Spotify Playlist for 27/07 – Scott Walker, Bach, Os Mutantes
A couple of things about today’s Spotify playlist. Firstly, I’m starting to lose track of what I’ve posted before, so if some tracks come up more than once, forgive me. I’m assuming no-one’s listening to *all* of these, anyway, just the ones that sound interesting to them.
The other thing is the notable lack of female artists. This is partly because my record collection is male-dominated, but also a lot of my favourite female performers (Carolyn Edwards and Joanna Newsom to name two) aren’t on Spotify yet. Anyone know of any really good female singers/songwriters I’d like?
Anyway, today’s playlist
Cossacks Are by Scott Walker is the opening song from his most recent (and to my mind best) album, The Drift. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about, but it sounds astonishing. Remember, this is someone who started his career in a boy band doing Four Seasons covers…
The Knife by Genesis is included after reading Gavin B’s post about it – it’s almost good enough to forgive them for Phil Collins.
Pale And Precious by The Dukes Of Stratosphear is XTC in their guise as a fake 60s psych band doing a perfect Beach Boys pastiche, while still managing to be a truly great song in its own right. Gorgeous stuff. Just listen to the “Don’t care what the others might say” section – it’s got *exactly* the same unexpected chord progression – and indeed the same distrust of other people in general and wish they’d disappear attached to an absolute adoration of one person in particular – that would happen in a Brian Wilson song at that point.
At this point, the playlist is a little proggy, so there’s a couple of simpler songs.
I’m Leaving It All Up To You by Don & Dewey is a song I found on a wonderful compilation called Frank Zappa’s Jukebox, which consists of stuff that Zappa listened to as a teenager, and so is a mixture of ‘difficult’ modern classical, skronking jazz and greasy blues and doo-wop. It’s an absolute treasure of a compilation.
Shakin’ All Over by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates is one of those records that was an absolutely massive hit in Britain in the early ’60s but almost no-one outside the UK knows. It’s a shame as it’s one of the great records of that period between Elvis getting drafted and the first Beatles record, which is generally regarded as a dead period in music but in fact produced people like Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and others who were far more influential than people now realise.
Movie Magg by Carl Perkins is a great record in its own right, but also a window into a time that seems a million years ago – this is a song about taking a girl to the cinema, but on the back of a horse. And recorded in the 1950s. The weird juxtaposition of the modern (the electrical kinematograph still seems modern to me, I am afraid) and what feels like the ancient, a song about a lost way of life that is still in the memory of many living, in a song that was a modern pop song at the time my Dad was born, seems very strange to me…
You Don’t Have To Walk In The Rain by The Turtles is from one of the very great overlooked albums of the 60s, Turtle Soup. This was the Turtles’ attempt to make their own Village Green Preservation Society and was produced by Ray Davies, and is a halfway house between the Kinks’ English pastoral and the Turtles’ California pop whose closest comparison is probably Odessey & Oracle. This was the single from the album, and the most conventional track on it, but I love the line “I look at your face/I love you anyway”.
Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball? by Buddy Johnson is for my wife, who’s spent most of the last few weeks watching rounders over the internet rather than talking to her long-suffering husband ;)
Opening Titles by Don Preston is another of Preston’s orchestral pieces. I’m becoming more and more convinced, the more I hear of Preston’s work, that he had the potential to be a true great had he not spent the last forty years in the shadow of his old boss. Shame.
The Prelude to the first Lute Suite in E Minor by Bach is just here because I like Bach’s lute pieces. So should you.
Lady Came From Baltimore by Scott Walker is as different from the opening track as you could get – a cover of a folk-pop song by Tim Hardin – but is still a lovely little track, overlooked in comparison to the darker stuff on Walker’s first few solo albums.
Arnaldo Said by the Wondermints is the only Wondermints track on Spotify at the moment, unfortunately. Weirdly, this is on an Os Mutantes tribute album, even though it’s a Wondermints original. But speaking of Mutantes…
Bat Macumba by Os Mutantes is my favourite track by Brazil’s greatest psychedelic band – not much of a song, but just listen to it as a *sound*, the way the totally different sonic environments are laid on each other…
Everyone Says I Love You by Janet Klein is a lovely little acoustic performance of the Marx Brothers song from Horse Feathers (and if I lent any of you my box set of Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers and Monkey Business, could I have it back, please? I’ve completely forgotten who I lent it to…)
Wonderful/Song For Children by Rufus Wainwright is a stunning performance of the first half of the second movement of Smile, and shows that Smile wasn’t just a great record, but the songs were great songs. Wonderful, especially, deserves to be regarded as part of ‘the great American songbook’.
Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair by Bessie Smith is another track by one of the all-time great blues singers, but to be honest I’ve included it for the horn playing.
And Over The Reef by Duncan Browne is a song I’m not even sure I like, but there’s something to it… it’s a very twee, folky thing which could smack of James Taylor, but there’s a sort of Incredible String Bandness about it that makes it work… I think… what do you think?
Anyway, I’m off til a week on Tuesday. Don’t turn this place into a tip while I’m gone…
Linkblogging for 26/07/09
Most comic blogs have gone quiet except for the ‘news’ coming from San Diego Geek-Demographic Media-Property Con, of which the only remotely interesting news is that part of the whole Marvelman/Miracleman rights mess has been sorted out. I’d love for this to mean that some time soon I can read Moore and Gaiman’s runs on the title in proper paper format, rather than as CBRs.
Gavin reviews a Ladybird book on Oliver Cromwell.
Brad Hicks explains what actually happened in the Henry Louis Gates arrest.
Marc-Oliver says that Longbox will be the eMusic of comics. I certainly hope so – I’ve argued we needed one for years.
Adam Curtis, one of my favourite documentary filmmakers, has released his latest, It Felt Like A Kiss, as a Flash video on his blog. Not seen it yet (no Flash on this browser) but I can guarantee it’ll be good.
And Costigan has a strategy to get fair votes.
Possible Future Posts
I’ve got a lot of ideas for future posts (I *always* have far more ideas for posts than I have time to post them), and I’m going to write some but not all when I’m in Greece. I’m interested in which ones people would like to read about, so here’s a list of what I might do. No promises that I’ll actually write the ones most people want, but I’m just interested:
A long post on the Cerebus graphic novel Guys.
A review of the About Time series of books on Doctor Who
A post on the Beatles
A post about my own songwriting, and why I’ve not produced much new music recently, and why I still want to
“Evidence-Based” Medicine – why it isn’t
Why Liberals Should Use GNU/Linux
A post on Bryan Talbot’s Alice In Sunderland
A post on Rick Veitch’s Maximortal and Rare Bit Fiends
A post on the Curt Boettcher/Gary Usher axis of soft-pop music in the late 1960s
A guide to my blogroll (my readership crosses a few boundaries – there are ‘politics people’, ‘doctor who people’, ‘comics people’ and ‘music people’ all reading this – and ‘comics people’ may not be aware of politics bloggers they’d be interested in and vice versa).
A Big Finish A ‘Week’ – Thicker Than Water
Apologies for the continued lack of posts – unfortunately I’ve had to work a lot of long days this week, as we’re preparing for a release. I’m going to try to get a few posts up this weekend, and while I’m away next week (on holiday with my family, with no net access) I’ll try to write a *lot* of stuff, so when I get back I’ll have a backlog to post.
The biggest problem with Paul Sutton’s Thicker Than Water is also its greatest strength, which is that it is explicitly part of a larger continuity, and the end of a ‘story arc’. As (in story terms) the last story to feature Dr Evelyn Smythe, it ties up details of her relationship with the Doctor. It’s a sequel to the earlier story Arrangements For War, where Evelyn’s reactions were based on the events of Project: Lazarus, which was in turn a sequel to Project: Twilight. Meanwhile, the emotional turning point of the last episode (which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t yet heard it) is a revelation about the events in a completely different set of stories – the Cyberman trilogy The Reaping, The Gathering and The Harvest, which were in themselves a series of stories involving three different Doctors in reverse-chronological order and…
You see what I mean?
Rather miraculously, the story still works as a decent adventure story without having heard these stories, and for the most part you can pick up what you need to know, but there are a few scenes in the last episode that pack a real punch when you’ve heard them but would just be confusing without it.
Overall, however, the story is extremely effective. Doing the ‘new companion meets an old one’ story a good few months before it happened in the nuWho episode School Reunion, and in a significantly more adult manner, one of the two main plots of this story involves the Doctor taking Melanie Knownasmel off to meet Evelyn, who he credits with having mellowed him and made him a more decent person, but who (it is revealed) he left in a somewhat petulant manner when she decided to marry.
The scenes between the Doctor and Evelyn are some of the best acting you’ll hear – especially at the end when Evelyn tells the Doctor (for the only time) “I love you”. It’s clear in context that she means it in a fatherly way – it’s also clear that he may have loved her in a somewhat different way. But the performances here are a world away from the mopey teenage angsting of the new show – these are very *grown-up* performances, Colin Baker’s Doctor clearly embarrassed by any kind of display of real emotion, his bumptiousness and bluster all shown as cover for a very restrained, repressed person who cares more than he ever dare let show. At their best (and they are at their best here) Colin Baker and Maggie Stables have a rapport completely unlike anything in TV Who – a genuinely adult, *real* relationship between characters who are real people. It’s very unfortunate that it was decided after this to reduce the number of stories featuring Evelyn (and the scripts for those with her in have been noticeably worse since this than the ones before it), as they’re really the only ones in which the Doctor has a truly adult relationship with his companion, and they’re all the better for it.
The main ‘adventure’ plot, on the other hand, is fairly easy to follow for even someone who knows little or nothing of Doctor Who. Doctor Who (the original show and spin-offs, but not the new series) was always about … well, ‘always’ is a big word… one of the most enduring themes of Doctor Who, from the very second story up until the last series, was the fight between small-l liberalism and fascism, specifically Nazism. Almost all the memorable stories in Doctor Who have been about this in some way , from the what-if-the-Nazis-won of The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, through the whole of Tom Baker’s first series, through Curse Of Fenric, with villains like the Sontarans being caricature German officers, only missing a monocle.
The audios have returned to this theme a few times – sometimes rather clumsily just having the Doctor fight some Nazis, as in Colditz, but often looking more at the moral issues involved. Davros, for example, is ‘about’ Holocaust denial. This story, in so far as it is ‘about’ anything (and for the most part it’s actually about the human relationships involved, rather than about the subject of the plot) is about the morality of using data from Nazi ‘experiments’ to save lives (see this link if you’re unaware of the debate about this, but be warned – some of the stuff described there would turn anyone’s stomach). Actually, the debate is twisted a couple of times in this for plot purposes – it’s not a straightforward morality tale – but it at least nods to the issues, which is more than many supposedly more thoughtful stories do.
So while by no means the best of the Baker Big Finish stories, this is a good, solid story, raised above what it should have been by the performances of the two leads (and despite Bonnie Langford’s equal billing here, it really is a Sixth Doctor and Evelyn story). The only real annoyance (at least if you’re familiar with the rest of the stories referenced) is that the science at the end is so poor – I for one would like to see a ban on the use of the term ‘DNA’ from all SF/fantasy/superhero stories. DNA DOES NOT DO WHAT YOU THINK IT DOES, SF WRITERS! Today alone, I have ingested chicken DNA, potato DNA, corn DNA, wheat DNA, cow DNA and probably the DNA of a few other species as well. I have not yet turned into a horrible chickpocowheacow , and nor would I have had I injected same directly into my veins. See also black holes (I’m looking at *you*, new Star Trek film).
In general, it’s far better to just use made-up nonsense terms if you’re doing made-up nonsense science – using the real terms won’t make any difference to anyone who doesn’t understand them, and will only remove any suspension of disbelief from those who do.
But that apart, this is definitely worth a listen for Baker and Stables’ performances, and I only hope Big Finish will soon start giving this pairing some more solid stories together.
Linkblogging for 22/07/09
Sorry for the lack of posting over the last few days, but I was unprepared for the amount of vitriol that came at me for that “Ten Things…” post (not, I hasten to add, from my regular reader/commenters, who mostly kept civil, whether here or over on Charlotte’s response – and I’m very impressed with some of you, like James and Pillock…). I’ve been mostly scared away from the internet by this (meaning I’ve also not done a few important things like sort out hosting for a website I’m working on…) . I’ve also had some other problems (lost my passport, someone stole my wife’s bike, someone else tried to steal my wife’s purse) which have been rather more pressing than this blog.
I would like to say though, ignoring the actual abuse and so forth, that one thing I found annoying was when people saw two apparently-contradictory statements and said “That’s a contradiction, therefore you’re stupid!” rather than “That looks contradictory to me – how do you reconcile those points?”
I will be doing a post, soonish, on how ‘evidence-based medicine’ as currently practiced is actually in many respects anti-scientific, but I’ll be leaving it until the fuss dies down. I’ll also be on holiday next week, without net access, so don’t expect anything from me then. But this week I’m hoping to get a few more posts done, on the usual subjects rather than anything controversial. Today, though, some links…
Most Lib Dem bloggers have been talking about the proposed policy document that’s just come out, which will not commit us to as much spending in the event we were to get into power. (We will still *hope* to spend as much, but recognise it’s not likely as the current GDP is fifty pence, and that’s being taken out of the country and held in an off-shore tax haven by Rupert Murdoch). Alex has what I suspect is the most accurate take on this, but Darrell and Costigan both have good posts too.
Calamity Jon has a post about a genuinely touching moment in 60s Superman, which also contains the best description of comic book ‘ages’ ever.
Slacktivist talks about offendedness, including a remarkable picture which is apparently the first ever Christ-on-the-cross image…
The Daily Mail have been reviewing films without bothering to watch them…
And Microsoft are ‘donating’ code to the Linux kernel…
Well, That Was Interesting… (And An Apology)
Debi got the point of that previous post, with her comment:
You’re right. I do.
However, the statements are too broad and brief to effectively invite me to debate the detail of any of your positions. So simply; yes, I disagree with a lot of these.
That was exactly the point (or part of it). It’s absolutely amazing to me how people ‘read into’ things, seeing statements that just aren’t there. I’ve deliberately not argued too much with commenters here, but I did to an extent over on Charlotte’s insta-reaction page. Charlotte herself didn’t infer *too* much that wasn’t there in the original post (though she did seem to assume, oddly for someone who knows me, that my disapproval of something equals the wish to ban it) but some of the comments on her blog are arguing about things that bear no relation to my points, such as they are (for example Roger Thornhill somehow jumping from a semantic argument about whether words that don’t have clearly-defined referents can be meaningful to a claim that I view humans as chattel, incapable of informed choice). Richard in the comments section to the post below is still bravely arguing against statements I never made, though as I explain myself little by little in Charlotte’s comments he’s become more understanding.
So in a sense, Charlotte was right about me ‘trolling’ – I wanted to see what posting some genuinely controversial views would do. But I do stand by *the statements I made*, as opposed to *the statements people assumed I was making* – some of them are, to the best of my knowledge, facts. Others are matters of taste. I was just interested in how people who read my blog were interpreting my statements.
Interestingly, the comments from people who are long-term readers of my blog tended to infer something like the intended meanings from the statements, as far as I can tell, while those who’ve come from Charlotte’s link (and Charlotte has been reading this a relatively short time, and most of her readers won’t have read my stuff before as we have very different audiences) misinterpreted a lot of what I said (along with assuming that I am stupid and/or evil).
This suggests to me that the context of my previous posts over a course of months or years allows people to ‘fill in’ somewhat the arguments I would have made had I chosen to. Either that, or people who read my blog agree with me generally ;)
It’s no surprise that Debi, who is both scientifically trained and someone I’ve known for years, was the first person to state that she wasn’t going to debate because there wasn’t actually enough content there to debate with.
If anyone’s genuinely interested in how I can justify those statements, let me know – because I *can* justify them (I only stated things that I genuinely think). I won’t be doing it in comments, however, because each one of them would require a post or several of its own – so also don’t expect the posts immediately…
(Oh, and one more thing – I do find it quite insulting that so many people consider me incapable of thinking of the immediate obvious objections to my statements. Generally when someone makes a ‘controversial’ statement, they’re either ignorant and stupid, or they know more about the subject than most people. I may fit into the former category, but it’s depressing how many people assume I do without checking…)
ETA In response to Debi’s comment that she felt like this was a test of the readers of the post, and she resented being tested, I can only apologise. That wasn’t my intention – I wanted to test how people were reacting to my writing, because I am becoming increasingly unsure of my own ability to communicate effectively. It was me I was testing, not you, and I am very sorry that I’ve actually upset at least one person I like and respect, and possibly other people too.
ETA To clarify the clarification… what I was trying to do was see if, with only minimal statements, people *who normally read my blog* would jump to the correct or incorrect conclusions about what I was actually saying. Mostly they did, with the exception of Debi who made the wider point that I wasn’t saying anything concrete at all. People like Duncan and David seemed to get what I was saying, even though the content was almost non-existent, because they’ve read a lot of my posts. People who don’t regularly read my blog mostly didn’t – but I wasn’t expecting them to read it, pretty much by definition (which is why I commented in far more detail on Charlotte’s blog than on my own). What I certainly wasn’t doing was sitting there saying “Ha ha ha, look at the fools! I have befuddled them with the cunning power of ambiguity and brevity!”
I also think the actual ‘ten things you disagree’ with thing is a genuinely good idea on its own, for a whole variety of reasons.
But that post, more than any other, was intended for my normal audience, It was intended as a bit of fun and a test of my own writing ability, and I was *not* expecting it to be linked by a blog that is far higher-profile and has a very different audience than my own.
The conclusion I came to, for the record, is that the more of my previous writing someone has read, the more they will be on the same wavelength with my other writing. Which suggests that aiming my writing at the people I know already read this could be dangerously counter-productive, as people will take away the opposite meaning from what I intend. As I inadvertantly also proved.
Again, I apologise if anyone was offended, or felt like I was testing them. I wasn’t. Truly. And I had no intention of upsetting anyone. I just wanted to test a hypothesis about my own writing while simultaneously doing something that on its own merits I thought might be quite a fun little ‘meme’. I am absolutely mortified, in particular, that I caused offence to Debi, who I respect greatly and consider a good friend, and Mark, who I don’t know well but whose blog I admire.
Ten Things You’ll Disagree With
I’ll do a proper post tonight, but I just thought this would be interesting… I’m going to make ten statements of things I consider to be true but which (I suspect) a vast majority of my readers disagree with. This isn’t a ‘meme’, but I would be interested to see other people try this…
1) Much (but by no means all, or even most) so-called ‘alternative medicine’ is actually effective. Conversely much (but by no means all, or even most) conventional medicine is pseudoscientific quackery.
2) Government intervention in the economy can often be a good thing.
3) Art should be measured primarily by how novel the ideas it communicates are, secondarily by its moral tone, and lastly by the technical skill with which it communicates them. By this measure the works of Jane Austen, for example, are of considerably less merit than even most potboiling bestsellers.
4) There is no such thing as a consistently moral opponent of immigration – unless that person also advocates enforced birth control, in which case they are consistent but wrong.
5) The scientific method is the single most important thing children could possibly be taught, and should take priority over everything else.
6) That said, spelling and grammar *matter*. The written word is a means of information transfer, and bad spelling and grammar add noise to the signal. Linguistic rules are arbitrary, but that doesn’t matter – what matters is that everyone abides by the same conventions.
7) Most music of the Classical and Romantic periods is pap. The influence of Mozart, leading to the effective death of counterpoint for two hundred years, was the most pernicious in musical history.
8) The term ‘free will’ is literally meaningless, and the hoops physicists jump through in order to reconcile it with experimental and theoretical results are ridiculous.
9) The ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. is dangerous. It is entirely possible to hold religious beliefs and be a rational person (though probably not to be a dogmatic follower of any major religion while doing so). The battle they should be fighting is not religion vs atheism, but dogmatism vs secularism – a battle on which many religious people of goodwill would be on their side.
10) The lending of money at interest is immoral.
New Spotify Playlist – All This Is That
This week’s playlist (a day or two early) started out as a ‘what I’ve listened to this week’ one, then mutated slightly. Now it’s *mostly* soft-psychedelia, with a little raw bluesy stuff thrown in. I think it works…
All This Is That by The Beach Boys is from the criminally underrated Carl & The Passions: So Tough, an album I’d put in their top five. This one’s written by Mike Love, Al Jardine and Carl Wilson, and lyrically is gibberish about Transcendental Meditation, but works just for Love and Wilson’s wonderful vocals (especially Wilson’s soaring ‘jai guru dev’ falsetto at the end). The current touring ‘Beach Boys’ often perform this live, and it’s usually the best thing in the show.
Cross-Hatched World by Chewy Marble is a great piece of 60s-esque pop from Modulations, one of my favourite albums of last year. For those who don’t know, Chewy Marble are led by Brian Kassan, the former bass player for the Wondermints, and are very much the same kind of band.
When The World Is At Rest by Janet Klein And Her Parlor Boys is in here for the delightful tuned percussion. Janet Klein, for those who don’t know, does “Lovely, Naughty and Obscure Music of the 1910′s, 20s and 30′s”, and very well, with a wonderful sense of humour but a respect and love for the material.
Wavestrumental by Tripsitter is from California Son – a very strong album let down somewhat by attempts to sound too much like the Beach Boys (down to quoting Friends and When I Grow Up for no real reason). This track, on the other hand, sounds just like the High Llamas, albeit the High Llamas at their most Beach Boysy, and is all the better for it. A gorgeous little mostly-instrumental, with a lovely vibraphone part.
Where Have You Been All My Life by The Stool Pigeons is a cover of the Mann/Weill song best known as a Gerry And The Pacemakers track. The Stool Pigeons are a band led by Lisa Jenio (also of Candypants and The Negro Problem) who do covers of Merseybeat songs with a punk aesthetic. This one’s one of their few ballads, done as a torch song with loud guitars. Great stuff.
Come And Get It by The Knickerbockers is not, as one might expect from a band best known as Beatles soundalikes, a cover of the Paul McCartney song that was a hit for Badfinger. Rather, it’s a remarkably good bit of blue-eyed soul, sounding very like the Spencer Davis Group or the Small Faces at their most bluesy. This really deserved to be a hit.
The Bride Stripped Bare by Don Preston is not the similarly-named Bonzo Dog Band song, but a really gorgeous Stravinsky-esque piece by the former Mother Of Invention turned jazzman (and, latterly, nostaligia circuit performer). It’s a shame Preston’s so overshadowed by his ex-boss, as he’s very, very talented himself.
No More Hot Dogs by Hasil Adkins is the greatest track by the mad rockabilly one-man band, one of many revolving around his favourite themes of murder and meat. This one’s an invitation to (presumably) his girlfriend to have her head cut off and hung on his wall, so she ‘won’t eat no more hot dogs’.
Electricity by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band is from what I still consider one of Beefheart’s best albums, his first, when there seemed a slight possibility that by compromising just *slightly* he could have commercial success. My friend Tilt once said that another song on this album sounded just like the Monkees, and indeed the ‘sung’ vocals here sound very Mike Nesmith. That said, the spoken vocals and theremin part leave no doubt who this is – Beefheart was trying to put his ideas in commercial form, but still using *his* ideas, rather than the pandering of Unconditionally Guaranteed.
Bubblegum by Kim Fowley is one of several attempts that Fowley, whose metier was novelty records, made to be psychedelic. One imagines it might not be wholly serious.
Kyrie Eleison by The Electric Prunes was, until my friend Blake Jones used it as the theme for one of his albums, the best pop-music Kyrie ever. This is from a time when the Electric Prunes had actually split, and David Axelrod was putting out albums of religious-based psychedelic music under their name, involving one or two original members. The band disown the albums now, but I think they’re rather good.
Cherry Picker by Candypants is a typically funny, observant lyric from Lisa Jenio, but what really makes this for me is the bass part, and the chord progression in the bridge, which sounds very Roger Nichols to me.
And Checkin’ In, Checkin’ Out by The High Llamas is unfortunately one of only three of their songs on Spotify, and not at all typical of them. However, it is a great little pop song, in a sort of middle-of-the-road acousticy way.
Oh, And
The political ‘blogosphere’ is talking right now about nothing except Iain Dale’s ego-trip the Total Politics Blog Awards, where all Iain Dale’s readers vote on their favourite blogs and Iain Dale gets to win, which must be very nice for him.
I won’t be taking part myself, because I have no interest in Dale’s gossip-mongering. But I know some of my readers will be, so I want to ask a favour. Could you vote for two of my personal favourite political bloggers, Debi Linton and Jennie Rigg ?
Neither of them ever get recognised in these things. This is partly because they blog about multiple subjects (but then so do plenty of people regarded as ‘politics bloggers’) and partly because their blog platforms (LiveJournal and DreamWidth) also function as social networking sites, but both of them suspect (as do I) that a lot of their lack of recognition comes from the fact that a lot of their political posts are about feminism, which isn’t regarded as ‘real’ politics in the way that, say, gossip over who said what to who in leaked Westminster emails apparently is.
Nothing would please me better than to see those two beating out some of the ‘important politics bloggers’ who get called on by the BBC, like Dale himself or Mark Littlewood or Derek Draper…
Euro Elections And MP’s Expenses
Well, I’m nothing if not topical…
I wanted to write something on this more than a month ago, but my lack of net access pushed it on to the back burner until now. However, this month’s Liberator contained several articles on these things, which have brought everything back to mind.
The first thing to say is that the BNP’s success in the Euro elections was *very* easily avoidable. The fact is, the only parties that actually treated the Euro election as a serious one were the BNP, racist UKIP, and the Greens. They’re the only parties that did *any* campaigning worthy of the name.
Which is not to say that individuals in those parties didn’t do anything – they did. But I could probably name every single person in South Manchester who did any campaigning at all for the Lib Dems – I would be *shocked* if it was more than thirty in total – and what was done was remarkably half-hearted.
Now that makes sense in a party with a limited budget – you have to choose your battles – but the fact is that despite what people like Rupert Reed (who complained vociferously that the Lib Dems said in a leaflet that he couldn’t win, and then he didn’t win) think, the election wasn’t a contest between parties, but *should* have been an attempt to get out any voters at all. Something like a third of the country voted, and if the proportions of support are broadly the same throughout the population as they were among voters, any of the big three parties could have had a landslide had they got out *all* their vote (and the smaller ones could have got many more MEPs if they had). The problem was we didn’t try hard enough to get out our vote.
But also, one thing I heard time and again when calling people or door-knocking was that people weren’t going to vote at all, because of the expenses row.
Now, like a lot of people I was not actually all *that* bothered by the MPs expenses row, because compared to getting us involved in two unwinnable wars for no good reason, destroying rights that have lasted centuries , destroying the welfare state, encouraging racism for political gain, torture, the wholesale funneling of billions of pounds of public money into the hands of incompetent private contractors, mismanagement of the economy on an epic scale and the continued existence of David Blunkett, fiddling the expenses seems such a trivial crime that to complain about it would be like telling the Elephant Man his new haircut didn’t suit him.
I also didn’t think it really affected the Lib Dems in this election, because Chris Davies, the incumbent Lib Dem MEP, had a cast-iron record on fighting corruption in the European Parliament, while John Leech, the local MP in the area I was canvassing, is in the bottom 10% of MPs on expenses claims (he certainly doesn’t have an expensive car or anything like that, as I discovered when he gave a lift to four of us in his tiny car – I nearly pulled a muscle trying to get my large frame out of that confined space).
But the problem is, the expenses row had affected people more than I thought possible. Firstly, because it had been so prominent in the news that people who knew nothing of those other events knew it (and there are a *lot* of people who don’t pay any attention at all – one of the people I called thought I was calling for ‘the Social Democrats’ – a party that disbanded twenty years ago – while another said ‘Oh yes, I’ll vote for Liberal Democrats – Mr Cameron’s lot’) – and those people weren’t going to distinguish between parties. But more importantly, it knocked the will to care out of a lot of people because it *hit home*. It was something they could relate to.
Time and again I heard the same thing from people – that they didn’t begrudge legitimate expenses at all (and most people recognised the need for reasonable expenses) but that what got them was that these people who were gaming the system for all they could were in power and making it almost impossible for people at the bottom end of the income scale to claim what they were entitled to.
One poor woman, a lifelong Lib Dem, said she just couldn’t bring herself to vote at all because of the expenses row, because after her husband died, she’d been turned down for benefits. She couldn’t work, because she stayed at home to look after her disabled daughter, but the benefits office had insisted that she couldn’t get benefits because she had a partner. “I kept telling them, she’s not my partner, she’s my daughter! But they wouldn’t listen!”
People like that see a wall of bureaucracy put in place just to stop them claiming the essentials for survival from a state they’ve paid taxes to all their life, and see the people at the top able to take what they like without consequence, because pretty much everyone in Parliament comes from the upper-middle or upper classes, and have no real understanding what difference forty quid a week can make to people at the bottom. (Boris Johnson calling a quarter of a million a year “chicken feed” is an example – it’d take me nearly ten years to earn that, and I’m comfortably off). And those people voted the Tories out in 1997 because they were sleaze-ridden, corrupt, and victimising those at the bottom of society. They were told that “Things Can Only Get Better”, and are now seeing that Labour are no different at all to the Tories. If your only two options for government are identical, then giving up on voting makes sense.
And that, even more than the unnecessary deaths of millions, even more than the torture, even more than the economic collapse, is the *real* crime of the New Labour ‘project’ and this government. It’s taken away from millions of people the hope that anything could ever be any better.
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