the China of the Buddhist philiosophers. Or the Marxists like Mao. It is the China who learnt from Richard Nixon that they could become respectable members of the world community if only they started behaving like American consumer capitalists.

Which lesson they have learnt.

……despite what you read, listen to, or see, on the media. He has simply moved his place of work to a beach in East Anglia, which is British, but as British as roast beef. Not New Labour. Definitely not old labour. Definitely Conservative, with a few Lib Dems.

And, instead of refreshing himself, and doing some serious thinking, he is spending his time planning his relaunch. And, even while on holiday, taking lots of new initiatives.

He is trying to get out of the hole he is in. But by digging. So the more he does, the deeper he gots buried in the mud.

If he was on a real holiday, he would be getting away from it all. And finding some healing from the savage wounds he has suffered from the media, the Labour Party, and increasingly his own colleagues.

Because much of what is happening is not his fault. Both the US, New Labour’s favourite ally, and Britain, are facing a nasty recession. Which harms Labour voters, but much more than those Tory voters, who have bumped up their salaries to astronomical levels, under the rule of Blair and Brown.

Brown needs time for reflection. But he is so charged up, that he is not reflecting.

And is his holiday resort he is not moved to do anything else.

Southwold is a pleasant place. But it is not very exciting. And it is not breath-takingly beautiful.

It is the sort of place the comfortably off middle classes used to holiday in the days before EasyJet.

If Brown had gone to Blackpool, he might have been able to lose himself on the Big Digger.

And he might have met a few Labour voters, who would tell him where he has gone wrong.

Yesterday it rained. This morning there is a thick mist so that I cannot see much further than the end of the drive. I wake from a dream in which I am wondering whether I shall be able to stick another ten years teaching journalism at City University. Which takes me back in time about nineteen years.

Depressed about journalism. Does it really ever find out anything? Remember a lack lustre item on BBC Newsnight last night. Gavin Esler was doing an item about who Barack Obama and John McCain would choose for their Vice President.

As the interviews dragged on it became abundantly clear that sleuths of Newsnight had absoluely no idea of the answers. Reminded me of those days on The Times when I have spent the whole day on the telephone and no-one has told me anything at all interesting. But the deadline is approaching and there is an empty space to fill in tomorrow’s paper.

Esler himself seems pretty depressed, so much so that he moves the discussion to whether it matters who the Vice President is, with some clips of former Vice Presidents, some of whom are forgotten, like Gerald Ford, even though he went on to President himself for a few months. And Richard Nixon, who went on to become the most disgraceful US President of my lifetime.

But Esler did ask one interesting question: Why was Obama only neck and neck in the US polls? Following his recent tour he has attracted a huge following in Europe. He answered the question himself, by noting that most recent elections have been close.

True. But not a very convincing answer. Two months ago, when Hillary Clinton  was still fightingObama for Democratic candidature, the polls were indicating a Democratic landslide.

None of the journalist pundits has explained why the Democratic lead has been whittled away to nothing. Most of the Clinton supporters do appear to have shifted to Obama.

Two months ago there was a lot of discussion about whether America was ready to elect a black President or a female President. These are the kind of questions which neither journalists nor opinion pollsters can get reliable answers to.

Far too many people lie in their answers. Even to themselves.

We shall have to wait until the morning of the fifth of November before we know whether the American electorate is ready to elect a black President. But maybe journalists can make a useful contribution by keeping the discussion going.

The sky is still all grey. But the mist has lifted a bit. I can now see the horizon. The traffic is moving on the A35 and the workman have arrived to work on my drive. So something might be achieved today.

Quite suddenly, in the last few days, David Miliband has become a serious possible contender for the job of leading Labour into the next election. Which according to the pollsters is an election they are likely to lose.

The media coverage has escalated to an astonishing degree, even to me who has spent a lot of his life actually reading the newspapers. Miliband’s article for The Guardian last week, is now deconstructed as a plot by the Blairites of New Labour to overthrow the Brownites.

There is supposed to be a Milibandwagon. But none of the newspapers, working overtime managed to unearth any evidence of that. Most cabinet ministers and most party activists, when telephoned by journalists, warned of the danger of Labour changing its leader.

The Mail on Sunday, however, as I reported in yesterday’s blog, dredged up a Blair memo written nine months ago trashing Brown’s destruction of everything he had done for Britain and the British Labour Party.

The Mail reported that Miliband had had regular telephone conversations with Blair recently. The implication was that Miliband was wanting to overthrow Brown because he was reversing Blairism. The Mail gave no evidence of those conversations, let alone reporting what Blair and Miliband said to each other.

But if you read what Miliband actually said in his Guardian article it was not so much a complaint that Brown was not continuing the Blair path, it was the opposite.

Here is the key quote from The Guardian article.

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 is urging not that Brown be more like Blair. He is urging Labour to remember what it stands for as a politiccal party. His argument against Brown, who had solid Labour roots is not that he is reversing Blair’s policies, but that he is following them.

And Brown, like Blair before him, is totally ignoring the effect of their policies, jointly decided. Their joint rule hugely increased the inequalities of wealth and priviledge. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 the personal wealth held by the top 10 per cent of the population has swelled from 47 per cent to 54 per cent. This is a huge increase.

And now Britain, like the US is facing a recession, it is an obscenity for a Labour leader not to make a serious attempt to revserse this trend.

Milband, in his Guardian article, is suggesting Newer Labour needs to address this.

But of course the myth of Blair/Brownism is that Labour can only become electable if it cowtows to the fat cats with their ever increasing salaries. Miliband is challenging that myth.

In doing this he is in a somewhat similar position to Margaret Thatcher, when she ousted Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader. She won, not because of a plot. Although she had some close friends like Sir Keith Joseph and the far right Institute of Economic Affairs, she was essentially going on her own instincts. She refused to believe that Conservatives who embraced the bloody, survival of the fittest, capitalist policies, were unelectable. And she was proved right.

For a few years.

Today, we are faced with a mirror image of the Thatcher era. The notion that Labour is unelectable, unless it allows the greedy to earn huge salaries and get away with not paying tax on them.

Miliband is, maybe, challenging this myth.

I say, maybe, because I have not actually met him.

I cannot be sure that his is challenging what is happening for the right reasons.

But I do know enough to realise that much of the media stuff written about him is tosh.

He got into Oxford, so they say, because of influence. He had two D levels in his A levels.

This says a whole lot about our examination system.

Because it is evident to anyone who has listened to him, or read any of his speeches, that he is far more intelligent than the average.

He was schooled not at Eton, ilke David Cameron, but at Haverstock School, which was supposed to provide a brilliant education for whoever who went there, be they working class Irish immigrants, or sons and daughters of the intellectuals in the neighbourhood.

Since it was in my neighbourhood, I know it well. It was in no sense a bad school, but it was not orchestrated to seeing ‘good’ education as getting the largest percentage into university.

So I am awaiting to see Miliband shapes out. It is obivous to me, that he is vastly more intelligent than the average.

My qualification about him has been that most of what he writes and says is far too cerebal. In the language of the posh folks he met at Oxford.

It is unsurprising that he is cerebal, since his Dad was a noted Marxist philosopher. Not old Labour or new Labour, but someone who had studied Karl Marx and found that some of what he had to say was relevent to the world in which we live now, although Marx died before the Daily Mail’s Northcliffe, and Pulitzer and Hertz in the US had invented the mass media.

So if Miliband does go forward I will be looking at his education policies.

Blair and Brown have been pushing people into Academies dominated by wealthy businessmen. So that they can balance the budget and avoid the unpopular policies af asking for more taxes, from the rich and the not so rich.

Because in the idiot world in which we live, the super rich pay less tax than the middle classes.

According to Toynbee and Walker at least 32 of the UK 54 billionaires paid NO TAX AT ALL.