RosieBell

Incidental nonsense, bicycling nonsense

When the Plebgate story broke, cyclists were staunch. Though it's neither big nor clever to swear at the police, a cyclist's right of way had been unreasonably impeded. 

According to the law books, there is a right for all Her Majesty’s subjects at all seasons of the year freely and at their will to pass and repass the public highway without any let and hindrance. (Read the rest for how the police have taken control of access to Downing Street).

Everyone was partisan about Plebgate. As one of Radio 4's misnamed comedians said on last night's News Quiz, it was a hard choice between the Tory toff, and the Sun and the Met.

Chris Mullin (ex Labour minister) had thought it was a fit up by the Police Federation.

Describing his own run-in with the Federation, which, he said, had sought to have him removed as chairman of the Commons' Home Affairs Select Committee when he raised questions about the probity of the police disciplinary system, he said: "The Federation is a bully.

... 

It has a long track record of intimidating ministers, journalists and anyone else who gets in its way. It also has a track record of defending the indefensible.

 One of the policemen standing at the gate agreed.

 Ian Richardson said the initial confrontation after Mitchell tried to leave Downing Street on his bicycle was a “nonsense incident” that spiralled out of control, in part propelled by the political aims of the Police Federation.

 …

 If senior officers had read his notes from the evening, Richardson said, it might have saved a lot of trouble: “I think it could have been put into perspective. It could have been said that it was a minor incident that’s been leaked to the newspapers, and let’s move on. But, of course, we didn’t move on, and we ended up at the high court last week and this week. It’s a great shame. And at what cost to so many people.”

 “Nonsense incident” meets the case.

 After a sequence of events of apology and investigation, suing and counter-suing. Andrew Mitchell ended up in the libel court, and what it hinged upon was whether he used the word “pleb” or not.

I was convinced in a comments thread that a toff however annoyed would not use “the archaic, pantomime word "pleb"...As soon as I read that I knew there was something wrong...it sounded exactly like somebody's caricature fantasy about what an angry toff would say to some innocent constable, and not at all what such a toff would be likely to say, even if intending great rudeness... “ 

However, the High Court judge presiding over the libel case stated:- 

 For the reasons given, I’m satisfied, at least on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Mitchell did speak the words attributed to him, or so close to them as to amount to the same, the politically toxic word pleb.

on the grounds that the policeman was too thick to make it up.

Weighing up the competing claims, the judge said PC Rowland was "not the sort of man who would have had the wit, imagination or inclination to invent on the spur of the moment an account of what a senior politician had said to him in temper".

Of course some will always take the chance to poke at cyclists:- 

 In another interview on Today a former Tory MP, Michael Brown, said Mitchell would not have got into trouble if he had been using a ministerial car rather than a bicycle.

“The reason that cabinet ministers and junior ministers were given ministerial cars by Harold Macmillan was so that they didn’t get into this kind of mess,” he said. “My main criticism of Andrew Mitchell is that all this Cameroon bicycling nonsense is what got him into trouble. Ministerial cars are for ministers to be protected from this kind of rubbish.”

In countries with civilised urban transport politicians do get about on bicycles.

 

Danish politicians on ceremonial visit to the Queen of Denmark

The Beeb solemnly informed us that Plebgate, WhiteVangate and Taxigate * all demonstrate “an out of touch Westminster elite.“

Or demonstrate the media grabbing at trivia to make an easy story to get the comments boxes and social media boiling. All of those incidents could have been/should have been settled with a quick apology. All can be commented on from the top of the stupidest head. At a time with two forms of destructive nationalism on the up in Britain and parties competing to out-anti-immigrant each other, we could do with less of this nonsense.

 *(Conspiracy theory – all involving transport.... must join up somewhere..)

New Year Resolution - Don't waste time and blood pressure with the Spiked stable

A handy synopsis to the Spiked team of writers, especially Brendan O'Neill.

1. [Subject] reveals a contempt for the working classes.

2. [Subject] is thinly disguised misanthropy.

3. [Subject] is merely an exercise in liberal self-congratulation.

4. [Subject] encourages a culture of victimhood.

5. [Subject] shows we’re governed by alarmist scaremongers.

6. [Subject] is an attempt to censor dissent.

If I ever met the person who wrote that, I'd buy them a drink.

Happy New Year!

Norman Geras - 1943 - 2013

I've been heavy-hearted all day after hearing that Norman Geras has died.

Norman Geras was in the same tradition as George Orwell– a social democrat who was concerned with the inconsistencies and the incoherent principles among that part of Left that in Orwell's time was soft in the head and heart about the Soviet Union and the Communist ideology and in our time shows the same gooiness towards Islamist theocracy. 

Like Orwell, he had a clear writing style that conveyed a great appreciation of living. He had a wide hinterland – cricket, football, music, literature. He was also generous. His blog spent as much time praising as taking to task, of letting other people speak as well as himself.

He's gone and the worth of his life is attested to by the many people who never met him and who are now grieving for him. They knew him as a witty demolisher of other people's cant, an admirer of other people's talents, whether in cricket or music or novels on that blog that was as sparing of pictures as Le Monde used to be and was as unblinged as a nun's face. You knew him by his words which clearly and precisely exposed fatuity and showed the weakness of an argument.

When I first started blogging, I was delighted and honoured when he include me in his Norm profiles. We sent each other a few humorous emails. One was an exchange inspired by Eunoia, a novel with each chapter using only one vowel. Norm slipped up – "oh Norm, no, wrong." I could write to him.

I was taken by his charm and humour as well as by his sharp ear for cant and his moral clarity. I've read a lot of accounts today which say the same thing – never met him, exchanged a few emails, what a lovely bloke, and what an inspiring one.

The Spews and the Scum

 

Pisses all over the culture, and then complains of the stench.

Nicked from Impossible Songs.

On Motives

"It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one."

Christopher Hitchens from his essay Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet

Some of what was said about the author of that aphorism after his death backs up that statement.

Brooksgate, Hackgate or however they'll gate it

Alex Massie is usually a genial chap, but he got his razor out today:-

An exclusive look at a strategy memo prepared for Rebekah Brooks this afternoon:

.....


You were only doing your job and your job was giving the punters what they wanted. (Yeah, we're going to have to drop the it's "inconceivable" that you knew stuff; everyone can conceive that you did. Tough break but there you have it.)

No, if you sinned it was because you loved the readers  - the Great sodding British public - not wisely but too well. They're a prurient, censorious, malignant bunch of bastards and we gave 'em a paper to match. If they've got a problem with that they should look to their own consciences first. Never mind the motes, look at the beams matey.

Read it all.

In a few words

John Gross

I was sorry to hear of the death of John Gross.  His Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters is one of my favourite books.

I’m re-posting a piece that I wrote about this book a few years ago.

I was a teenager and we were living in humid Hamilton, New Zealand, a city that was growing fast with wide sticky roads and sprawling ranch style houses.  My father was an estate agent at the time and rented out flats, and in one of these he had found a box of books which he gave to me. Among them was a fat hardback - expensive in New Zealand at the time - called The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by John Gross.

The Rise and Fall etc is a history of British intellectual life since 1800, with potted biographies of literary journalists and neat, throwaway remarks about the periodicals they wrote for and the movements they were involved in. It is very readable, with an open, tolerant humorous tone.  I did not know the voice of the English liberal, but I found it congenial.

"The chief practical purpose of literary histories is to teach us something about books that we have never read and probably never will."

Indeed.  I know that one day I shall get round to reading J S Mill*.  In the meantime I make do with Gross's synopsis.  I trust him since when he writes about authors that I have read - George Eliot, George Orwell - he gives what I think is a fair assessment.

He writes about Carlyle:-

". . . he was very much a portent.  He points forward, not indeed to fascism itself, since after all he never crossed over into the realm of active politics, but to the trahison des clercs, the long procession of artists and intellectuals whose hatred of the modern world has led them to flirt with brutally authoritarian regimes or to clutch at obscurantist dogma.  And, as with so many of his successors, the infected areas of his work cannot simply be cordoned off from the healthy.  Both are the product of the same fundamentally imperious approach to social complexities, of an imagination naturally drawn to clear-cut diagnoses and drastic solutions, impatient of hedging and compromise.  It is so the credit of such a man that he should nevertheless have been willing to prescribe unromantic short-term palliatives (organized emigration, elementary schools, etc.) but this was hardly his first claim on the consideration of his contemporaries, any more than it is on ours.  His most enduring distinction as a social critic is to have brought into dramatic focus the ruthlessly disruptive effects of unrestrained laissez-faire industrialism.  Trying to describe the larger forces at work in his society, he fell back on metaphors of homesickness, uprooting, disharmony.  As metaphors, they are brilliantly suggestive; but as the point of departure for any kind of comprehensive political programme, they need to be handled with care.  Like many other romantics, Carlyle ultimately seems to be judging society as though it were an unsuccessful work of art.  The analogy is dangerous, since social cohesion can never be as absolute as artistic unity; it will always be easy for those who dream of restoring an organic society to despair, and tempting for them to assume that a deliberately imposed uniformity will come to much the same thing in the end.  A romantic is properly concerned with integrity - the integrity of a personality, the integrity of a poem.  But politics is the art of rough, very rough approximations; and ever since Plato, the desire and pursuit of the whole has usually turned out, taken far enough and translated into political terms, to be a first-class recipe for totalitarianism." 

Well, that was me unconsciously armoured against the ideological interpretations of literature which I later came across when I went to university.  And immunised against the revolutionary bugs that floated about in the seventies.

I have just bought the second edition of Man of Letters (reissued in 1991) where in an Afterword John Gross laments the successful colonisation of English departments by the theorists:- 

". . . there is a hostility not merely towards the freelance, but towards the free response.  For in spite of its apparent variety, a great deal of critical theory is coercive, designed to enforce approved social and political attitudes (roughly speaking, any attitude that rejects 'traditional hierarchies').  The belittling of the belle lettrist, the person who writes as he pleases, is a bottom a demand for ideological conformity.

 The body of theory that has accumulated over the past few years, taken as a whole, seems to me a monstrous excrescence, a vast distraction, a paltry substitute for the experience of literature itself.  I believe that in time it will fade, but I am filled with a cold horror at the thought of how much further it could spread before it does."

I'm glad John Gross has read the theorists for me.  I'll take his word for it.  When I come across theorists or sons of theorists I find this:-

I am sceptical of this orientation toward the self from the antierioty of the monument. As Donohoe has it, the complex appearing of the monument is only such that it forms a correspondence with the self, with Da-sein. In turn, the objectification of death becomes subjected to an ontic appeal. Not only that, but the temporality of the monument, as stretching beyond time, places the self in a privileged location, insofar as temporality becomes re-presented in and through the self.. .

I don’t need to go on.

*I have now.

Eye of Marx, Toe of God

Thought for the Day on Radio 4 contravenes the Trade Descriptions Act as its blended platitudes about how we should all be nicer to each other and bad things happen aren’t something you can chew on for very long.  However, about 10 days ago someone, I can’t remember who, did actually grab my attention.  First of all he said the name “Eagleton”, then he said he’d been reading something Professor Prolific has been writing - evidently his new book about Evil - and how he’d gone from interpreting the three witches in Macbeth as revolutionary socialists overthrowing the old order (that would have been in his Marxist days - what a perverse reading of the withered hags) to thinking they are a bunch of evil nihilists wanting destruction for destruction’s sake (that’s in his present Christian guise, and a standard reading borne out by the text).  Well, anyone can change their mind about a literary work - nah they can’t, it’s Eagleton, and he’s up to no good.

I don’t want to read his latest so I can denounce it as vapour but Anthony Grayling has saved me the trouble by tasting the stew Eagleton has cooked up in his cauldron from random ingredients:-

He [Eagelton]  sets off on one of those complexifying journeys, like the route of a pinball bouncing backwards and forwards among a thicket of pingers, from William Golding to St Augustine, Macbeth to Pseudo-Dionysus, original sin to the Holocaust, Shakespeare to Freud, Satan to Thomas Mann, Arendt to Aristotle, and so copiously on – a verbal pinball ride among the entries in the telephone book of Western culture, to tell us what evil is. But do not expect, by the end, a conclusion, still less a definition, nor even a summary. Eagleton has been too long among the theorists to risk a straightforward statement. You have to grasp at fragments as you bounce among the pingers, not always quite sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing with this or that author, even whether he is still paraphrasing an author or speaking with his own voice. That’s a technique, of course.

Yeah, the shifty sod. 

As we are dealing with Eagleton here, note that this is of course not a mish-mash of inconsistencies, as it appears to be; this is subtlety and nuance. It is, you might say, nuance-sense.

I chose the same bits to quote as Butterflies and Wheels, for the very good reason that they are witty and apt.  Grayling goes on (read the lot - it’s an elegant hatchet job):- 

The notion that evil is non-rational is a more significant claim for Eagleton than at first appears, because he is (in this book as in others of his recent "late period" prolific burst) anxious to rewrite theology: God (whom he elsewhere tells us is nonexistent, but this is no barrier to his being lots of other things for Eagleton too, among them Important) is not to be regarded as rational: with reference to the Book of Job Eagleton says, "To ask after God’s reasons for allowing evil, so [some theologians] claim, is to imagine him as some kind of rational or moral being, which is the last thing he is." This is priceless: with one bound God is free of responsibility for "natural evil" – childhood cancers, tsunamis that kill tens of thousands – and for moral evil also even though "he" is CEO of the company that purposely manufactured its perpetrators; and "he" is incidentally exculpated from blame for the hideous treatment meted out to Job.

You can see where this leads: with other ways of defining deity conveniently beyond any possible meaning that can be attached to the notion, the religionists and their fellow-travellers are forever protected from challenge to and criticism and refutation of religious ideas and beliefs.

When Shakespeare was writing about witches he was living at a time when people believed they did have actual powers that could hurt and harm.   Eagleton’s statements on God are an incantation that summon what he no doubt thinks is a Cloud of Unknowing but are in fact a medium’s vapour of ectoplasm, a magician‘s puff of smoke.

Round about the caldron go;
    In the poison'd entrails throw. . .
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
    Then the charm is firm and good.

Let A Thousand Conduits Pour

I was very taken with this installation:-

 
  
The artist, Ai Weiwei, sounds like a hero as well.  He uses his position as a famous artist to speak against the Chinese authorities’ abuse of human rights:-

Ai helped to design the "Bird's Nest" national stadium for the 2008 Olympics – then blasted the country's "disgusting" political conditions and the use of the games as propaganda. Since then he has championed a number of sensitive causes, notably internet freedom and justice for children who died when shoddy schools collapsed in the devastating Sichuan earthquake. Others have fallen foul of the government for far less, and supporters fear Ai's position and his father's reputation will only shield him for so long. Certainly, the authorities seem to regard him, increasingly, as a problem. His China-based blog has been closed down, his email account hacked into, and security officials have made inquiries at his bank. In Chengdu last year, police detained him and fellow activists to prevent them attending the trial of a campaigner investigating schoolchildren's deaths. In the furore, a policeman punched him in the head, leaving him with painful headaches; weeks later, while working in Germany, he underwent surgery after doctors spotted internal bleeding.

The internet has made a huge difference to those who once would have had their message slowly trickle out through samizdat publications..  Ai Weiwei can pour out what he has to say through a thousand conduits:-

Around 26,000 people follow his volley of outrage and satire, facts and aphorisms, on Twitter: "No outdoor sports can be more elegant than throwing stones at autocracy; no melees can be more exciting than those in cyber space," read one recent missive.

“People often say I started to become too outspoken after a certain period. It's all because of the internet – if we didn't have this technology I would be same as everybody else; I couldn't really amplify my voice," he says.

Weren’t there some Russian poets who learned forbidden poets’ work off by heart so they wouldn’t be lost when the authors were suppressed?  Now they would post them on friendly blogs hosted in foreign countries.