Spineless economists

There are lots of things I want to blog about, which I will do soon... probably. But for now, just thought I'd share something I read today that made me smile. It seems a bit self-indulgent when there are probably still kids being beaten up in Parliament Square as I type, but...

My boss has a bit of a thing about John Ruskin, and organised a seminar for us today on 'Unto This Last', his relatively little-known foray into political economy. Her relentless Ruskin-plugging must be working, since I've borrowed her copy and started reading it on the train home. Here's what he has to say about the idea of the self-interested, maximising individual that underlies much of classical economics:

"Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusion of the science if its terms are accepted. I am simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables; and that when these results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitution. The reasoning might be admirable, the conclusions true, and the science deficient only in applicability.

"Modern political economy stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul; and having shown the utmost that may be made of bones, and constructed a number of interesting geometrical figures with death's-head and humeri, successfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny the truth of this theory: I simply deny its applicability to the present phase of the world."

Okay Catherine, you've sold me. This guy is clearly awesome.

Some thoughts on the student protests

A few mildly unconnected thoughts I've had lately on Wednesday's anti-fees rally, or more accurately on the way it's been reported and discussed:

1) It's annoying that people keep on implying that this is a self-interested protest. Yes, of course it reflects an entirely human preoccupation with your own situation and with people like you who will face that situation, rather than with the state of the world in general. But most of the students protesting will categorically not be affected by these reforms. That's not why they're on the streets. They're there on behalf of the thousands of people who will be affected, and who they know will find it harder to get a degree than they have. This seems blindingly obvious to me, but apparently not to Every Pundit Ever. Besides, as Mark has pointed out: they may not be organising protests against the cuts as a whole, but then neither is Polly Toynbee. Like her, I'm sure a lot of them would turn out for those protests as well. But it's unfair to criticise the National Union of Students for failing to organise them - the clue's sort of in the name...

2) Yes, I have noticed that a couple of days after I whinged at anti-fees campaigners for letting the Tories off the hook, anti-fees campaigners stormed Tory HQ. Ahem. Don't I look silly. Except that again, some pundits appear to have internalised the anti-Lib-Dem focus, citing the target of the invasion as an indication of random destructiveness: I swear one actually said, 'Their whole campaign has been aimed at the Lib Dems, and then they go and invade Tory HQ!' Yeah, what on earth have the Tories got to do with any of this? It's not like Cameron is Prime Minister or anything. Crazy students.

3) Left this till last, but really my deepest unease about this whole thing. Admittedly, this may just be the Evening Standard, as I haven't had a chance to read the other papers yet - but if their coverage is anything to go by, all that was achieved after the G20 protests seems to be crumbling before our eyes. The number of police injured in the 'riots' seems to have magically multipled from 7 to 40 some time between Thursday's paper and Friday's. Phrases like 'eruption of violence' are being bandied around left right and centre (often to imply that people or organisations are condoning violence when in fact they have endorsed non-violent direct action - again, the clue's in the name...) And most worryingly, the finger is directly being pointed at the namby-pamby liberal intelligentsia who 'tied the police's hands' after G20, preventing them from responding effectively to events.

Now, to be clear - I wasn't there on Wednesday, so I don't know what happened or how violent it was. But the way it's been reported is something I've seen many times before to describe protests with no violent intent, where the only injuries caused were a result of scuffles caused by over-zealous policing. To reiterate, I don't know if that's the case this time - but I'm certainly taking the press reports with a generous pinch of salt.

Anyway, regardless of the truth of the reports, I'd still be concerned if this risked undoing the limited progress that was made after last year's G20 protests. The way peaceful protests are policed in this country is utterly unacceptable. I have seen peaceful protesters intimidated, traumatised, attacked without provocation and arrested without due cause. This is not the action of a few bad apples, it's completely endemic. For Christ's sake, have we forgotten that a man died not so long ago? But it seems like at least some people are in danger of forgetting it, and going back to giving the police carte blanche to beat up hippies, all because of a few smashed windows and an idiot with a fire extinguisher. And that really scares me.

What's that? you're angry about housing benefit? I'll just transfer you to my colleague Steve...

Just a quick observation as I'm rather tired, but... I noticed with some surprise the other day that Steve Webb, the Minister for Pensions, seems to have been allocated the unenviable responsibility of putting his name to parliamentary answers on housing benefit. What, I ask myself, does housing benefit have to do with pensions? It certainly doesn't feature in his list of ministerial responsibilities, unless you class it under 'pensions and related benefits', which seems like a bit of a stretch. Given the government's rhetoric pitting housing benefit claimants against 'average working families', you'd think it might fit better under 'employment and related benefits', which is Chris Grayling's area.

However, Steve Webb does have one distinguishing feature that Chris Grayling lacks: he's a Lib Dem. Perhaps I'm just being overly cynical, but I can't help wondering if it is quite deliberate that one of the government's most widely-criticised attacks on the welfare state is being fronted by the DWP's only Lib Dem minister. Steve Webb was the party's work and pensions spokesperson before the election, and I'm fairly confident he would have been speaking out against the current changes as strongly as anyone had he still been in opposition. Instead, he's forced to defend them. It does make me wonder whether the widely-noted tactic of pushing Danny Alexander in front of the cameras to announce unpopular things whilst hiding George Osborne in a box extends to other departments as well. I can well imagine the existence of a concerted Tory strategy to make Lib Dems the fall guys as far as possible - with Lib Dem ministers happy to take nominal responsibility for controversial areas in the heady anticipation of having influence.

I can equally well imagine that I'm barking up completely the wrong tree here. But either way, I can't help feeling that the Tories are playing a far cleverer game than the Lib Dems in terms of coalition politics.

UPDATE: Ironic that the day after I wrote this, Nick Clegg is left carrying the can at PMQs on the day of the student fees march, resulting in a predictable 30-minute mauling. Obviously, Cameron has a pretty good alibi, being in China and all. But I can't imagine the Tories being too upset about this. Tuition fees is another area where campaigners and the media seem to have done the Tories' job for them by aiming their fire so exclusively at the Lib Dems. I know it's easy and it's rational, because of the narrative of betrayal, but it's unfortunate that it's led to those who are actually the leading party of government - who never opposed raising fees in the first place and would clearly have done this anyway with or without the Lib Dems - getting off scot free.

A big fat nothing

Hello again.

Baffling Question of the Day which has prompted me to break my blogging silence is: why the hell are so many people taking 'the Big Society' so seriously?

From pretty much the first time I heard the phrase, it seemed blindingly obvious that it was nothing more than a fairly pathetic attempt to rebrand Thatcherism. You can almost see the Tory spinners sat in the pub, going "Maybe instead of talking about the 'small state', we should start talking about, I dunno, the 'big... society', or something", as they scribble 'big society?' on the back of a beermat. Sure, some vague policy ideas about devolving power and supporting voluntary organisations have been stuck on or sketched in since, but surely, at bottom, that's really all it is?

Yet working in the charity sector, I am constantly surprised by the number of people having entirely serious discussions about 'what the big society means for us'. Fairly understandably, this is mostly coming from charities involved in delivering services - and to be fair, most people seem to have a healthy cynicism about the contradiction between expecting them to take on the job of the state and cutting the very budgets that fund them. But the other day I swear I saw a discussion thread about the implications of the Big Society agenda for charitable campaigning, which just made me want to shout "NOTHING! THERE AREN'T ANY! The Emperor has no clothes - bloody obviously!"

Now, maybe I'm wrong. One of my pet peeves is political commentary that says 'Ha, you fools - if only you were as clever and enlightened as me' (see pretty much every socialist blogger on Lib Dem voters, although notably only *after* the coalition was formed). I think it's patronising, arrogant and unhelpful. So I really don't want to be one of those people. Also, it's entirely possible that the people having these discussions know more about this than me, rather than less. But I am genuinely baffled at how the voluntary sector seems to be treating the Big Society as a serious policy agenda worthy of consideration, rather than with the contempt it deserves. It seems to me that by doing so, they're giving what is basically Tory propaganda a credibility it doesn't warrant. Why is there such readiness to let them off the hook like that?

"Only the Conservatives..."

Having just got back from the hustings for the Lewisham mayoral elections I am feeling all civic minded and thought I would blog about the outrageous graph abuse in the election booklet (not circular) I got in the post for said mayoral election at the weekend.

The booklet helpfully contained a page from each of the candidates on why you should vote for them. In all honesty I was never likely to vote for the Conservative candidate, Simon Nundy, anyway, but I had a scan through his page and my eyes hovered briefly over his obligatory "CAN'T WIN HERE" graph, seen below:


In case you can't quite read, it says "2008 Mayoral election: How Lewisham voted". Apparently, how Lewisham voted was 37% Labour, 24% conservatives and 9% Lib Dems, leading to the logical conclusion that "only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6th". Thanks, Mr Nundy!

So, I continued my merry way through the booklet and thought no more about this, until I got to the Lib Dem candidate's page, and saw this graph:


I spent a good minute or so flicking back and forth between these two graphs, reading the small print and trying to find out if there was any possible way they could be reconciled, and eventually gave up in bafflement.

Fortunately, I have my personal research assistant (aka Mark) on hand to solve life's little mysteries. He looked into it today, and it turns out that Lewisham didn't have a mayoral election in 2008. The Conservative candidate's graph was, in fact, a visual representation of 'how Lewisham voted' in the London mayoral election. That's right, folks, in a totally different election. I'm sure the Boris/Ken showdown has some intangible relevance to my vote for Lewisham mayor that I have yet to fathom. That or Simon Nundy is a weaselly duplicitous git.

As it turns out, the Conservatives haven't been in clear second place in Lewisham in any election for some time. The Greens were second in the most recent local elections, and in the last general election, the Lib Dems came second in my constituency, and in the other Lewisham constituency there was very little to choose between the Tories and Lib Dems (both way behind Labour). So the only way for the Tory candidate to suggest that 'only the Conservatives can stop Labour on May 6' is to present us with results from an arbitrarily chosen election in which they did come second.

I know this isn't exactly an unusual tactic, but whenever I've seen someone do it before, they at least tend to own up to the fact that they're showing, say, local election results in a campaign leaflet for the general. This was specifically designed to make you think it was giving you information about the election you were, you know, actually voting in. And if it hadn't been for the Lib Dems' graph (which seems to have been broadly accurate), I might never have realised. In terms of sheer contempt for the electorate I really do think this one takes the biscuit.

But if you try sometimes, you end up looking a bit silly

So I recently decided that I needed something to fill the Cbyv-shaped singing hole in my life and joined a 'political choir'. Little did I know it would also fill the ridiculous-things-to-write-about-shaped blogging hole in my life...

For it turns out that, as well as being a place to go and sing good songs with genuinely lovely people, this choir is like being in a particularly brilliant sit-com. It's run collectively, and the decision-making process is basically everything you might imagine would be produced by a well-meaning group of lefties taking certain things a tad too seriously.

To illustrate. Back when I was in Cbyv, we'd learn songs, and then we'd, you know, know those songs. We'd sing them again from time to time, unless they were rubbish, or too hard, in which case they'd be quietly dropped by a sort of tacit consensus.

In this choir, when you learn a new song, a collective decision has to be made on whether to take it into the repertoire. And, inevitably, that decision is preceded by an interminable discussion in which the song is taken apart and over-analysed until you are thoroughly sick of it and never want to sing it again.

A few weeks ago, someone taught us an arrangement of Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' with the Rolling Stones' 'you can't always get what you want'. It was supposed to be a wry comment on consumerism (ho ho). I thought it was pretty reasonable, if perhaps a little try-hard. But several people in the choir took issue with the final line – which, for those of you not familiar with the Rolling Stones' oeuvre, is 'you can't always get what you want – but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.'

Why, you might reasonably ask, would anyone get exercised about this bland and inoffensive lyric? Because – wait for it – SOME PEOPLE TRY THEIR WHOLE LIVES AND THEY DON'T GET WHAT THEY NEED.

I kid you not – we genuinely had a vote in which several people voted not to 'take the song into the repertoire' as it stood, because they felt that it was making some kind of obnoxious Thatcherite statement to the effect that if the poor only tried a little harder, they'd be alright.

Don't get me wrong – I get on really well with pretty much everyone in the choir and the people making this argument were no exception: they are nice, and I tend to agree with their politics. But really, the only response I can muster to this is '?!?!!'

[I was going to end this by saying I'll keep you posted, but since my blogging record has been patchy at best for the last few years, and the readership has dwindled correspondingly until there isn't really a 'you' to speak of, it seems a bit redundant.]

To change or not to change?

Note: having finished this and read it through I realise it probably comes across as a bit self-indulgent. Sorry about that.

Did I mention I'm getting married next June?

This post isn't just an excuse for me to squee about my wedding (I get enough excuses to do that thanks to my lovely friends) - I have a genuine wedding dilemma that I need advice on. Although why I thought posting it on my unread blog would be a good way of doing this, I have no idea. Perhaps I'll cross-post to facebook where someone may actually comment.

ANYWAY. My dilemma is this: should I change my name?

When I first started thinking about this, I thought the whole feminist* thing around changing your name when you marry was a bit overdone. My logic was that your maiden name is taken from your dad anyway, so why should it be more feminist to take the name of a man you have chosen than of a man you didn't choose?

But then I thought it over a bit more and realised this was a bit silly: the point is that your name is part of who you are, it's something you've had all your life - and you shouldn't have to change your identity just because you've chosen to enter into a committed relationship with someone. In some ways, taking someone's name *is* a bit like subsuming your identity into their own, and is a relic of a patriarchal system where you became the property of their family.

So, after all that to-ing and fro-ing, I figure the important thing from a feminist point of view is that you have a choice, and choosing to do one thing or the other doesn't inherently make you somehow un-feminist.

This being the case, the pros and cons of either approach seem to me as follows:

TO CHANGE
- I can see myself having Mark's name. This vision is strangely appealing
- It would be quite nice for us to have the same name
- It would probably make various adminny things slightly easier
- But: it would be effort
- I would need to get a new passport
- And learn a new signature
- And I would be C. Taylor, the same as both Mark's parents, which would be weird.

NOT TO CHANGE
- I like being a Berry. I might miss not being a Berry.
- It would be effort-free
- But: I would be Mrs Berry, which would accelerate my transformation into my mother
- Or I would be Ms Berry, and Ms is a bit silly.

Any thoughts on any of the above? Anyone?

~~~
* I'm going to use the word feminist throughout this blog post - this isn't the place to try and define it or to explain why I do consider myself a feminist, but am more than happy to enter into a discussion with anyone who's uncomfortable with it. Especially with those who, like Kate and Lisa, have too many crappy associations with cod-feminist literary criticism at A-level to engage with it on any meaningful level ;)