On The Day That Thatcher Died . . . An Epitaph of Tweets

On the day that Thatcher died there were millions of tweets pouring into cyberspace. This selection of them is an archive for anyone who didn't really understand the feelings of the majority of people in Britain about Thatcher.

How dare politicians tell us we must respect Mrs Thatcher - she ruined our society - she was as loathed as Saddam Hussein, she really was. -- Julie-Ann (@BienSoeur)

Best thing the left can do after Thatcher's death is resist the coming hagiography & ensure her shameful political record is fully contested -- David Wearing (@davidwearing)

Thatcherism is undead. -- Daniel Trilling (@trillingual)

Whatever we blame Blair or Cameron for; they're only continuing that woman's work. The destruction of the welfare state is her epitaph. -- Dan Thompson (@artistsmakers)

Nothing to celebrate. The battle continues. -- Thee Faction (@TheeFaction)

@PhilosophyExp @stefanstern civility? she fucking sold it along with our other national assets -- e_p_smythe (@e_p_smythe)

@BienSoeur I can't believe the number of people mourning her loss given the social injustice and inequality she promoted. So much hypocrisy. -- Sue Hill (@SusieSpur)

The death of Thatcherism would be something to celebrate. The death of Thatcher is just... the death of an old lady. -- Holly Robinson (@holbolrob)

Watching TV news I feel like a North Korean as government and media put a spin on events that clearly doesn't reflect opinions of population -- Steven Dick (@dickmagician)

If you didn't live under a Thatcher govt pls don't get upset with those of us who did and who are NOT feeling griefstricken right now... -- Charlie Moores (@charliemoores)

Any and all Thatcher defences will be met with blockings, no exceptions -- Jim (@jcw163)

I think the hand-wringing folk fail to see that we aren't just crowing, we're all genuinely pleased -- Jim (@jcw163)

Think of her children. Her racist, disgusting children. -- Murray (@muzrobertson)

RIP, Mrs T. "Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there; I do not sleep; I am the thousand benefits cut; I am the A&E department, shut." -- Stuart Houghton (@stuarthoughton)

My dad: "I feel very sanguine about it. She may be dead but we've got these bastards instead and they're even worse." -- Ellie Mae O'Hagan (@MissEllieMae)

I have two nice, well dressed ladies in their 70s here laughing that mrs thatcher has died. She wasn't loved, she was loathed by most. -- Julie-Ann (@BienSoeur)

Busy day for Mephistopheles today. -- Drac Noise Person (@Dracnoiseperson)

Thatcher is DEAD! At last, the miners and heavy industry workers whose lives she destroyed can rejoice. -- Steve (@Cadrieu)

What bitter irony in a week when many are suffering further division & humiliation the women that started this strain of conservatism dies! -- Elizabeth (@lizzjones18)

#Thatcher may have died, but we should not be distracted from the need to fight her rancid ideology which still prevails. -- Jack Darrant (@JackDarrant)

I hope people took no happiness from the deaths of Pol Pot, Hitler, Pinochet, Marcos or Franco. That would be wrong. -- Otis B. Driftwood (@DocHackenbush)

The greatest peacetime British Prime Minister of the 20th century was Clement Attlee. -- Jacob Richardson (@jjarichardson)

As Davina would say, "Let's have a look at your best bits." To start with "No sanctions - Nelson Mandela is a terrorist." -- Mark Steel (@mrmarksteel) 

As a member of society, can I just say: "There is no such thing as Margaret Thatcher." -- Pete Sinclair (@pete_sinclair)

#Thatcher's legacy was destruction of the economy,& ppls livelihoods,3 generations of destitution & individualism over community. #NoTears -- Ed Pomfret (@EdPomfret)

I'm feeling oddly elated, and I don't know why. ;-) #NotReally #IActuallyFeelMorbidlyIndifferent #Thatcher -- Lee Hyde (@anubeon)

Interesting taboo around reactions to death. Why is it ok to have sadness reaction but not happiness? Is the dead person supposed to care? -- the greener grass (@TheSilverGreen)

So I'll try some mindfulness. I feel sad for her friends/family in mourning. I feel glad for the symbol of a tyrant's passing. I move on. -- the greener grass (@TheSilverGreen)

It shows how pathologically split we are as a culture that we can't tolerate *both* responses. Also how immature that we fear death so bad. -- the greener grass (@TheSilverGreen)

Observation: "the left" being warned re family in grief. "The right" allowed to parade Thatcher's legacy in front of every family she broke -- the greener grass (@TheSilverGreen)

Thatcherism has led to the tragic premature and ignored deaths of many thousands of people over 30 years. Let us remember them today. -- AdamRamsay (@AdamRamsay)

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This was surely the sweetest and most innocent tweet of the day -

Am I the only one who doesn't know who Margaret Thatcher is or what she's done wrong? -- Carissa Fairhurst (@CJFairhurst)

And finally, whilst I have some respect for Phillip Blond - the Red Tory - this is ridiculous. It's probably the vaguest and blandest thing he could think of saying about Mags:

The thing I liked most about Mrs Thatcher was that she had a global vision for Britain - she knew we mattered and wanted to make us matter -- Phillip Blond (@Phillip_Blond)

Here's the thing, Mr Blond - everybody on this earth matters. Thatcher didn't think the working classes mattered because they didn't, on the whole, like her, agree with her, or vote for her. So who is this "we"? As for her aspirations for Britain - she was full of ridiculous and untenable "global visions" - none of which were rooted in any kind of reality. Thanks to her privatisations, deregulations, etc, Britain and its financial system, as well as its manufacturing sector, became completely busted.

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Suzanne Moore's thoughts this week:

At least in Thatcher's day we knew what we were up against

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/10/thatcher-we-knew-what-against

She and her spawn clung like zealots to the idea that the market would somehow step into towns stripped of industry. And the ultimate free market did fill the void all right. Heroin flooded into decimated "communities".

This nostalgia is to do with activism being thrilling. She was all you wanted in a hate figure: pro-apartheid, a shrill-voiced, demi-wigged prig whose veins flowed with some repulsive idea of respectability.

She absolutely performed gender as it suited her, switching from housewife to warrior queen to grandmother. The whole housekeeping model – though incorrect – still underpins the logic of the cuts.

Thatcher, though, did not invent Thatcherism: Keith Joseph, among others, shaped it and credit must be given to cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, who deconstructed this mixture of post-Fordism, aspiration and hegemony. I was working at Marxism Today when this was happening and many of those people became ultra–Blairites, for the analysis of Thatcher's appeal resulted in New Labour. When I started working there, "the project" was revolution. When I left, "the project" was New Labour.

What matters now is that in these ultra-conservative times, oppositional culture bafflingly appears to have little to coalesce around but tax and toffs. Maybe because what remains of her agenda is privatisation that is so internalised, it is immoral. By this I mean that a loathing of those who have little, who are weak or uncertain is justified by a political discourse which says we can longer afford the weak. The Thatcherite fetishisation of strength enables the coalition to trample on the already broken. We are saving money apparently because some humans are not worth saving. That's just housekeeping.

Cameron will exploit her in death; grief, like nostalgia, is a commodity after all. A politics of utter selfishness, certainty and greed is meant to have won the day.

Thatcher dies alone. But in the Ritz. Joyless.

Layer 537 . . . A Summer of Sport, and a New Beginning

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After four years of regular blogging Oxzen has needed a sabbatical and some time off to refresh, reflect and take stock. It's been an interesting few months. 2012 has been an interesting year.

So what's been occurring?

As far as Oxzen is concerned, since the beginning of April - a great deal of watching television. March was glorious, warm and sunny, but the rain began at the start of April. It rained almost daily throughout April, May, June and July. The wettest spring and summer on record in Britain.

Not that I'm complaining. I'd had some vague idea that the summer of 2012 was going to be glorious and I'd spend day after day sitting and walking in endless sunshine. However, in many ways it was fortunate there was little possibility of spending a lot of time outside. It's been an amazing television summer.

From the beginning of April, and even before that, it was necessary to watch the many hours of live televised coverage of the Leveson Enquiry.

http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveson_Inquiry

"The first part will examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media. In particular, Lord Justice Leveson will examine the relationship of the press with the public, police and politicians."

This enquiry turned out to be a fascinating carnival of scumbags and professional liars, all rehearsed to the nth degree by their highly paid advisors and spin doctors to find every possible way of avoiding giving truthful answers to the Enquiry's questions, and if all else failed, to simply say, "I can't remember" and "I don't recall".

Leveson was supposed to examine the culture and the ethics of our media, but the use of  words like "culture" and "ethics" in relation to the majority of our predominantly nasty, supine and obsequious media is quite amusing. For "culture" read "the habitual practice of distorting the truth and whenever possible distracting the nation from anything that really matters in our national life". For "ethics" read "willingness to lie, distort, trivialise and smear; tendency to spread alarm, confusion, mystification and fear".

Throughout this spring and summer the government of Great Britain has stuck doggedly to Plan A, with all the obvious and predictable consequences. The 'rolling back' of the State and the trashing of public services has made an appalling and unnecessary economic depression even worse than it already was. The Labour party is not wrong to say that the Tories have been cutting "too far and too fast", but they are very wrong and very guilty in their collusion with the very notion that our public services should have been cut AT ALL.

Any economist with half a brain (ie those who resisted the nonsense of the neo-conservatives and the Friedmanite Chicago School) understands that in a time of recession and a failure of the private sector to invest in the British economy you need to spend MORE on public services and not LESS if you wish to avoid deflating the economy and prevent a recession from turning into a depression. For fuck's sake - we learned that lesson back in the 1930s, thanks to Keynes and Roosevelt.

For some months now we've even had the International Monetary Fund - never a hotbed of progressive liberalism - gently nudging Cameron, Osborne and Clegg towards a Plan B, and the engagement of some common sense in their economic policies. For 'common sense' read 'lack of willful stupidity and ignorance'. Even the IMF, which runs the whole globalised economy hand in glove with the World Bank, recognises that the last thing the world needs is for one its important engines of finance and potential economic growth (ie GB PLC) to crash even further into depression at a time when the worldwide economy needs reflation and growth.

What the IMF may not recognise, however, is that Cameron and Osborne, and their little chum Clegg, are acting out of an ideological conviction that cares little for world stability and economic growth. The limits of their ambitions are to ensure the prosperity of the City of London's financial institutions, and therefore of themselves and all their fat cat chums -  protected, supported and even further enriched in the face of the shitstorm that's already happening.

Contrast this with the more sensible and honest conservative leaders of Europe and the USA (i.e. Merkel and Obama) who have a real concern with the proper long-term functioning of the international capitalist system. For fuck's sake - these European conservatives are even implementing a Tobin Tax on financial transactions. Obviously our Tories will have nothing to do with this tax since it's something their pals in the City have told them they must never do.

Meanwhile the banking scandals have continued, with Barclays being busted for their criminal manipulation of Libor, RBS busted for helping drugs cartels to launder money, and now Standard Chartered busted for their well-paid assistance to Iran to avoid financial restrictions and sanctions. Ethics? In Britain? In Westminster and the City of London? Don't make us laugh.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/25/brand-osborne-is-over-recession

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Now where was I? Oh yes - the summer of television.

Euro 2012 took place between June 8th and July 1st. England, as expected, were pathetic, and were knocked out as soon as they came up against a decent team. Spain, as expected, were the winners, beating Italy 4-0 in the final.

http://www.uefa.com/uefaeuro/index.html


Wimbledon took place between 25th June and July 8th, and ended with Roger Federer's record-breaking win over Andy Murray. Roger's a phenomenon, and almost an honorary Brit. We love his decency, self-control, thoughtfulness, modesty, and of course his brilliance.

http://www.wimbledon.com/en_GB/about_aeltc/index.html


The Tour de France took place between June 30th and July 22nd. Bradley Wiggins and Chris Frome rode brilliantly, and finished in first and second places. Mark Cavendish, the other star member of the first British team to win the Tour, was also phenomenal - even though his team's support for sprint finishes was necessarily minimal, since winning the General Classification was the stated aim of the team. However, Cavendish was strong enough and fit anough by the end of the tour to win a sprint finish immediately before the final Time Trial (won by Wiggins by a mile) and also able to win for a record 4 times in a row on the final sprint-finish stage on the Champs Elysees.

http://www.letour.fr/indexTDF_us.html


And finally - the Olympics. The games took place between 27th July and 12th August. Having been drawn into compulsive watching of the Olympics four years ago by the Beijing opening ceremony, it was anticipated that these 2012 Games in London would also be addictive and compulsive. And so it turned out.

http://www.london2012.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/08/london-2012-beautiful-utopian-collective-dream

Bearing in mind that Oxzen is not a sports fanatic, usually watching very little in the way of live football, cricket, athletics, etc, and doesn't subscribe to any premium sports TV channels - it's been a very odd and very enjoyable summer. And there's still 10 days of the paralympics to come. In short, it's been distracting, fascinating, refreshing, relaxing, often exciting, and a lot of fun.

I was about to write something about last night's abysmal and embarrassing Olympics closing ceremony, but on reflection I won't. No point in ending this particular piece on a negative and sour note.

Laters.

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Random tracks of the day, thanks to Media Player:

Papa's Got A Brand New Bag - James Brown
Turn, Turn, Turn - The Byrds
Happiness is a Warm Gun - John Lennon/Beatles
Blues to Elvin -  John Coltrane
Work  -  Bob Marley

Layer 536 . . . Hollande's Victory, Clegg's Nonsense, and a Web of Privilege

Brilliant news yesterday from France - every bit as uplifting as the day Berlusconi was booted out of power in Italy -

French president François Hollande promises 'a new start' for Europe

After victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, Socialist says he will fight back against German-led austerity measures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/francois-hollande-becomes-french-president

François Hollande has won the presidency of France, turning the tide on a rightward and xenophobic lurch in European politics and vowing to transform Europe's handling of the economic crisis by fighting back against German-led austerity measures.

The 57-year-old rural MP and self-styled Mr Normal, a moderate social democrat from the centre of the Socialist party, is France's first leftwing president for 17 years. Projections from early counts, released by French television, put him on 51.9% and Nicolas Sarkozy on 48.1%.

His victory is a boost to the left in a continent that has gradually swung right since the economic crisis broke four years ago.

From the town of Tulle in his rural heartland of Corrèze in southwest France, Hollande declared victory. "May 6 should be a great date for our country, a new start for Europe, a new hope for the world," he said. "I'm sure in a lot of European countries there is relief, hope that at last austerity is no longer inevitable."

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Meanwhile, here in Poundland, we have the Guardian giving column space for Nick Clegg to make himself look as big a dickhead as he undoubtedly is:

Local elections: this coalition is stable and the centre will hold

The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition isn't about to lurch to the left or the right. We spent two years on rescue. Now it's reform

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/nick-clegg-coalition-local-elections

This is a classic, as are the dozen or more pages of comments beneath it. Enjoy.

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The wonderful Gary Younge wrote this superb column today:

A web of privilege supports this so-called meritocracy

On both sides of the Atlantic, the social ties that bind our political, legal and corporate forces lie exposed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/06/leveson-murdoch-cameron-brooks-privilege

Class privilege, and the power it confers, is often conveniently misunderstood by its beneficiaries as the product of their own genius rather than generations of advantage, stoutly defended and faithfully bequeathed. Evidence of such advantages is not freely available. It is not in the powerful's interest for the rest of us to know how their influence is attained or exercised. But every now and then a dam bursts and the facts come flooding forth.

The Leveson inquiry has provided one such moment. It was set up last year to look into the specific claims about phone hacking at the News of the World, alleged police corruption and the general culture and ethics of the British media. But every time it probes harder into the Murdoch empire it draws blood from the heart of our body politic, telling us a great deal about how Britain's political class in particular and ruling class in general collude, connive and corrupt both systemically and systematically.

Issues of alleged criminality will eventually be determined in the courts. But while illegality would be more damning, much of what we now know that is legal is no less corrosive. The evidence has laid bare the intimate, extensive and insidious web of social, familial and personal ties between the political, corporate and legal forces that govern a country: a patchwork of individual and institutional associations so tightly interwoven that to pick at one part is to watch the whole thing unravel. The "sit downs", pay-offs and class camaraderie on display owe more to a cross between Downton Abbey and the Sopranos than the functioning of a 21st-century democracy.

Now that Brooks has agreed to hand over her text messages to Cameron, we are about to learn whether rumours that they exchanged as many as 12 texts a day are true.

Brooks was arrested both on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption last year. She was arrested again this year with her husband, Charlie Brooks, on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. Charlie went to Eton with Cameron – as did the Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Such is the incestuous nature of the British ruling class and the gene puddle from which it draws its stock. Such is their brazen venality, complicity, contempt and mendacity. Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon, Westminster – if you're looking for a tiny minority who are struggling to integrate, look no further than the cabinet.

The issue here is not class envy but class entrenchment. The fact that they were born rich is irrelevant. They had no choice in the matter. But the fact that they appear to want to give even more to those who already have a great deal while denying much to those who have little is unforgiveable.

Rocked in the cradle of power from birth so that its rhythms become second nature, these people imbibe their sense of entitlement with their mother's milk. But the personal tutors, private schools, the most expensive universities do not, somehow, suffice. As though the benefits of wealth were not enough, they apparently feel the need to game the very system they already control.

Which brings us to the manner in which these interactions mock the very notion of democracy on which the nation's illusions are based. For the meetings, lunches and visits showcase a parallel, unaccountable universe where actual decisions are made and deals are done. 

Layer 534 . . . Hunt, Cameron, Murdoch, BSkyB, and Urgent Questions for the Prime Minister

So the latest polls indicate that support for the Conservatives has fallen back to 29% - which is pretty much their 'core' vote. This simply confirms that come hell or come high water somewhere between a quarter and a third of our population will continue to support the Nasty Party - either because those supporters are wealthy enough to directly benefit from Tory policies, OR because they are stupid enough to believe Tory propaganda and the crap published by Tory supporters who act as Conservative cheerleaders in our mass media.

Anyone with half a brain now understands that there really isn't any such thing as 'compassionate' Conservatism. Meet the new boss - same as the old boss. Clearly Cameron wasn't just trying to placate (and finesse) the extreme right wing of his party when he said that his mission was to finish whatever it was that Thatcher started. He really means it. He really is bent on privatising or at least marketising (which is almost as bad) our public services, on cutting them back as far as possible, on boosting the entry of private enterprise into our public services, and on selling off anything he can get away with selling off. Just like the old boss.

I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, I really did. But look at his recent behaviour. A stupid and nasty budget. One of his own backbenchers* calling him and Osborne a couple of posh boys who understand nothing about real people and their lives. A lack of apparent concern that the national economy is back in reverse gear, and back in recession. And now the revelations as to what he and his Culture Secretary have been up to vis a vis Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp empire.

As a matter of fact, even Tory commentators have been expressing their disquiet. Here's Simon Heffer ( a dyed in the wool Thatcherite) writing for the Mail today -

There is enormous public disquiet about issues that the Coalition refuses to address, presumably because it does not find them to be so important. For example, the disastrous state of the economy, and the arrival of the double-dip recession that some of us had long feared inevitable.

Here is a problem that voters would love the Government to address. It is one that is keeping well over three million of them out of work (rather than the official figure of 2.7 million, which has been massaged in various ways). 

The recession is handicapping manufacturers and service providers, and deterring entrepreneurs. Outside central London, it is driving down property prices. It is depressing tax revenues. The threat of unemployment is also causing millions more to fear for their own financial security. It is, in short, a calamity.

The reaction of David Cameron and George Osborne to Wednesday’s announcement that Britain had fallen into a double-dip recession was to bury their heads in the sand. Perhaps backbench Tory MP Nadine Dorries — a proper tribune of the people — had a point when she berated ‘posh boys’ in power for not understanding how the other 99 per cent live.
However, I fear the reason for the failure of Messrs Cameron and Osborne to get a proper grip is not because they are posh, but because neither can bear to lose face by admitting his serious errors.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2136402/Nadine-Dorries-point--politicians-detached-real-lives-voters.html#ixzz1tWk7sGPP

Of course extreme right-wingers such as Heffer will always seek to blame the leadership when Tory support falls below 30% (rather than blame or question Tory ideology as such), but obviously he makes some very good points - those points that are blatantly obvious to anyone who has eyes to see and a little bit of their brain in working order. He goes on:

If that wasn’t enough to make people feel politics was no longer relevant to them, along came the exposure of Jeremy Hunt’s activities as Culture Secretary in the proposed takeover of BSkyB by the Murdoch empire.

Recent history shows that nothing revolts the public more than proof their elected representatives are behaving improperly. Mr Hunt has, of course, denied any wrongdoing. However, the notion that no wrong was done was exploded on Wednesday, when Mr Hunt’s special adviser resigned, admitting he was ‘too close’ to the Murdoch empire. 

What inspired him to get too close? Could it have been that he thought Mr Hunt wanted it? And if Mr Hunt wanted it, why did he? Could it have been because he thought Mr Cameron wanted it?

So, from the point of view of the public, we have a Government not only adamantly in denial about the gravest problems facing the British people, but also up to its neck in cronyism, impropriety and downright sleaze.

So - our extreme right-wingers such as Heffer can see all of this, our extreme left-wingers can see it, and so can the vast majority of us in the middle. This government is in deep excrement.

As for Cameron refusing to investigate what Hunt and his pals were up to, it's pretty obvious that he's terrified of anyone examining too closely Hunt's text messages and emails because some of them will have been copied to Cameron to keep him in touch with what he was doing, and therefore making him an active participant in the conspiracy to hand complete control of BSkyB to Murdoch.

It seems to me Cameron will continue to stall on this issue until Thursday's local elections are out of the way - at the very least. This week of all weeks he can't afford to have any more shit hit the fan, which it will do if either Hunt resigns or if he has to sack Hunt.

This lunchtime the unelected Baroness Warsi was again on Radio 4 news to tell us that the people of this country don't care about the Hunt affair. How come this person is usually the one the Tories put forward to do their bullshitting and dissembling? Is it because she speaks with a slight Northern accent, and is less likely to say something downright idiotic than Cameron's actual MPs? How come she spouts such patronising rubbish - telling us what we do and don't care about?** Of course she's spoken with 'ordinary' people who don't care about the Hunt affair, and who probably aren't even aware of it - but we can all go out and find a few dipsticks to say what we might want to hear. This doesn't mean they're in the majority, or are even 'representative'. The Baroness ought to be aware that more than 70% of us are now fully aware of what the Tories are doing (and not doing) and we don't like what we see and hear.

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* "On March 6, 2012, Nadine Dorries MP attacked the leadership of the Coalition over their taxation policies. Referring to the proposed cuts in child benefit, she told the Financial Times "The problem is that policy is being run by two public schoolboys who don't know what it's like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can't afford it for their children's lunchboxes. What's worse, they don't care, either". She again criticised Cameron, and also George Osborne, in similar terms on 23 April, calling them "two arrogant posh boys who don't know the price of milk - who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others"." - Wikipedia

** These are the actual words of Warsi today:
"If you go out and speak to ordinary people, this is not what they are obsessing about. When people look in Westminster Village and see us obsessing about these kinds of issues, and see us playing party politics, using systems and processes to score points against each other in this way, they say 'a plague on all their houses'. What people care about is their schools, their future, and that is what they want us to be talking about."

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Speaker Bercow has agreed to summon Cameron to the Commons this afternoon to answer "urgent questions". He's due to appear live on the Parliament Channel sometime after 3.00pm. The following is taken from the Guardian's 'politics live' blog today:

1.23pm: Ed Miliband should get hold of a read-out from the Number 10 lobby briefing before he asks his UQ on Jeremy Hunt. The exchanges illustrated some of the questions which David Cameron could find it hard to answer. Here are more details.

• Will Cameron definitely order an inquiry into allegations that Jeremy Hunt broke the ministerial code? Cameron has said that he wants Hunt to be allowed to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry and his spokesman repeated this line this morning. "We should let the process run its course, let the inquiry establish the facts," the spokesman said. But Leveson has said that it is not his job to investigate breaches of the ministerial code, and the prime minister's spokesman was unwilling to say categorically that Cameron would refer this matter to his independent adviser on ministerial interests, Sir Alex Allan, if Leveson did not address it. All he would say was: "The prime minister has been very clear that he would not duck his responsibilities on the ministerial code." That's a hint that Cameron will order an investigation in due course, but not a confirmation. Cameron may have to firm that up this afternoon.

• Why does Cameron think Hunt has not breached the ministerial code when people like Lord Butler think he did? Asked about the remarks from Butler the spokesman just said that Cameron "has said that he has seen no evidence that the code has been broken".

• Has Cameron asked Hunt directly what he knew about what his special adviser, Adam Smith, was saying to News Corporation about the BSkyB takeover? Asked about this, the spokesman said that this would be covered by the evidence given to Leveson. He also said that Leveson has given a ruling asking people not to disclose their evidence before it is heard by the inquiry.

• Why did Hunt tell MPs that he had published all details of his department's exchanges with News Corporation when he hadn't? In March last year Hunt told MPs: "We are publishing all the documents relating to all the meetings – all the consultation documents, all the submissions we received, all the exchanges between my department and News Corporation." But he did not release details of the exchanges between his special adviser and the News Corporation lobbyist, Fred Michel. This information only emerged in a 163-page dossier released by the Leveson inquiry last week. Asked about this, the prime minister's spokesman said that Hunt addressed this point in his statement last week. When journalists said that Hunt did not actually answer this question last week, the spokesman replied: "I have nothing further to add to what the secretary of state said."

• Why did Hunt tell the Commons that he always accepted the advice of independent regulators when he did not follow Ofcom's advice and refer the BSkyB bid to the Competition Commission? Asked about this, the spokesman insisted that Hunt said he was minded to refer the bid to the Competition Commission. (David Leigh went into this in more detail in a Guardian article last week.)

• Will Cameron reveal all his text messages and emails with Rebekah Brooks? Do the text messages still exist? And, if they are disclosed, will they be redacted? All the spokesman would say on this was that Cameron would provide the Leveson inquiry with "whatever he is asked to provide".

• What contact have government officials had with Lord Justice Leveson about his inquiry? Last week it was revealed that Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, spoke to Leveson about the Hunt affair. Today the prime minister's spokesman said: "I am sure that there have been contacts between senior officials and the Leveson team." Some journalists found this potentially suspicious, particularly when the spokesman declined to elaborate what those contacts were, but the spokesman said contacts of this kind were to be expected given the fact that several ministers are giving evidence to Leveson. The spokesman also insisted that the inquiry was "entirely independent".

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1.19pm: Here's what Ed Miliband said this morning about the Jeremy Hunt affair. He was he was asking an urgent question about it because it "goes to the character of the government".

"People need to know, particularly in these times, that they have a Government that stands up for them, not the rich and powerful. People need to know that there is the utmost probity and integrity in the way that government is run. I am afraid the events of the last week suggest that something other than that has been going on.

It is a pattern with this prime minister, particularly around News International. He resists the calls for change. He resists the calls to do the right thing. Exactly as he did in phone hacking last summer, exactly as he did with Rebekah Brooks, exactly as he did with Andy Coulson. He is doing the same now when everyone can see that the obvious thing for him to do is make this referral to Alex Allan. That is what he should get on and do rather than seeking to use Jeremy Hunt as a firewall."

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2012/apr/30/cameron-hunt-statement-politics-live

Here's a piece on Harriet Harman's concerns:

http://www.labour.org.uk/ministerial-code-investigation-on-bskyb,2012-04-25

Here's the Independent's view:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-hunt-on-the-brink-as-he-is-accused-of-misleading-parliament-7687530.html
.

Layer 532 . . . The Guardian, Banks of Ideas and a Progressive Counterculture

For years I've put up with people going on about my apparent obsession with the Guardian. This has nothing to do with the political stance of the paper. It's more the fact that I have piles of old copies lying around, some of them half or a quarter read, some with articles highlighted in various shades of green, yellow, blue and magenta. (And no - I'm not organised enough to use any thought-out colour-coding  scheme as such - the shades are random depending on which highlighter is closest to hand.)

The point I'm getting to is this. I don't have an obsession with the Guardian - I get enormous enjoyment and stimulation from reading the paper. Every day is like the Saturday and Sunday of the Guardian's "Open Weekend" - there's an amazing feast of brilliant brain food on offer. What's not to like, and to want to keep in a collection? [OK - you can go online and 'clip' favourite articles to a virtual file - and I do that as well - but it's not the same thing at all as having real bits of hard copy. Don't ask why - it just isn't.]

As for throwing away brilliant articles - I've never understood why people would throw away or give away brilliant books, or brilliant DVDs for that matter. Life of Brian? Oh yes - I watched that last week. Threw it away yesterday. Shakespeare? Read it already. Thrown it away. What's not to like about having a fantastic library, or libraries, at home?

And you don't have to be 'an intellectual' to enjoy the Guardian, any more than you needed to be an intellectual to enjoy the Guardian Open Weekend. All you need is to allow good stuff to enter your brain. Take yesterday's paper, for example.

* A front-page story about the latest Tory party funding scandal and cash-for-access to Cameron and Osborne - "Two hundred grand to 250 is premier league - the first thing we want to do is get you at the Cameron/Osborne dinners."
* Four pages on the Open Weekend at Guardian HQ.
* An article on Obama's healthcare reforms being challenged by more than half of the states in the Supreme Court.
* An article on the latest moves to privatise education and to make it 'for profit'.

Plus a wealth of 'Comment' articles by the usual array of brilliant and not so brilliant columnists, plus the editorials, plus the letters page. So what is not to bloody like?

And then there's the sports section, and of course there's G2, which yesterday featured

* A four page Decca Aitkenhead interview with Grayson Perry
* A two page feature on Julian Baggini's 'Heathen Manifesto'
* A column by Ian Martin, who's a writer for 'The Thick of It:

Life under the Tories: don't say you weren't warned

Some of us saw it coming – but it doesn't have to be this way

by Ian Martin

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/25/tory-nightmare-dont-say-werent-warned

The anxiety of living under a Tory government is that you're only ever a few days from the next national bad luck lottery draw. You know something spectacularly horrible will be announced next week. You just don't know whose unlucky balls they'll be holding.

Don't say you weren't warned. We told you what the Tories were like, we of the wilted generation, two years ago. We'd seen it all before. We were struggling young parents ourselves in the 80s when Thatcher's deregulation of the market led to class war, video nasties and Bananarama. We told you. You wouldn't listen.

Come on, you simpered, the Tories can't be any worse than that other crate of soft fruit, with the Britpop on their iPods and their impenetrable jargon. And, OK, I too froze in horror when I heard Labour's schools minister Jim Knight announce through his trimmed facial ladygarden that the challenge was "not simply how to divide the cake, but how to grow the cake". They've made him a Lord now, by the way. Presumably for services to advanced metaphor.

This is why we warned you about the Tories. We knew it would be easier for them to deconstruct the welfare state this time round as they spent much of their last time in office loosening the bolts. The print unions and the miners were defeated early on. The rest of the Tory era was spent dismantling a working class power base it had taken a century and a half to build. They had plenty of time. My son was born in 1979, the year Thatcher became prime minister. He was 18 before the Tories were turfed out again.

Local authorities were humiliated, their stock of affordable housing sold in a right-to-buy fire sale, their powers gradually whittled down to bins and dog waste. The Public Finance Initiative, greatly expanded under the auspices of Blair, was originally introduced as a buccaneering Tory programme, an innovative way of "synergising" public and private sectors. In much the same way that partnerships are forged between a desperately broke family and a loan shark.

Look, the reason this government's moving so quickly to divide the NHS into privatised contractual fiefdoms for its mates, and to divert education budgets into "free" schools for its mates' children, is because it can. Resistance has been atomised. Working-class rage, once articulated by powerful unions representing people doing proper jobs, has dissipated. 

There's no hope of reunionising the country is there? You might as well try to unionise comedy writing, and … oh, wait.

I'm a member of two writers unions. One here, and one in the US I had to join for an American gig last year.

If you can unionise joke-writing you can unionise anything. People who do "silly" jobs of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

It would be interesting to see how long Westminster could function if the Amalgamated Union of Baristas and Sandwich Fillers called a strike. And the civil servants came out in sympathy. And the drivers and the cleaners and the couriers and the receptionists and the child-minders and, now I come to think of it, the grandparents.

All this guff the government's spinning about choice and the individual: that's what they want. The last thing they want is collective action. They're always sneering about "Guardian readers". Well, we pay our daily sub of £1.20, let's call ourselves a union. Comrades, to the barricades! Or if you're a Times reader, the paywall!

http://writing.ie/meet-the-authors/special-guests/358-ian-martin-and-the-coalition-chronicles-.html

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Coincidentally I'd spent time at the Open Weekend thinking about the cumulative benefits of all those people at the event taking part in all those discussions on such a wide range of subjects - political, social, cultural, educational, psychological, scientific, economic, etc.

In the early part of the last century - pre-television - people used to go in large numbers to meetings of political parties, trade unions and other interest groups. There was true citizenship in action - direct participation in discussion, debate and policy-making. People listened to speakers giving out information and opinions, and had a chance to ask questions for clarification, as well as give direct feedback with their own opinions.

Our politics and our party system is busted, and everyone knows it. There's very little difference between three dinosaur parties full of young and middle aged prats who represent the political spectrum from the centre right to the hard right. There is NO coherent progressive or alternative opinion. And of course there's little or no actual participation by regular citizens. No wonder those of us who wanted to see the back of New Labour had no-one credible or coherent to vote for. No wonder we're stuck with a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.

The Guardian HAS to become even more of a focal point for the positive energy of all those who took part in the weekend gathering of the tribes, plus all those who couldn't get there or didn't know it was happening. Back in the 60's - fully 50 years ago - we built a counterculture and a movement. This has to happen again. Glastonbury's fine, but it's not enough. Music isn't enough. We need ideas to shift a moribund culture and kick it into new life. We now have the Internet, email, Skype, Facebook and Twitter to help build links. We are the many - and the one percent are the few. We need a government that's genuinely of the people, by the people, for the people. We've had enough of rule by Westminster and the City.

We need regular gatherings and debates all over the country. We need young people and old people to be involved in them. We need to make connections and we need to form affiliations. The Open Weekend had no particular agenda and no identifiable leaders. It had organisers. It was led by ideas and opinions. Thank goodness.

Television and radio are more or less closed shops - run by professionals for professionals. We need organised gatherings and spontaneous gatherings where people actually talk to one another, learn from one another and enlighten one another. We need to learn the arts of participation and discussion. The Bank of Ideas needs to have branches in all our towns and cities, and the Guardian can surely help with this.

Love Me Do was released on 5 October 1962. This was the first record released by The Beatles, and was more or less the beginning of the Sixties. By the 5th October 2012 at the latest we need to make sure we've organised a 50th anniversary party, which will recognise the beginning of a whole new era and a whole new way of running a vibrant and progressive culture, one in which progressive ideas are as important as they were back in the Sixties. Get on the bus, tune in and turn on.

Knowledge is power. Watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_fIjX1_gLw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/user/freedominfonetwork

http://www.freedominfonetwork.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf5nVk5MU70

*  "Love Me Do" with its stark "blunt working class northerness" rang "the first faint chime of a revolutionary bell" compared to the standard tin pan alley productions occupying the charts at the time. - Wikipedia

Layer 529 . . . The Madness of Queen Melanie

One thing you can say about Melanie Phillips - you always know where you stand with her. And where you stand is clearly to the left of her, since it's impossible to go any further to the right. She stands firmly next to the starboard wall of reality, and sometimes beyond it.

Take her column in yesterday's Daily Fail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2113576/Infantile-Lib-Dems-cynical-Cameroons-plot-squeeze-middle-classes-dry.html

Infantile Lib Dems, cynical Cameroons and a plot to squeeze the middle classes dry

That says it all, really. You don't need to go any further. Her madness perceives a dastardly plot to "squeeze the middle classes dry" - whatever that means. What's more, the plot is being hatched by those infantile LibDems and their partners - the Cameron-led clique of Etonians and Bullingdon Clubbers - a well known faction of leftists, anarchists and commies. This is the crazy world of La Phillips, which the Mail pays huge sums of money for her to describe. Nice work if you can get it.

Yesterday, radio and TV studios hosted a procession of squirming Lib Dem spokesmen miserably trying to explain to incredulous interviewers the progressive contortions of their proposals for tax increases in the Budget.

First, the Lib Dem election manifesto in 2010 proposed a ‘mansion tax’ on multi-million-pound properties.

When that was knocked back in coalition by the Tories, the Lib Dems proposed cutting tax relief on pensions for higher-rate taxpayers.

When that, too, was greeted with justifiable horror because it would punish the prudent for saving, Nick Clegg came up with yet another wheeze - a ‘tycoon tax’ to ensure that millionaires who legally avoid high tax rates are required by law to pay not less than 20 per cent in tax on their income.

Indeed, the Lib Dems appear to possess a bottomless bran-tub of proposals to ‘soak the rich’. However, the reason for the ‘mansion tax’ was that the realisation had dawned, somewhere in the dim recesses that pass for a Lib Dem brain, that taxing wealth-producers until the pips squeak means that - surprise - they become less inclined to produce more wealth.

Phew! Let's take a pause to consider.

"Taxing wealth-producers until the pips squeak." In Phillipsland all rich people are 'wealth producers', and any attempt to impose a slightly higher rate of tax on them will make their pips squeak. No matter that most truly wealthy people employ other people to do their work for them; no matter that most wealthy people (eg bankers, landowners, stockbrokers) often never have an original or a socially useful thought in their lives; no matter that most truly wealthy people inherit their wealth and live lives of considerable ease, thanks to their ability to NOT work and to employ other people who do the work. No matter that a slight increase in their tax contributions will have no effect whatsoever on their lifestyles and their wellbeing, let alone make their bleeding 'pips' squeak.

Shall we continue?

That was why Dr Vince Cable decided that taxation should be shifted from income to assets. The idea was that, instead of putting off those actually delivering prosperity for the nation, the state would pounce upon the fruits of their labours. Hence the ‘mansion tax’ on their houses.

There she goes again, insisting that the truly rich are "actually delivering prosperity for the nation", and suggesting that there's such a thing as "the fruits of their labours". As far as the rest of us can see, the City of London, spiritual home of those well-known labourers, "delivered" ruination to the nation, not prosperity. The fact that their mansions were frequently bought in the first place with huge 'bonuses' for crashing the economy doesn't seem to have occurred to Phillips.

Oh well.

The Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, merely waffled about ‘asking the wealthiest to pay more’. Ah, the dreaded ‘w’-word.

In Lib Dem-speak, ‘wealthy’ seems to mean anyone who is not poor. So their proposals will clobber the many millions struggling along on middling incomes but who the Lib Dems think are the rich who must be soaked.

Here we see the real craziness, or possibly the deliberate evil, in Phillips - since she substitutes 'wealthy' for the word which the muppet Alexander actually used, which was 'wealthiest'. And where is her evidence that in 'Lib Dem-speak' the word 'wealthy' means 'not poor'?

They call this the ‘fairness’ agenda. Well, when a Lib Dem talks about fairness it’s time to take to the hills. For, of course, this is utterly unfair.

Yes, it is right and proper that the better-off should contribute in tax more than the poor. It is the mark of a civilised society for the ‘haves’ to offer a helping hand to those who genuinely have not.

But the fact the Lib Dems totally ignore is that the middle classes and the truly wealthy already do just that.

As we already know, this is complete nonsense. As we already know, the truly rich employ battalions of accountants to figure out how to avoid paying their fair share of tax, as laid down by the laws of the land. Some of them actually go so far as to deliberately evade taxes. Some of them do their banking offshore and use tax havens and anonymous bank accounts to keep their wealth well out of sight and out of reach. None of this is disputed by sane people.

And why is she still banging on here about the 'middle classes' - and trying to put the fear of God and of the taxman into them when she knows perfectly well that the creepy LibDems are merely suggesting that the wealthiest in our society should pay slightly more in taxes - certainly no more than they can easily afford? I think we know why.

This is not fairness. This is grossly unjust. It is also not merely an attack on the rich but a deeply oppressive bullying of the middle-class which, as the Treasury’s cash cow, is already targeted for financial punishment many times over.

"Deeply oppressive bullying"! "Grossly unjust"! "Attack on the rich"! "Financial punishment - many times over"! Either this woman is completely nuts or she's a vile propagandist of the first order. But not a very good one, since her gross exaggerations and distortions will only penetrate the brains of those who already hold such ludicrous opinions, Mail readers, obviously, and have no chance of converting anyone with any sense of reality or sense of social justice to go along with her bonkers way of thinking.

More than 3.5 million people now pay tax at 40 per cent on an annual income above £43,000. To call people earning such sums ‘wealthy’ is an offence against the English language.

So who's calling them wealthy? Not our chums the LibDems.

There may also be an overhaul of council tax, with new bands on properties worth more than £320,000 — again, hardly a ‘mansion’ in South-East England where that kind of money may buy only a modest semi.

True, Mel, but we all know that to have the highest band for council tax set at 320K always was and always has been grossly unfair. Why should someone wealthy enough to buy a million-pound property pay the same as those who can afford £320,000 or less? If we have several bands below 320K then why should the banding end abruptly at that level? There's no logic to it whatsoever. But then the Thatcherite architects of the Council Tax were never interested in fairness or social justice - they were only interested in substituting something - anything - for the hated poll tax.

And then there’s the proposed cut in child benefit for all those earning more than £42,745 — which would further penalise single-earner families while continuing to pay the benefit to dual-income families bringing in £80,000 a year.

This from someone who recently argued in the Mail for the abolition of all child benefit. Not happy about a staged abolition, Mel?

What’s more, those who cripple themselves by independent school fees or who pay for private health insurance are still subsidising everyone else through the taxes to which they contribute such a disproportionate share of their income.

Who says it's disproportionate? They pay proportionately less income tax now than their parents or grandparents ever paid, thanks to recent governments of the right and centre-right shifting the tax burden to VAT, which is the least proportionate and most unfair tax of all, since everyone has to pay 20% VAT on nearly all purchases, regardless of their ability to pay.

And who asked these people, these idiots, to "cripple" themselves anyway? Surely such "crippling" is self-inflicted by people who are wealthy enough to seek what they see as better quality health, education, etc. How come the rest of us can make do with the regular state provision? David and Sam Cameron for example, apparently. Are our hearts supposed to bleed for these poor "cripples"?

These middle-class and wealthy people are, in fact, contributing to the common weal many times over. Yet they are vilified by the Lib Dems and their ilk as social parasites.

Look, Mel. We all know that poor people who have jobs pay proportionately more tax than rich people who have an earned or unearned income. End of.

And when did LibDems EVER "vilify" the middle classes, OR vilify the wealthiest people among us for that matter, let alone call them social parasites? Many LibDems might be rather stupid people, but even they aren't THAT stupid. In fact I think it was the governor of the Bank of England, or possibly the head of the CBI, who said that many merchant bankers are social parasites. Which is quite true, as it happens.

[With] a ‘mansion tax’ the State, in effect, lies low so as not to frighten people away from helping the economy to grow; but when they have actually done so, it wallops them and snatches their money away.

"Wallops"? "Snatches"? Since when is passing legislation to require the wealthiest in society to pay a bit more in what's effectively a council tax "walloping" anyone? And who's going to do this walloping and snatching, anyway? Oh - I do believe it's us - we, the people - who are sick and tired of letting the richest 1% or whatever get away with paying proportionately less tax than the rest of us. For that matter, why should the richest, say, 10% get away with paying proportionately less council tax than people with properties worth £320,000 or less? That's what most of us would call disadvantaging the majority of the middle classes that Mel cares so passionately about, a la Mitt Romney.

So much for the Lib Dems and their politics of envy.
But are the Tories really any different?

Oh, Lord - she's dispatched the LibDems and their politics of "envy" already. Watch out you Tories!

As we all know, the Cameroons’ modernising strategy rests upon being seen to wear on their sleeve hearts that bleed for the poor. The way they have chosen to achieve this is by bashing the better-off. (!!!!!! Is 'bashing' a fit and proper word for such a lady?)

So they kept the top rate 50 per cent tax band for those earning upwards of £150,000 a year. This was purely a propaganda gimmick.

For it rapidly became obvious that in terms of raking in extra revenue it was utterly self-defeating, since the measures people were taking to avoid it actually reduced the amount coming into the Treasury.

This is the usual lie about higher tax rates producing less in taxes, which has been shown to be a lie again and again.

The Prime Minister and the Chancellor reportedly have come to understand that it is not the most brilliant idea to be dumping so cynically on the Tories’ supposed core constituency - the striving and aspirational classes. 

(I think she'll find this is the Tories' ONLY constituency at the present time. Striving is good? Greed is good?)

But they nevertheless still seem fixated on the need to hit the better-off - simply to fend off the accusation that they are ‘toffs’ who would happily see poor children starve in the gutter. Hence the ever-more frantic attempts to trade the 50 per cent tax rate for one of the Lib Dems’ war-on-the-wealthy schemes.

Accusation, eh? How ridiculous. How unfair. We all know that the Cameroons don't want to see poor children starving in the gutter. That's Mel's job already.

Still mesmerised by the false analysis that the Tories can win power only by appearing to be Left-wing, the Cameroons have unfortunately signed up to the manifest absence of fairness in the redistribution of wealth.

Oh sweet Jesus. Lord above. This is getting crazier by the sentence. I'm speechless.

Not only is this unjust; not only does it belittle the striving classes by assuming that all wealth is either unearned or somehow illegitimate; it also breaks off the nation’s middle-class nose in order to spite its own face.

Crazy. Bonkers. She's babbling. And foaming.

For the message the Coalition is delivering day after day is that the Government is anti-business and anti-wealth creation, and that any entrepreneur thinking of investing in the UK needs his head examined.

Speechless. This government has done nothing except pander to the City and the 'Markets'.

With the economy desperately struggling to pull itself out of recession, this takes political stupidity to an epic level.

Well the 'economy' had better pull itself out, since the government is so unwilling to help it, just as these Tories never did or said a thing to help it during a 30 year period when there was no such thing as industrial policy, unlike in Germany - only cheerleading for the City, privatisation, asset-stripping, the Big Bang, deregulation and the bonus culture.

The Lib Dems subscribe to this politics of envy and class spite because - heaven help us - they actually believe in it. The Cameroons subscribe because they think it will win them elections.
It’s a moot point which is worse - infantilism or cynicism. The pantomime horse that is the Coalition unfortunately has one at each end.

As I say, you have to be waaaaaaaaaaaaay over on the extreme political right wing in order to attack the Cameroons for their so-called left-wing policies. Surely cynicism is the stock in trade of politicians, anyway? Obviously Mel would rather the Tories nail their (her) nasty policies to a highly visible mast in order to ensure future electoral success. Good one, Mel. Let's all simply tell the proles they can just fuck off and die, and be done with it.

Is it just me, or is this Phillips person getting crazier as she gets older? Or is she just showing clear signs of early onset something or other? Early onset frothing at the mouth, terminal rabid Mail-syndrome? Maybe it's just burn-out from a long (too long) career as a media rotweiler and arch propagandist. Give yourself a break, Mel. Retire now before it's too late to rediscover - or maybe discover for the first time - some semblance of reality, decency and sanity.

And by the way, dear Oxzen readers, don't forget to read the truly entertaining and hilarious comments of her readers which are on the website below Phillips' column. These are people who didn't just lose the plot - they never had any idea of it in the first place.

Layer 523 . . . Satirical Cartography, Stereotype Maps, Yanko Tsvetkov, and Occupy London: What Went Wrong?

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Speaking as a bit of a geographer, and as a lover of maps, the idea of 'satirical cartography' is very appealing. What the hell is it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/17/stereotype-maps-tsvetkov

Stereotype maps: Is that what they think of us?

Tim Dowling is both intrigued and mildly entertained by graphic artist Yanko Tsvetkov's satirical maps of national stereotypes. Plus, see a gallery of maps from Tsvetkov's collection

Yanko Tsvetkov's stereotype maps - in pictures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/feb/17/stereotype-maps-yanko-tsvetkov

It's well known that Americans have a disarmingly blunt view of other nationalities, but seeing such brazen prejudices laid out, country by country, might shock even them. This is the world as depicted by graphic artist Yanko Tsvetkov. It is also a world in which gay men view Ireland as 'being in denial' and Greeks see the rest of Europe as a 'Union of Stingy Workaholics'.

"The World According to Americans" is real genius. As is "L’Europa Berlusconiana". In fact they all are.

"No matter where you're from, you should be able to find something here to offend you."

http://alphadesigner.com/

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Rise of the 'phablet'

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224363/Rise_of_the_phablet_

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9224350/Hands_on_Samsung_s_Galaxy_Note_engages_perplexes

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Occupy London: what went wrong?

It gave a voice to the usually ignored, but Occupy's consensual model has seen it too often take the path of least resistance

by John Harris

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/13/occupy-london-what-went-wrong?

What it has taken to keep the London camp in existence is unimaginable, and as it splutters to a halt, it's worth reflecting on its very real successes.

So, here goes. Occupy LSX's impact on a dithering Church of England was a joy to see. There is no doubt that the people involved played an important role in the upsurge of anger that has lately crystallised around the issue of bonuses, and the fact that the byzantine Corporation of London has seen an unprecedented burst of interest in its affairs. At least some of the camp's output (read, for example, this piece by its economics working group) has defied all the caricatures, and been incisive and original.

It's now a cliche to malign the fact that the camp at St Paul's became a "magnet" for the homeless and addicted, but I'd rather look at that issue from a slightly different perspective: there and in Bristol, I was struck by the fact that the camps seemed to be giving voices and roles to people who are usually completely ignored (and if anyone should know about the downsides of neoliberalism – well, you get the point). Most importantly, whatever happens in the next few days, do not think we have seen the last of the hundreds of people involved.

And yet, and yet. As the St Paul's camp fades out, it's worth reflecting on what you might think of as the Poverty of Horizontalism, and the serious drawbacks of organising – or, rather, not organising – in the way that just about all the Occupy protests have. 

We all know the drill: clear demands have been spurned, any idea of leadership remains anathema, communing with mainstream politics is largely off the menu, and the running of everything is almost painfully collective.

"This is what democracy looks like," is the campers' mantra, and fair play to them: to watch all those general assemblies in full flow has been both exciting, and fascinating.

But here are the problems. As can happen with any rudderless collection of individuals, Occupy has often seemed to turn introspective, until the issue in danger of consuming them has been the camps themselves.

Moreover, given a consensual, effectively leaderless model of decision-making – "jazz hands", and all that – it has ended up, pretty much by definition, recurrently taking the path of least resistance. This matter of basic logic presumably explains the absence of a clever exit strategy, and why the St Paul's camp is so miserably fading away.

Any alternative, no matter how creative, would always be greeted with at least some opposition, whereas staying put and fizzling out proved to be the least controversial option. On Occupy's terms, the result is assuredly democratic. From the outside, it also looks tragic.

Towards the end of last year, the basic point was put pretty well by the venerable Malcolm Gladwell, who compared Occupy to the civil rights movement: "It was a carefully controlled, incredibly hierarchical, thoughtful, even Machiavellian assault on the status quo. It couldn't be more different than the Occupy movement."

A reminder: the state . . .  remains every bit as top down (verticalist, if you will) as ever. If you want spectacular proof, have a look at last night's scenes in Athens, or think about the imminent arrival of the law outside St Paul's. The same, needless to say, is true of the world's most powerful corporations.

Power, moreover, has a habit of ensuring that any potential threats are usually so diffuse as to represent no danger at all – and in the case of Occupy, the job may well have been done for it, with no need for any effort. The most basic argument may actually be even simpler: in the end, what is there to fear from a movement that is not only fading, but has had such profound problems articulating what it wants?

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Thanks to Raj Patel for this link:

http://www.foodnotbombs.net/food_is_a_right.html

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Battersea Power Station - demolish, develop or preserve?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2012/feb/15/battersea-power-station-development-housing?CMP=EMCNEWEML1643

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Hyde Park concerts threatened by Londoners' noise complaints


Westminster council to debate reducing number of events held in royal park

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/feb/15/hyde-park-concerts-noise-complaints?
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Layer 513 . . . Radical Movements, Global Protests, Visiting Japan, Occupy London and Banning Bonuses

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In yesterday's G2 Paul Mason had a two-page article - very sober and measured, as you'd expect from such a senior and serious journalist - reflecting on the future of the radical movements that came to prominence in 2011.

Global protests: where does the revolution go from here?

2011's anti-capitalist protests and Arab spring made everything seem possible. But will 2012 bring real change? The key is turning rebellion into coherent political vision

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/31/where-revolution-goes-from-here

If 2011 felt, at times, like a rerun of 1848 with stereo headphones, 2012 is already exhibiting some of the features that made 1849 a byword for reaction.

In Greece, the euphoria one could sense among the indignados camped in Syntagma Square last June has given way to an angry silence; to fragmented, anomic acts and the struggle to survive.

And the fundamental economic problems remain unsolved . . . 

As a revolutionary wave breaks, historically, it also breaks up. During the Arab spring and the winter of occupying public spaces, it was impossible to ignore the similarities between the youth across borders: the way they spoke and dressed, the social media they used, the music they listened to.

So what remains of the revolution? As the events recede and solidify it becomes clear that 2011 was, above all, a cultural revolution: a loss of fear in the dictatorships of north Africa; a loss of apathy among educated youth in Europe, Latin America and the US. And the revolution consisted of this: a mass rejection of the values dominant during 20 years of freemarket capitalism.

Freemarket patterns of wealth distribution created the most potent political meme of 2011 – which was not the Egyptian slogan "Bread, freedom, social justice" but "We are the 99%".

Today, among the activists who made 25 January happen in Egypt – and among those who turned Occupy Wall Street or UK Uncut into global brandnames – you find a common reluctance to engage in the dirty business of power; of the actual, the specific, the non-exhilarating work of community organising, of elections.

In short, 2012 may be the year the counter-culture accumulated by young people in the good years, and deployed in what one has called "the senseless beauty of rebellion" in 2011, finally has to concretise into a programme, a coherent vision. If it doesn't – as is obvious from Budapest to Cairo – there are plenty of other forces with coherence. And in times of economic crisis people turn to them.

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Charlie Brooker in Tokyo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/feb/01/charlie-brooker-tokyo-japan-games?intcmp=122

Another fairly serious and measured piece of journalism. Good one Charlie.

I'm looking forward to hearing about the culture shock Charlie experiences when he gets back to London. Everyone should visit Japan, at least once in their lifetime. Beg and borrow money if necessary in order to do it. It'll change your way of thinking - and in a good way.

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The salaryman's guide to Tokyo

Salaryman Kuzuhara-san leads Chris Michael on a tour of the hidden Tokyo where an army of office workers get to let off steam at the end of the working day

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/feb/01/salarymans-guide-to-tokyo-city?intcmp=122

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Tokyo: a walk down Memory Lane - video

Omoide Yokochō - Memory Lane - developed as the eating quarter after the second world war. David Levene checks out old school Japanese delicacies such as salamander, loach and viper wine. It's all good for the stamina

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2012/feb/01/tokyo-memory-lane-strange-eats?intcmp=122

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10 of the most unusual hotels in Tokyo

Tokyo has an unusual hotel to suit every taste, whether you want to spend a night in a pod hotel, at an urban onsen, or stay with a Japanese family, says Richard Smart

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/feb/01/top-10-unusual-hotels-onsen-pods-tokyo

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10 of the best budget hotels in Tokyo

Tokyo has a good spread of hotels at great-value rates, from traditional ryokans to cheap and cheerful business hotels in the heart of Shinjuku, says Richard Smart

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/feb/01/10-best-budget-hotels-tokyo
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Occupy London's eviction is a failure for the church, not the camp

The protesters about to be removed from the steps of St Paul's could have helped the cathedral find a compelling new narrative

by  Giles Fraser

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/31/occupy-eviction-st-pauls-cathedral

It's time for all good people to decide where they stand - with the bankers and the Establishment, or with the protestors. There's NO middle way in this.

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With a ban on bonuses, Fred Goodwin could even have kept his knighthood

Even bankers want the bonus culture outlawed. It's a conspiracy to extract money from firms that properly belongs to others

By Simon Jenkins

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/31/ban-bonuses-fred-goodwin-knighthood

Very well said, Simon. This whole fucked-up bonus culture is a massive scam, and needs to be made illegal - at least for 'bonuses' above, say, £2,000, whether in cash or shares. Better to get rid of the whole of this nasty nonsense.

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Layer 511 . . . Taxing Wealth, Fear of Taxes, US Elections, Global Apocalypse, Carl Jung and Data Pool 3

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The thing is, politics is far too important to be left to politicians. That's why we need public intellectuals, capable analysts, and great writers & journalists. And we need the Guardian to give them a creative platform. Here's a selection of what was in the paper yesterday.

[It might seem like dull, dutiful, hard work sometimes to keep up with what's happening in the world, but in times of crisis and change we all have a public duty to pay attention, and to work hard if necessary at knowing what's going on. Otherwise we lose the right to complain when we don't like what's done to us.]

Mysteries of Data Pool 3 give Rupert Murdoch a whole new headache

The arrest of four Sun journalists threatens to open a fresh phase of the scandal surrounding News International

by Nick Davies

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/29/data-pool-3-sun-arrests-murdoch

On Saturday morning, the police arrested four journalists who have worked for Rupert Murdoch. For a while, it looked as though these were yet more arrests of people related to the News of the World but then it became clear that this was something much more significant.

This may be the moment when the scandal that closed the NoW finally started to pose a potential threat to at least one of Murdoch's three other UK newspaper titles: the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times.

The four men arrested on Saturday are not linked to the NoW. They come from the Sun, from the top of the tree – the current head of news and his crime editor, the former managing editor and deputy editor.

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Taxing wealth? The public mood still escapes the Tories

Ed Miliband's task is to point out where the blame really lies for unfairness in the system

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/30/tax-on-wealth-public-anger

by Polly Toynbee

The Hester bonus retreat marks a seismic political moment, a point of no return. How long it has taken, how slow Westminster has been to respond to public outrage since the crash – but Labour has seized the moment.

Labour's call for a tax on bank bonuses gains real traction as boardroom kleptocracy finally breaks through the political sound barrier. Despite poll after poll showing disgust at top pay, the issue has been ignored at Westminster and was invisible at the last election. Hester's failure to respond in time to public outrage has lit the blue touch-paper. Uncharacteristically, David Cameron missed the public mood, so he looks both weak and in hock to a City that bankrolls his party. Each new bonus announcement will skewer him again and again – one RBS trader gets £4m and on Friday, Barclays' Bob Diamond will swipe £10m: no Cameron nudging is likely to shift his sod-you-all attitude.

Hester has handed Labour the tin-opener to the whole can of worms over boardroom pay. Research from Professor Karel Williams at Manchester University's Cresc shows how far soaring executive pay is unrelated to performance, but how closely related it is to the tiny pool of people sitting on boards, similar earners rubber-stamping one another's ever-rising pay. There is, Williams says, "a very weak link between pay and performance". Most employees know that performance-related pay is largely a chimera: gamed by managers, resented by staff, it corrodes into custom and practice. Let this end the bonus and incentives fallacy in every sphere.

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Why are deficit-cutters so afraid to talk about tax?

Reducing public spending is not the only way of balancing the budget, but taxation seems to be taboo for politicians

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/29/deficit-cutters-tax

By Mehdi Hasan

 'I like paying taxes," the US supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, "with them I buy civilisation." As hundreds of thousands of self-assessment taxpayers frantically file their returns to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, ahead of 31 January's looming deadline, the late judge's words are worth bearing in mind.

We need to talk about tax. I won't pretend I like paying taxes. I don't. But I agree with the argument that it is taxation that helps civilise our society. Tax revenues fund high-quality public services, the welfare state, our national defence and much-needed infrastructure projects. Progressive taxation of income keeps inequality in check, by redistributing from the rich to the rest.

But taxation also goes to the heart of the current debate over the deficit. In his new and aptly titled Compass pamphlet, White Flag Labour, economist Howard Reed points out that "there are two ways to close a fiscal deficit when the economy is operating at full potential – one is to cut spending, the other is to raise taxes" yet deficit hawks assume that "cutting spending is always and everywhere the preferred route to fiscal balance, rather than raising more revenue via the tax system".

Fiscal policy has been reduced to a sterile debate over public spending in recent years. Our political elites act almost as if taxation doesn't exist. Defending Labour's recent tilt towards cuts, Ed Miliband proclaimed in a speech on 10 January that "the next prime minister will still have a deficit to reduce, and will not have money to spend". Really? Why can't said deficit be reduced through additional tax revenues?

The phrase "deficit reduction" has become a convenient euphemism for cutting public expenditure. It shouldn't surprise us. The biggest myth in British politics is that government borrowing spiralled out of control because of overspending; our record budget deficit, say the Tories and their Lib Dem mini-mes, is the inevitable consequence of Labour profligacy.

It cannot be said often enough: the deficit was caused not by rises in public spending but by a collapse in tax revenues. For example, by 2009-10, the Treasury had received around £112bn less in tax revenues than it had expected to. As Channel 4's FactCheck website decisively concluded earlier this month, "the drop in tax receipts triggered by the economic crisis is what's behind the bulk of the £149bn deficit".

Poll after poll shows overwhelming public support for a tax on bankers' bonuses; a mansion tax on multimillion-pound properties; a windfall levy on the oil and utility companies; a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions; and a one-off wealth tax of 20% on the richest 10% of households (which would raise a whopping £800bn and, according to YouGov, is backed by three out of four voters).

Increasing taxes on the rich to help reduce the deficit isn't "class warfare", as President Obama belatedly argued in his state of the union address last week: it is "common sense". If our leaders want us to believe that they are serious about the deficit, then they have to lift their self-imposed taboo on discussing tax.

The time has come to say the politically unsayable: it is wrong to pretend that cutting spending is the only, best or main method of eliminating the deficit. It isn't. In the long run, once the economy is off its knees and growing again, we need to make much greater use of taxation to balance the budget. Perhaps we can update Justice Holmes's mantra for our age of austerity: I like paying taxes, with them I pay down the deficit.

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US elections: no matter who you vote for, money always wins
Dollars play a decisive role in US politics. And more so since the supreme court allowed unlimited campaign contributions

by Gary Younge

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/29/us-politics-vote-money-wins

Republican presidential debates are not for the faint-hearted. 

Given the general state of the Republican party . . . truth and facts are but two options among many. The party's base, overrun by birthers, climate change deniers and creationists, floats its warped theories and every now and then one makes it to the top and bobs out into the airwaves.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/27/obama-no-credible-republican-challenger

 It is difficult to think of anywhere else in the western world where these debates would have any credibility outside of a fringe party (even if the fringes in Europe are now spreading). Far from indicating America's exceptionalism, it looks more like an awful parody of the stereotypes most outsiders already believed about American politics at its most bizarre. "Those who follow this race daily may have long since lost perspective on how absurd it is," said the German magazine Der Spiegel last week. "Each candidate loves Israel. They all love Ronald Reagan. Each loves his wife, a born first lady, for a number of reasons."

The good news is, with the exception of Perry's demise, the debates have not been pivotal. The bad news is that the truly decisive element has been something even more insidious: money. Lots of it.

The issue here is not class envy, hating rich people because they are rich, but class interests – cementing the advantages of the privileged over the rest. The problem is not personal, it's systemic. In the current climate, it means a group of wealthy people in business will decide which wealthy people in Congress they would like to tell poor people what they can't have because times are hard. And unless the ruling is overturned there is precious little that can be done about it.

Downplaying money's central role at this point merely buys into the illusion of participatory democracy, where ideas, character and strategy are paramount, while others are actually buying the candidates and access to power. The result is a charade. Fig leaf, G-string – name the scanty underwear of your choice. The emperor is butt naked. Whoever you vote for, the money gets in.

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SweetBirdOfTruth

"Truth and facts are but two options amonst many."

Great line, and one which is borne out every day here on Cif by the more mendacious right-wingers.

It's difficult to believe that, four years after a financial crisis created by widespread corruption and fraud by banks, not a single person has been jailed either in the US or the UK for perpetuating this fraud.

It's even more difficult to believe that this crisis has been exploited by right-wingers and free market zealots to make the case for a shrinking of the state and greater deregulation in the interests of those who clearly cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.

The neoliberal zealots, for whom truth and facts are simply options, shout down those who call for regulation and controls on irresponsible markets as socialists who will usher us all into the Gulag.

They will have missed the Newsweek report this week which found that there are 6 million people in the US either incarcerated or under some form of criminal supervision.

Newsweek helpfully pointed out that the figure of 6 million, in the Land of the Free, exceeded the total number of people imprisoned or under state supervision in the Soviet Union in the worst years of Stalinist repression.

Meanwhile, there are $18trillion sitting in offshore tax havens, a figure which exceeds the combined debt of the OECD economies.

The truth and the facts show that there is no justification for austerity.

Austerity is simply a policy choice for neoliberals who care more for their own selfish interests than they do for truth and facts.

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Davos policymakers are playing Global Apocalypse – and running out of lives
If the world economy was a video game, the central bankers and politicians have been struggling to master the controls – and remain stuck on the first level

By Larry Elliott

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/jan/29/global-economic-crisis-policymakers-apocalypse

Policymakers have put the question of global rebalancing into a box labelled "too hard to deal with", and have been dilatory in sorting out the problems of their financial sectors. Instead, whether through a misguided belief in financial orthodoxy or a fear of the bond markets, they have concentrated on heavy-handed and blanket austerity, something that should have come at the very end of the game.

The result has been sluggish growth in the west because every element of growth – public expenditure, consumer spending and investment – has been choked off simultaneously. If government is to retrench without causing recession, private demand has to rise, but the squeeze on real incomes and a reluctance to invest means this is not happening. The result is an unbalanced global economy, drifting towards a double-dip recession (in the west at least), a dysfunctional financial system and – a new ingredient in the toxic mix – a deeply disaffected public.

Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund's managing director, spent last week rattling the tin in the hope of getting contributions for a $2 trillion (£1.3tn) war chest. European policymakers were trying to put the finishing touches to a Greek debt deal. Draghi made it clear that providing liquidity to Europe's banks would not be enough on its own to bring an end to the crisis.

What does it mean? It means that blanket austerity is not working, and. It means that what was originally a global response to a global crisis has become a series of national responses to national crises. It means that Europe is treating a three-dimensional problem (growth, banks, public finances) with a one-dimensional fix of deficit reduction. It means that the global economy is still struggling to get beyond level one of Global Apocalypse. And if policymakers don't start showing a bit more skill, it will soon be Game Over and time to play Global Apocalypse 2.

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This could be Carl Jung's century

The psychoanalyst saw himself as a sort of therapist for western culture, and his diagnosis of its ills resonates today

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/jan/25/carl-jung-century

by Andrew Samuels

If the last century has been called "the Freudian century", there are reasons for thinking that this one could be Jung's. His time does seem to have come.

He had a much more positive view of the human psyche and unconscious than Freud. For Jung, the unconscious is not only full of wild and destructive drives; it is also the source of creativity, spirituality and the capacity for relationships.

What Jung saw in western culture is very familiar to what its contemporary critics perceive. He despaired of the over-rational one-sidedness of western culture, the way it has got cut off from nature (Jung is the pioneer of what is now called ecopsychology). He hit out at the materialism and loss of individuality in our world, focused on the mind-body split, on mechanical approaches to sex, and the west's loss of a sense of existential and spiritual purpose and meaning. 

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