Misleading £1 bus claim lacks ambition

Don't even think about making a dodgy claim about a £1 bus ticket. People will be outraged and you'll be forced to retract:

MEGABUS ads offering fares from £1 have been banned after the company admitted as little as one seat per coach was available for the price...

...Two people complained, saying they could not find fares at that price.

Megabus said the number of fares available at £1 varied due to factors such as the number of intermediate stops and whether tickets were booked for partial or full routes.

The Advertising Standards Authority said: ‘We noted in particular that only one of the £1 fares on the London to Bath route was for the full length.’ It ruled that the ads must not appear again in their current form.

Plaster a dodgy claim about £350 million windfall on a bus and nobody can stop you driving the bugger around the country for months.

Herr Goebbels must be chortling in his grave:

"The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous."

Money troubles

One good reason for not entrusting the future of the country to the people who think leaving the European Union will solve everything, is that those people look rubbish at handling money. First, if we're to believe the latest allegations, Vote Leave had more wonga than it could legally use, so breached electoral law by laundering its spending via a tiny unofficial campaign run by a 23 year old fashion student.

In contrast, the people who started this whole sorry business, Ukip, are so short of money that they've been reduced to a crowdfunding campaign to keep the clown car on the road. They apparently need £100,000 "to save Ukip whilst it restructures its position." Last week they'd raised just £610 of that figure. This week they're up to ...

... £620. At this rate, by my reckoning, they'll have raised enough money to save the UK branch of the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society in about 190 years.

Admittedly the party's youth wing, Young Independence, has taken a bit of time off from trying to organise rallies for failed neo-Nazis to cough up £2,000 towards the crisis appeal, but even with two grand from the Batten-Jugend, they're only up to two and a half percent of their target.

Mind control, using the smell of golf

In hindsight, it was obvious that an outfit like Cambridge Analytica would turn out to be run by a an over-privileged bunch of shady chancers, lurching from one dodgy comic caper to the next. But what about CA's parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL)?

Of course it's the same. Of course it was set up by a chap called Nigel. Of course his parents are landowners from Chipping Norton. Of course he went to Eton. Of course he once dated a minor royal. Of course he claimed to have studied psychology at University College London, although UCL say they've no record of him ever being a UCL student. And of course, before he got into data mining and covert political manipulation, he was into a whole load of other weird, dodgy-sounding stuff. Like smell-based marketing:

...Marketing Aromatics, the world's first designer fragrance agency, devoted to persuading companies that along with their corporate image they need a corporate smell. Smells can influence attitudes and therefore behaviour, Nigel Oakes, the agency's managing director, said. And we know that behaviour, whether in employees or customers, is the dominant deciding factor in corporate achievement. At the launch he demonstrated a range of smells, including autumn, coconut, new-mown meadow, ocean, red wine, and golf - a subtle mixture of pine and sweat.

Like parent, like child:

You read the stories about Cambridge Analytica and you think, Damn, these guys are total geniuses who can control our minds. You watch the undercover video of the Cambridge Analytica execs and you think, Damn, these guys are seriously some clown-ass schmucks. Like always, believe what you see.

Meanwhile, in the real world, undercover police have been informing on health and safety reps and union activists, so construction industry bosses can put them on an employment blacklist and protesters are being prosecuted as terrorists.

Welcome to the "United" Kingdom, a nation divided and ruled by scary clowns.

Fake news factory fooled fake intellectual with fake office

There's a rich vein of social comedy in the Cambridge Analytica affair. Here's how wily old Etonian cad, Alexander James Ashburner Nix, conned that gullible American pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon, by appealing to his philosopher king fantasies of dreaming spires and elite institutions:

So keen was the firm to impress Mr Bannon it opened a satellite office near the University of Cambridge after Mr Bannon expressed an interest in visiting the city.

"We created this fake office in Cambridge and brought a bunch of people to set up this office beside the university to make it look like 'This is our Cambridge site. Our Potemkin Cambridge office," Mr Wylie said.

"And later, when the Mercers bought in and they appointed Steve to set up the company, he decided he should call it Cambridge Analytica... as a tip of the hat to our deep links to the University of Cambridge. And so a false reality was infused into the name Cambridge Analytica."

It's not being fooled that hurts. It's being fooled by fools like this.

Afterthought - maybe Hobo Trump got fired because, for all Bannon's intellectual pretensions, his boss already knew more than he did about this kind of bullshit:

Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal describes a stunt in which he lured Holiday Inn executives into investing in an Atlantic City casino by directing his construction manager to rent dozens of pieces of heavy equipment, in advance of a visit by the executives, to move dirt around on the proposed casino site, creating the illusion that construction was underway.

The Register belts Cambridge Analytica with double whammy

1. Best headline: "ICO surprise Cambridge Analytica raid delayed: Nobody expects the information commissioner! Oh wait, yes they do"

2. Best response in the comments: "Anyone would think that the establishment are trying to give CA enough of a chance to clean their house* before they have a snoop around."

I'm sure that Arron Banks, who boasted about Leave.EU using CA, before changing his story and denying they'd ever used CA, will be following developments with interest...





*Update - of course, the process of Spring cleaning started waay before the ICO gave CA a head start, so they could get on with burying the remaining bodies...

Where can you go from there, Boris?

Boris Johnson has likened the way President Putin is promoting the World Cup in Russia to Hitler's notorious use of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The foreign secretary said Labour MP Ian Austin was "completely right" to say Russia's president wanted to "gloss over [his] brutal corrupt regime".

A man with an expensive classical education like Boris should really have a wider range of historical precedents to draw on. But no, if your opponent is thuggish, repressive, undemocratic, there's apparently only ever one valid comparison. Hitler, Hitler, always bloody Hitler. But the thing is, once you've turned your rhetoric all the way up to Hitler, where do you go from there? Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel could have told him:

Nigel Tufnel: ...You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly.*

And "Nowhere" is exactly these comparisons usually lead.

Anthony Eden wasn't afraid to talk the talk about Nasser being the new Hitler, but when it came to walking the walk ... well, let's just say that Suez wasn't exactly a replay of our finest hour. Then there was the drum beat to the Iraq War, when you were either with us or some kind of craven Munich-style appeaser. Surprise, surprise, it took more than overheated rhetoric and a dodgy dossier to liberate Iraq and victory, when it came, brought a settlement that was more Mad Max than Marshall Plan. And who can forget Boris's fellow ex-London mayor, Ken Livingstone, doubling down on his stupid comments about Hitler being a Zionist? That didn't exactly bring peace to the Middle East, or achieve anything, apart from indelibly staining Ken's reputation.

If you have to use the "H" word, save it for actual Nazis, like the sort of far-right Holocaust-denying cranks Putin's Russia has  been funding and supporting in its transparent, and relatively successful, efforts to destabilise Europe. That's about as close to a justified Putin-Hitler connection as you're going to get. Otherwise, Putin is just another one of the world's thuggish autocrats, in the same mould as Erdoğan, or the UK's best buddy, Prince Salman. They're all objectively horrible, but not in the same league as a mass murderer who gloried in killing tens of millions by war and genocide.

The more Hitler comparisons I hear, the more sympathy I have for the crudest version of Godwin's Law ("If you're the first one to mention Hitler, you lose").





*Of course, in Spinal Tap, they solved the problem of having nowhere higher than ten to go by painting the number "eleven" on the amp dial. I'm not quite sure how Boris could take it all the way up to eleven - maybe he could compare Putin to Darth Vader, who had a whole planet and its population blown up just for the evulz, which would sort of make him even worse than Hitler, if only he'd actually existed...

Never believe anything until it is officially denied

"Toxic nothingburger: Cambridge Analytica exposé is dangerous political attack posing as journalism" screams RT  (formerly Russia Today). "Apart from that, how did you enjoy your toxic nothingburger, Mr Skripal?"

"‘No Impact’: Cambridge Analytica Uproar Much Ado About Common Election Practices" insists Sputnik.

"THE Facebook data scandal is being wildly exaggerated for political ends." claims Pravda The Sun. .

Effective propaganda

This is bad:

Cambridge Analytica’s managing director Mark Turnbull was secretly filmed by Channel 4 News describing how his firm operates.

He said: “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again… like a remote control.

“It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘That’s propaganda’.”

But this is worse:

[Non-experts] will know very little about [the objective failure of Brexit] from reading the papers that campaigned so hard for Brexit in the first place. At best the information will be reported in a dismissive way with some reference to how economists always get things wrong... Against such reports will be a constant stream of comment and reporting extolling the imagined benefits of Brexit.

This propaganda could be countered by informed and informing reporting by broadcasters. Unfortunately, with the exception of Sky News, the standard of reporting by broadcasters on Brexit has been very poor. In particular the BBC treats Brexit like any other Westminster based issue, with an additional touch of nationalism. We hear a great deal from May, Fox, Johnson etc, with virtually no expert analysis of what the true state of negotiations are.

I’m not an expert on international trade, but because I read some of the now numerous people who write stuff on Brexit who are experts, or who have made themselves experts, I feel I am reasonably well informed. I have never seen the same level of expertise from the broadcast media. If I just listened to the BBC or read any newspapers bar two or three, I would know almost nothing about what was really going on in the negotiations...

...I also think this is not the first time in recent memory that the media has failed to accurately report what was going on and what experts thought. Before the 2015 election the media accepted the idea that getting the budget deficit down was the most important goal of macroeconomic policy, and that the economic fundamentals were strong. Few experts would agree with the former, and the latter was simply false.

The air time the BBC has allocated to repeating the demonstrable untruths and fantasies of the Brexit/austerity extremists, more or less unchallenged, has done more damage than anything a couple of dodgy tech firms could have managed. If you want an example of how to get propaganda past the public's radar without anyone thinking "this is propaganda", consider having a trusted public service broadcaster blandly reframe provable lies as legitimate points of view and objective policy failures as the story of a coherent plan coming together.

Succession planning for autocrats

Sometimes it's interesting to step back and take a long view of the stuff that's in the news. Mark Blyth has an intriguing question about some of our current crop of autocrats, like Xi Jinping who's abolished the term limit on the Chinese presidency and become a tempting role model for any aspiring Mini-Xi from Sultan Erdoğan, to Right Said Vlad ("I'm too sexy for my shirt").

Having established a strong and stable autocracy, what happens when the big guy dies (this riff comes out of a discussion of the Russian spy poisoning case, which starts about 4'30" into this video, if you want to cut to the chase)?


Blyth thinks there's a danger that the demise of the main man might quickly turn your autocracy into the sort of bloody black farce portrayed in Armando Iannucci's recent film The Death of Stalin (currently banned in Putin's Russia), as rival wannabe autocrats scrabble for the vacant throne.

Possibly, although at least one other historical precedent yields a more ambiguous answer. I've just been reading Mary Beard's bestselling history of ancient Rome, SPQR. When Rome moved from being a republic, structured to keep executive power from being monopolised by one person, to an imperial autocracy, with supreme power in the hands of a single ruler, the top bananas kind of made up the rules of succession as they went along. Adopted heirs were put in place where needed, rivals bumped off and unexpected ad hoc Emperors elevated to supreme power in a series of fudges which contrast with the obsessive interest that a monarchy like ours takes in the correct line of succession.

Sometimes this lead to a bloody The Death of Stalin-style power struggle, but sometimes the cobbled-together Roman system was surprisingly stable, as Mary Beard notes:

"The murder of Gaius was a particularly bloody case of regime change, but the transmission of imperial power in Rome was often murderous. Despite the impressive survival rate of the emperors (fourteen rulers in almost 200 years is one testament to stability), the moment of succession was fraught with violence and surrounded by allegations of treachery. Vespasian in 79 CE was the only emperor in the first two dynasties to die without any rumours of foul play surfacing."

If you're a glass half full person, you can see that record of fourteen rulers over two centuries as evidence that the Romans must have been doing something right. If you're like Europe's medieval monarchies, you might be looking at the violence, the plots and rumours of plots and want to try for a more stable transfer of autocratic power. Medieval Europe opted for a more controllable dynastic basis of succession, like the one the Kims are trying for in modern North Korea.

I'm not convinced that the medieval solution of succession by bloodline and primogeniture was necessarily a more stable model of autocracy than the ad hoc Roman system. A quick look at the English, and later British, monarchy shows that transfer of power was hardly reduced to a manageable formality. Starting with William the Conqueror, you only get to his son, William Rufus and already people are being bumped off in mysterious circumstances. Then there's The Anarchy of the 12th Century, the vicious in-fighting of the Plantagenet "Devil's brood", the fall of Richard II, the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors' dynastic dramas, the Stuarts with one king beheaded and one exiled and so on.

The Roman system may have been ad hoc, but however much you enforce the rules of succession by blood, it's almost as much of a lottery for two broad reasons:

1. You need to provide heirs - no succession plan survives contact with infertility, the death of a queen of childbearing age, or infant mortality (at least when there's an heir but no "spare")

2. even if your heir survives to adulthood, he or she needs to be a competent ruler - dynasties of incompetent autocrats rarely last long.

Still, it's one of Mark Blyth's favourite points that conditions change, so the past never replays itself exactly. Which makes me wonder whether there might be more of a future for the Kim model of dynastic autocratic power than for the Xi/Putin model of grabbing power then making up the succession rules as you go along.

Here's how it might work. We've seen two ways that the medieval dynastic model could fail. Although modern science hasn't eliminated danger 2. (the designated heir not being up to the job), one major thing that's changed since Henry VIII's time is medical science. Doctors know a lot more about fertility problems and childbirth is vastly safer for both mother and infant. A modern day Henry VIII-style tyrant would have a lot more chance of producing a healthy designated heir and seeing the succession process go to a predetermined plan. If you're an autocrat, looking to transmit power via your own genes, you've probably got a better shot at it now than at any previous point in history.

I hope it won't come to that, but if I was writing dystopian fiction, I think I'd be exploring some version of medieval feudalism, only unchecked by the chance intervention of infant mortality.

"Taking back control of our borders" Humpty Dumpty style

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

Apparently Humpty Dumpty and Chris Grayling have more in common than their shared resemblance to an egg:

The UK government is reportedly considering making Britain's borders completely open to the European Union after Brexit if it crashes out of negotiations with no deal in place...

...Transport Secretary Chis Grayling last night insisted there will be no additional checks on Britain's border no matter what form Brexit takes.

"We will maintain a free-flowing border at Dover, we will not impose checks at the port, it is utterly unrealistic to do so," the Brexit-voting Conservative minister told audience members.

"We don't check lorries now, we're not going to be checking lorries in the future."

They also both seem to live in Wonderland and appear to have been taking a few too many puffs of whatever it was that caterpillar was smoking:

The clock is ticking

Interim leader Gerard Batten has warned UKIP is facing a financial shortfall that is threatening its future.

He has said that £100,000 is needed in the next few weeks to put UKIP, which has had three leadership contests in two years, on a "surer foundation".

From a BBC report dated 9 March 2018.

So how's the emergency cash transfusion going? A picture's worth a thousand words:

"£610 raised of £100,000 target by 23 supporters", according to the crowdfunding site (screenshot taken a few minutes ago, today, 16 March 2018).

If they can't do better than that, and quickly, the party's over.

When it ends, take just a few minutes to celebrate the good news that the gatecrashing vandals have finally left the building. Then hope that enough people will rally round to clear up the post-party mess they left for everybody else to sort out.

_________________

Update - just in case you didn't get the bad news, somebody's still trying to flog this dead horse.

Boris Johnson to blame for the Skripal poisonings?

Oh, hi Boris Johnson's lawyers, how are you doing? No, I most certainly wasn't accusing your client of doing anything untoward - "just asking questions", as they say.

What do you mean Betteridge's Law is no defence in a case of libel?

OK, I would like to state, for the record, that I do not believe your client, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, capable of poisoning the Skripals. Assuming that the Skripals were the intended targets of the unknown poisoner (which I do), I believe that this attack was planned and carried out by professionals. If somebody had tasked a brilliant amateur like Boris Johnson with carrying out the hit, I believe that the targets would have escaped unscathed, although Boris would most likely have ended up accidentally poisoning half of the Salisbury Cathedral choir. He is Boris, after all, and getting into "hilarious" scrapes it what he does.

So what am I saying? I'm just floating the hypothesis that, if I belonged to the intelligence service of a hostile power and I was thinking about doing something shockingly illegal in the United Kingdom, I might look at the person appointed to the post of UK Foreign Secretary and think "These people cannot be serious - I'm totally not frightened of messing with them."

Whatever talents Boris Johnson may have - writing moderately amusing (if factually-challenged and occasionally racist) opinion pieces, quoting Cicero and saying "cripes" a lot when in character as an entertaining upper-class eccentric - it's obvious to even the dimmest observer that diplomacy, discretion and mastering his brief are not among them. His addiction to blurting out memorable sound bites at every possible opportunity, with no thought for the accuracy of what he says, or for who might be offended is as close to an anti-qualification for the post of Foreign Secretary as I can think of.

After all this time, it still beggars belief that Boris is the public face the UK presents to the world. Making him so implies contempt for the people the UK is dealing with. It's the equivalent of turning up late to your best friend's wedding half-cut and unshaven, wearing trackky bottoms and a mucky T-shirt. It implies a total lack of respect both for the occasion and for yourself. OK, a few people might have a laugh at the wacky funster throwing convention to the winds, but most of the people invested in the process will be rightly mortified.

And it makes the UK look weak. It implies a barely-keeping-it-together administration, too absorbed in the psychodrama of its own self-inflicted crisis to care about impressing the outside world. An administration that looks at a man who could, maybe, be allowed to make an ass of himself at, say, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport without doing too much damage and thinks "Let him play at being a world statesman for a bit - he's obviously going to shoot his mouth off at every opportunity and infuriate every nation on the planet, but right now we've got more important things to worry about than what the rest of the world thinks, like not having an actual punch-up round the Cabinet table."

Why wouldn't your hostile foreign power take one look at what we, as a country, are doing and assume that we're a bunch of powerless, clueless diplomatic pygmies who can be ignored and flouted with impunity? What would a careless bluffer like Boris do to protect a couple of foreigners, when he can't even look after the interest of UK nationals (your foot in mouth helped to double Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's sentence, Boris, but we're still waiting for you to get her out of that Iranian jail)?

Boris is the symptom of a national self-absorption that puts winning petty squabbles within the Westminster/UK press bubble ahead of presenting any semblance of credibility or competence to the outside world. It would be no wonder if some hostile power* thought "Is that the best you've got?" and proceeded to do as it damn well pleased. If so, some of the blame belongs to Theresa May for offering, and to Boris Johnson for accepting, an important job which, deep down, even he must have realised he would be terrible at.





*Probably Russia. Richard North overstates the doubts when he goes off on one about other people being idiots for jumping to that conclusion (to be fair, he usually blogs about Brexit, a target-rich environment for idiot hunters, so he's probably a bit trigger-happy). He makes great game of people for saying "Russia", when the nerve agent was originally developed in the Soviet Union (specifically, Uzbekistan).

Which is all very well, but Russia is the suspect with the obvious motive and probable means to attack the Skripals. OK, the nerve agent was developed in another former Soviet state, but let's do a fun WMD quiz. When the Soviet Union broke up, which of its constituent countries got all the nukes? Clue: it wasn't Uzbekistan. And which bit of the former Soviet Union do you think was most likely to get first dibs on any other nasty stuff that was hanging around? Clue: probably the same place that got all the nukes.

Of course it might be somebody else - the Uzbeks (why?), or surprisingly well-resourced non-state actors, or a false flag operation by MI5, in the hope of drumming up more counter-terrorism resources, or part of a US deep state anti-Trump plot , or Mossad, or Hilary Clinton while she was taking time off from running a paedophile ring out of a pizza joint ... if you want to jump down the rabbit hole into any of the above conspiracy wonderlands, be my guest, but it's still probably Russia.

__________________________

Update - if you thought I was exaggerating about those conspiracy theories, feast your eyes on this little beauty:

"MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom may be perceived as a plot to derail Brexit negotiations and use Russia’s alleged threat as a pretext to keep the country with the European Union, Richard Wood, a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), told Sputnik on Wednesday."

Wood told Sputnik that he thought the Skripal poisonings were "staged." I fought Poe's Law and the law won...

Bonus fact - "Sputnik" is Russian for "one on the same path (with someone)", or more succinctly, "fellow traveller."

Bonus bonus fact - Ukip's Richard Wood was - purely coincidentally - one of the delegates on a Moscow-sponsored jolly to Crimea last March. In a statement to Sputnik, Wood gushed:

"I wanted to see the situation in Crimea and I was absolutely delighted. I saw the people wanting to be a part of the Russian Federation. That is what came over to me strongly. I never heard of anybody saying that they have been put down, they were repressed or had difficulties with the Russian authorities. For a very long time now the West has had a very shortsighted policy towards Russia. When I was in Crimea, I have never seen a policeman on streets, I have never seen a soldier, no civil disorder, nothing of that sort," 

Make of that what you will...

Frankenstein's corporate monster

In recent years, the legal abomination of free speech rights for those artificial entities known as corporate persons has broken fee of its bounds and gone on a terrible rampage:

According to a recent study, corporations and their trade groups are behind nearly half of all free-speech cases these days. Businesses have used the freedom of speech to overturn laws requiring tobacco companies to put graphic warnings on cigarette packages, publicly held companies to disclosure of the use of conflict minerals, and food companies to notify consumers of genetically modified organisms.

If you don't agree that this is a monstrous perversion of laws intended to stop real humans being silenced by the powerful, I don't think we can ever be friends.

Having said that, it all started with the best of intentions. Just as Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein started off as a well-intentioned idealist, who wanted to free the human race from pain, suffering and death, the road to free speech for corporations was paved with good intentions, as Adam Winkler points out:

Huey Long was Trump before Trump. The fiery populist governor elected on the eve of the Great Depression had an aggressive agenda to make Louisiana great again—and little tolerance for dissent. Long set up a state board to censor newsreels and another to decide which newspapers would be allowed to print profitable government notices. When the student paper at Louisiana State University published an unflattering editorial about him, an outraged Long—referring to himself, as autocrats often do, in the third person—sent in the state police to seize copies, saying he wasn’t “going to stand for any students criticizing Huey Long.”

After Louisiana’s larger daily newspapers came out against him, “the Kingfish” declared war. “The daily newspapers have been against every progressive step in the state,” Long said, “and the only way for the people of Louisiana to get ahead is to stomp them flat.” To do so, in 1934 Long’s allies enacted a 2 percent tax on the advertising revenue of the state’s largest-circulation newspapers. Long said the tax “should be called a tax on lying, two cents per lie.”

Led by the Capital City Press, the publisher of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the newspaper companies challenged the advertising tax in court. They claimed the tax was an effort to silence those who questioned Long’s policies...

... In 1936, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspaper corporations and struck down Long’s advertising tax.

So the monster wasn't the dumbed-down Hollywood version, born bad because the mad scientist's lab assistant goofed up and accidentally gave it the brain from an evil dead person.* This is more like Mary Shelley's infinitely more nuanced, humane original, created good, but doomed by unforeseen consequences and the neglect of his creator.

So, if you're talking about the attempted censorship of media corporations, corporate free speech isn't necessarily such an abomination. But not every attack on media corporations' unfettered freedom to print whatever they damn well like, no matter who gets hurt, is as obviously pernicious as Long's attempt to silence critics. There is, for example the "Stop Funding Hate" campaign in the UK, which also seeks to hit media corporations where it hurts - an example, IMO, of where the corporate media are the bullies, not the bullied, and deserve all the pushback they get.

You could say it's a grey area, although that's more than you could reasonably say about, for instance, the free speech "right" of a non-media corporation, like a tobacco company, to apply as much unfiltered public relations spin as it likes, regardless of the costs to the rest of society. That's still monstrous.







*I really don't like the managerialist subtext of the incompetent menial screwing up in the James Whale version. In the book, Victor Frankenstein is completely responsible for both his own good intentions and for his flaws, so his fall is a real tragedy. In the film, Dr Frankenstein is kind of let off the moral hook by a dumb "honestly, you just can't get the staff"-type accident. This always seems like a cop-out to me.

The placebo of the people

In the Nineteenth Century, when Marx decided that religion was the opium of the people, some variety of organised religion was the one stop shop for all of most peoples' religious and spiritual needs. Now that organised religion has lost a lot of its (sometimes coercive) power across the more prosperous areas of the world, we have a new distinction, with increasing numbers of people identifying as "spiritual, not religious."

I've never been very impressed with this formulation, but it's only just occurred to me how useful Marx's famous quote is for clarifying the difference between religion and spirituality.

The thing about opium is that it contains an active ingredient which has a real effect in the physical world. Likewise, religion, as opposed to spirituality, also produces real-world effects, whether you believe in it or not. People actually get off their backsides and congregate together on a specific day and go through a specific ritual. They raise actual money to support good causes, or to propagate their ideas, or to build/renovate churches, mosques or temples, or to educate/indoctrinate children.

Religion has, for good or ill, a presence in society and creates objectively real things, from community cohesion (and sometimes exclusion), to some pretty stunning buildings and music, all of which undeniably exist the real world.

Spirituality, in contrast, is one of those things that might work for you, if you believe in it. So if religion is the opium of the people, then spirituality is the placebo of the people.

A compulsory dip in the Sea of Faith

Here's a familiar Victorian lament about the decline of religious faith:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...

Why the decline? As any half-awake student of poetry, or the history of ideas, can tell you, it was Darwin wot done it. "In the third stanza, the sea is turned into the "Sea of Faith", which is a metaphor for a time ... when religion could still be experienced without the doubt that the modern ... age brought about through Darwinism, the Industrial revolution, Imperialism, a crisis in religion, etc."

And I agree with this analysis, as far as it goes. Even many educated people literally believed in the Biblical account of creation before Darwin. After Darwin, there's been such an inexorable decline that non-creationist Christian apologists now routinely claim that most pre-Darwin Christians never believed that the Genesis story was literally true (although contemporary evidence suggests to me that such apologists are just plain wrong).

The Darwin effect was amplified by Nineteenth Century German scholars like David Strauss abandoning the idea of "gospel truth" in favour of an analytical approach which tried to work out which bits of the sacred texts were probably factual history, in the sense we would understand it, and which bits we'd classify as myth, or fiction.

But there's an extra contributing factor which tends to get played down these days. When the Sea of Faith was at the full, you could be fined, or worse, for not going to church:

"Among other complaints made to me by prisoners, J. C. came forward, and stated, that he was placed in the Ecclesiastical Court, 310 and sentenced to pay a fine of 1s., and 14s. costs; that he had been in prison ten weeks, and had no means of paying, and hoped that a representation might be made of his case, or he must remain a prisoner for ever. Upon referring to this man's commitment, I find that he was summarily convicted before two magistrates, that on the of June, being the Lord's-day, called Sunday, in the township of—, did neglect to attend a church, or at some other place of religious worship, on the said day, he not having any reasonable excuse to be absent, and adjudged to forfeit and pay 1s., together with 14s. costs, and, in default, to be kept in prison until the said sums shall he paid. It appeared that the following number of persons had been committed for a similar offence, and been discharged upon payment of the fine and costs:—"

This account comes from evidence presented to the House of Commons in 1842 (a quarter of a century before Arnold's Dover Beach was published), in favour of repealing "certain acts of Elizabeth and James 1st, as inflicted penalties for the non-attendance on divine worship."

A fact worth remembering, whenever anybody makes the standard rhetorical contrast between the warm, simple faith of our forefathers and foremothers and the supposedly cold, calculating rationality of a less religiously-observant age. That simple faith was often encouraged by the simple threat of fines or, if you were too poor to pay a fine, prison.

Ukip 2.0 - still vapourware, one year on

So the mighty populist party that once boasted one whole member of parliament has now lost control of the only local authority it controlled.

But those politicians who cowered in terror at the awesome force that was Ukip should still beware. Remember, in March 2017, Arron Banks announced the birth of a new, improved Ukip 2.0 from the smouldering ashes of the old Ukip:

Arron Banks, the Ukip donor who bankrolled the multimillion-pound Leave.EU Brexit campaign, has said he has quit Ukip and will now set up a new political force...

He also described his new movement on Tuesday as “Ukip 2.0, the Force Awakens”, although it is unlikely to use the Ukip name. He has previously suggested it could be called the “Patriotic Alliance”.

So how's it going? Well, at the time of writing, something called  The Patriotic Alliance exists as a single web page, which claims to belong to "a grassroots movement built on the success of the EU referendum", with the stated aims of "holding the political establishment to account and introducing fresh ideas to the national policy debate."

The page has is no information about what those "fresh ideas" are and provides no concrete information about the party, or even proof that it exists as more than a single web page, but if you're interested enough, you can leave your e-mail address and "pre-register" with The Patriotic Alliance.*

But Banksy's not the only one with big plans for a new, improved, Ukip. Last month, the ex-Ukip candidate best known for his "Gay donkey tried to rape my horse" claim, founded another brand new political party - complete with donkey logo, naturally.

AKA Ukip 3.0, or UCRAP (Unusually Camp Rapey Animal Party).

And now Ukip's latest ex-leader has released Ukip 4.0, a dynamic young party otherwise known as OneNation, a piece of branding which deftly combines reassuring echoes of Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister with the up-to-the-minute aesthetic of InterCaps. No wonder Henry's such a big hit with the youngs.

He’s big, red and has a nice friendly smile which makes him one of the most popular policy vacuums in the UK.

This is the mighty popular wave holding Parliament's feet to the fire over Brexit. No wonder they're too scared to change course.

___________________________

*Update -  Since writing this post, I've come across a statement from Banksy, published on the 25th of March 2017, "introducing" the The Patriotic Alliance. To be fair, there's a bit more information about the "fresh ideas" TPA are kicking around. Although "fresh" is stretching the truth a bit - from what I can see, TPA is about reheating the familiar leftovers from the Kipper wish-list: an Australian-style immigration points system, ensuring only the "right" migrants are allowed to live here, a cap of 50,000 migrants per year and making prisons more unpleasant.

Other than that, Banksy wants YOU, potential TPA supporter, to spEak You're bRanes in an "experiment ... in direct democracy", presumably designed to reanimate some kind of Frankenstein's policy monster from the collective id of the Daily Mail's comments section.

When will this exciting experiment start? The TPA's web site was "set for launch in May" according to Banksy's introduction, although he didn't specify May of which year.

In an article last April, David Lawrence of Hope Not Hate speculated that the hyped launch of The Patriotic Alliance got delayed, following Theresa May's announcement of a snap general election, because "Farage is lining UKIP up for failure in the hope that they bomb so badly that the need for an alternative – in the shape of Banks’ TPA – is obvious."

If this analysis is correct, maybe Ukip's poor showing in last years' election wasn't quite poor enough for the strategists behind TPA and maybe they're still waiting for Ukip's final implosion (which can't be far off now the party apparently lacks the funds to even stage elections for a new leader), before animating its zombie web site. Either that, or Banks is all mouth and no trousers. Time will tell.

Two games, two bloody difficult women

Ken Clarke did Theresa May a huge favour back in 2016, when he was overheard saying to a colleague, "Theresa is a bloody difficult woman, but you and I worked with Margaret Thatcher." First, he made himself look like a sexist throwback, while giving Mrs May a bit of free feminist credibility to appropriate in the spirit of #nastywoman, or "Nevertheless, she persisted."

Second, in a more specifically Conservative context, namechecking May in the same breath as Margaret Thatcher must, for many Conservatives, have sounded like the ultimate accolade. If they had any doubts before, the children of the Thatcher revolution probably shelved them at the prospect of Maggie 2.0 going forth to slay the Brussels dragon with one swing of her mighty iron handbag.

I'm no Conservative, and certainly no fan of Margaret Thatcher, but even I can see how Clarke's careless comparison must have burnished May's reputation at a critical time. After all, Thatcher fans can point to the negotiating record of Bloody Difficult Woman 1.0 and say "look, she went to Europe and got us our rebate." And they'd be right. That actually happened.

Of course, since the Tories booted up Maggie 2.0, AKA the Maybot, the new model has failed to extract any similar concessions from Europe. Disappointed Thatcher fans will probably put this failure down to her lacking the conviction and resolve of the original Iron Lady, but at this point, I'd start to disagree with them.

Yes, Margaret Thatcher negotiated some meaningful concessions from Europe where May, playing an even higher-stakes game, has so far failed. But I don't put May's failure down to personal deficiencies. Rather, I think that she's playing a different game to the one Thatcher won and, in this new game, the odds are stacked against her and the House almost always wins:

Here’s the idea: two-level game tactics, in which you reduce your win-set with a view to maximising the chances of your preferred option carrying the day, work if everyone prefers staying together over not finding a solution. This is known as a battle of the sexes game: John wants to go to the football game while Mary wants to go to the theatre, but both want to do something together rather than go alone. A battle of the sexes game is about the unequal distribution of outcomes when both want to cooperate. So, as long as the UK is in the EU, being a slightly recalcitrant member works in its favour because the rest of the EU wants a deal more than no deal.

While it works well as long as the UK wants to remain an EU member, the two-level game tactics backfire when you are negotiating leaving the EU. Drawing red lines when you don’t want to cooperate anymore is massively counterproductive, even if you negotiate among equals but certainly if the other party controls the process. Since there is de facto no second level anymore – the UK has had its Brexit vote and, as Theresa May reminds us almost daily, Brexit means Brexit – the UK no longer is able to use that as a way of forcing other EU member states to inch closer to its preferred outcome. It is, indeed, much simpler to negotiate opt-outs during forty years of membership than opt-ins when leaving the EU.

Thatcherites are, I think, wrong to put May's failure down to a lack of bloody mindedness. As far as I can see, she's got enough of that to be either praised for her resolve, or damned for her stubbornness, depending on your point of view. What she doesn't bring to the table is a deterrent. When Thatcher negotiated her rebate, her negotiating partners gave ground because they had a relationship to save. Mrs May has not only filed for divorce, but has said, repeatedly, "Divorce means divorce."

It reminds me of that bit in The Life of Brian, where a high priest, or some such cleric, is sentencing an old man to be stoned to death for blasphemously uttering the name of Jehovah. When the old man accidentally blasphemes some more, the cleric says "You're only making it worse for yourself!" No longer having anything to lose, the old man replies "Making it worse?! How could it be worse?! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!" In the end, the cleric himself ends up being stoned, but I guess it's a bit late to remind the vicar's daughter that some serious self-examination is generally recommended before casting the first stone:

Nuts!

... is the title of a summer blockbuster I'd pay good money to see:

Can technology save us from shark attacks? BBC (David L). You are more likely to die from a coconut falling on your head. Seriously. Even after allowing for debate over how far you could generalize from the original study and cutting the extrapolation by a full order of magnitude. But no one makes movies about falling coconuts.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back under the tree...

"We have heard rumblings"

It's not my place to tell other people how to do their jobs, but what the hell. Here's a template for schools, showing how not to communicate with parents:

"Re: staffing for next year. All staff are fully qualified and experienced teachers who we check carefully. We have heard rumblings from parents who may have concerns. Please come and speak to Mrs [redacted] so you can be reassured. No negative comments on here please. We always endeavour to listen and work with you. Thank you [redacted]."

"Why don't we just put any information that parents might need to hear in one place, on the school website?"

"Because we're down with the kids; we're all about social media, sharing and interactivity! Let's create a Facebook group and use that to keep in touch with parents! They'll love it! They can tell us how great we are, share cute photos and everything!"

"But what about parents who don't do Facebook?"

"La, la, la, not listening!"

"And if you invite people to interact, doesn't that create a systemic risk of people sharing things you'd prefer they spoke privately to staff about? Isn't the result just curated, fake interactivity, that pretends to welcome sharing and feedback, but patronises parents like naughty five year olds if they say anything that isn't positive?"

"BORING!!!"

For the record, I haven't used Facebook in about a decade and don't know the specifics of what the parents in question had been "rumbling" about. I just think the whole set-up is asking for trouble, as well as being annoying to non-Facebook users like me.

People shouldn't need a Facebook account in order to do important things like keeping in touch with their children's schools.

Question: "How deep is your love?"

Answer (if you're Transport for London): "As deep as a fifteen floor building."

Geoff Marshall plumbs the depths:

"Insecurity is fantastic" revisited

The usual paranoia warning applies here ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), but some things are so stupid that they look a lot like deliberate sabotage:

One disconcerting possibility is that figures such as Fox and Rees-Mogg might be willing to believe the dismal economic forecasts, but look on them as an attraction.

This isn’t as implausible as it may sound. Since the 1960s, conservatism has been defined partly by a greater willingness to inflict harm, especially in the English-speaking world. The logic is that the augmentation of the postwar welfare state by the moral pluralism of the 1960s produced an acute problem of ‘moral hazard’, whereby benign policies ended up being taken for granted and abused. Once people believe things can be had for free and take pleasure in abundance, there is a risk of idleness and hedonism.

Remember, Peter Hargreaves, the stockbroker who spent £3.2 million on funding Leave.EU, said this in an unguarded moment before the referendum:

...a vote to leave would create uncertainty in the UK.

 But he argued that was what the country needed, saying it "would be the biggest stimulus to get our butts in gear that we have ever had".

"It will be like Dunkirk again," he said. "We will get out there and we will be become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic."

Are they just trying to "take back control" in an incredibly inefficient way? Or are they deliberately conspiring to make our lives insecure in a very efficient way?