Against Wilful Stupidity
How amazing is Marko Attila Hoare. He’s even right about nine-grand tuition fees. His post is not just a takedown of the policy but an attack on anti-intellectualism in general: on a culture that equates stupidity with integrity, and intelligence and creativity with naivety and pretension. Read the whole thing.
As a child studying at Holland Park Comprehensive School in London in the 1980s, I naively believed that hard work and talent should be rewarded, and that a university education would be my reward for studying hard. I was one of those who actually worked at school and did my homework. And it wasn’t always easy, with classes constantly being disrupted by loudmouthed morons who despised education, viewed school as oppression and teachers as the enemy. They dossed around for five years and left school with minimal or no qualifications, after having made the learning experience as difficult as possible for the rest of us. So difficult was it to work in such an environment, that I found I could study more in one hour of poorly attended optional after-school maths class – where there was no noise and disruption – than in three hours of regular classes.
Welcome to England: the European nation that most despises schools, universities, teachers and students, and that most celebrates stupidity and vulgarity. As encapsulated in the moron’s refrain to the student – ‘I’d rather have a degree from the university of life’. The subtext being that education corrupts and divorces students from the real world, and that there is a greater nobility in ignorance, prejudice and underachievement. The binge-drinking yobs and football hooligans are the ones with the real integrity, not the poncey students with their poncey books.
How, you may ask, did a nation that thinks like this produce some of the world’s greatest institutions of learning, including the world famous Cambridge and Oxford, but also excellent universities and colleges like Imperial College, York, the London School of Economics, Warwick and others ? In fact, it’s a question of two sides of the same coin. There was a traditional belief that university education should be the preserve of the privileged few, while the masses should have no access to it. Unjust as it was, this system did at least have the merit of producing treasures like Cambridge and Oxford. A more enlightened ruling class would have sought to preserve this treasure and maximise the chances of students from all social backgrounds of benefiting from it.
Instead, for the last twenty years or so, our politicians – both Labour and Conservative – seem to have been following an inverted form of Flaubert’s dictum, and to believe that the point of democracy is to lower the ruling class to the level of stupidity attained by the masses.
There are two strong points here.
1) Most people don’t mind funding public services that they may never or rarely need – for example, people are happy to fund the NHS through tax even though they may never get sick, to fund the police even though they may never be the victim of a crime, even to fund welfare though they may never be out of work. The same should apply for higher education.
2) If you consider yourself leftwing, the indulgence of philistinism is a bad move – even if it’s wrapped in prolier-than-thou rhetoric.
Also check out Marko’s report on a recent demo, and watch in disgust as he lifts the Daily Mail rock.
Beyond the Blank Page: What is the point of Ed Miliband?
I was born into the progressive Guardianista middle class. My parents hid Vietnam draft dodgers in the seventies, waved CND placards in the eighties and became ardent Blairites in the nineties. The long dark night of the 1980s must have been harder for them because they knew they were in a minority. Thatcher won three decisive election victories and there were clearly people who loved Thatcher and thought that she was doing the right thing.
The National Government shares Thatcher’s monetarist approach and ideological thrust but not the political mandate. Cameron’s coalition was lashed together in four days and at the last minute when it became clear that he had failed to win an outright majority against a shattered, third-term administration led by a bumbling sociopath at a time of almost unprecedented crisis. The Conservative Party never hesitates to overthrow its leaders if they don’t deliver – that’s why it has been such a success in British politics – and Cameron’s inner circle went into coalition talks on a desperate mission to get him the premiership, at whatever cost. Cameron’s appeal to the Liberal Democrats was basically ‘Dear Nick. I have been locked in a small room with a revolver and a glass of Bell’s. Please prop up my government. I am begging you.’ An anonymous Tory told the Guardian that the priority was ‘Operation Save Dave’: ‘All that matters is getting David into No 10. Then we can work out what we need to do.’
People tend to underestimate Cameron – both his strengths and his ideological dark side – and you would hardly believe this desperation could exist in the relaxed and confident sharpshooter who leans on the dispatch box every midday Wednesday. The coalition government rests on a electoral sandcastle yet it acts as if its ministers were carried into Whitehall on the shoulders of cheering crowds. On the back of Cameron’s 36% vote share he is ploughing ahead with dramatic changes to education, the NHS, welfare, defence, policing, everything. (Contrast this with Tony Blair, who won a landslide in ’97 yet in his first term was cautious to the point of rupture.) Predictably, most of the changes are spending reductions. Everything is justified with the foul lie that there is no alternative to swift and deep cuts. The rest of us must repent for the sins of the elite, who like the Buchanans in the Great Gatsby, ‘smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’
Labour’s response to all this has been to spend four months fucking around with a leadership contest, and now, apparently, we are going to spend more months fucking around with a policy review. In a big hyped speech Miliband announced ’22 policy inquiries’ and ‘the formation of a series of working groups, chaired by shadow cabinet ministers, intended to lay the ground for a new policy programme to take Labour into the next general election.’ Sorry, Ed, but do we really have time for all this shit? Have we really earned the luxury of the blank page?
Here’s what Uncle Eddie should be asking at PMQs. Do you think your approach to cutting the deficit is wise considering that Ireland destroyed itself by doing exactly the same thing in 2006? Why doesn’t your Chancellor, who has no experience of business, commerce or finance, listen to the serious economists who say his plans will end in disaster? In the light of research showing that you could avoid spending cuts by taxing the richest 1,000, do you think that it is fair to sacrifice the livelihoods and lives of millions of people because of mistakes made by your friends in the City? You insist that the working class and middle class should lose public services and quality of life. Why should they? What gives you the right to do this? Who do you think you are? How do you look in the mirror in the morning, and sleep at night?
Seven months into the National Government’s first term we are seeing riots, demonstrations and occupations. Consider that the real pain of Gideonomics won’t hit until January when the VAT hike comes in. Students breaking into CCHQ could then be the least of Cameron’s problems. We are seeing the dawn of a new, intelligent, creative force in political protest. On Friday in several different cities activists from UK Uncut chanted ‘We are the tax enforcement society’ as they closed flagship stores of revenue-dodging billionaire Philip Green. There has never been such acute awareness of the distribution of wealth and power. The debate is happening, but it’s not happening in Parliament.
Government strategy against Ed Miliband is the same as it was against Labour leaders of the 1980s, to link him with leftwing disorder or at least make him deny that there’s a link. Miliband knows this and by manouvreing around the charge he is making himself look ridiculous. On a recent student demo, Miliband said that ‘I said I was going to talk to them at some point, I was tempted to go out and talk to them.’ Why didn’t you? ‘I think I was doing something else at the time, actually.’ Cameron, a brilliant debater, capitalised on this at PMQs: ‘At least the Deputy Prime Minister can make up his mind whether to join a demo or not – the Leader of the Opposition cannot even decide whether to sit on the fence.’
Thing is, Miliband will gain nothing by distancing himself. You can’t appease the right. They are never satisfied. Miliband should go on the attack and throw his weight behind the protestors. These aren’t the sectarian bigots of the STWC. They are the ‘squeezed middle’ he keeps going on about. They are people with jobs and relationships and needs and aspirations. And in the end, they may not need him.
Update: Having said that…
Robin Hood tax: an idea whose time has come?
Some unions, NGO’s and sections of the left are presently busy promoting the so-called “Robin Hood Tax” as an alternative to the Con-Dem cuts in the UK and mainstream capitalist rersponses to the world economic crisis. It’s not a new idea, and traces its origins back to the 1970’s when Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin suggested a currency transaction tax , was originally defined as a tax on all spot conversions of one currency into another.
Tobin said:
“It would be an internationally agreed uniform tax, administered by each government over its own jurisdiction. Britain, for example, would be responsible for taxing all inter-currency transactions in Eurocurrency banks and brokers located in London, even when sterling was not involved. The tax proceeds could appropriately be paid into the IMF or World Bank. The tax would apply to all purchases of financial instruments denominated in another currency—from currency and coin to equity securities. It would have to apply, I think, to all payments in one currency for goods, services, and real assets sold by a resident of another currency area. I don’t intend to add even a small barrier to trade. But I see offhand no other way to prevent financial transactions disguised as trade.”[1]
I’m personally not entirely convinced that the “Robin Hood”/Tobin tax is the panacea some would have us believe. Doubts remain about its practicability and about how easy it would be to avoid. Tobin himself eventually rejected his own idea as unfeasible, though Joseph Stiglitz said in 2005, the tax is “much more feasible today” than a few decades ago, when Tobin recanted.[34]
And, of course, anything that makes the bankers pay even a tiny amount towards effects of the crisis has to be worth serious consideration.
The “Robin Hood” campaign has put out some rather good little videos, even if they’re produced by that plonker Richard Curtis:
NB: much of the above comes from Wikipedia’s informative (and as far as I can judge, accurate) entry on the Tobin Tax.
Support Fairness at Work – Lobby Your MP Now!
The Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill has been introduced in response to the raft of court cases brought against unions whose members had voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action. John McDonnell MP has been drawn in the Private Members Bill ballot and is campaigning to repeal part of the anti-trade union laws which make it possible for employers to take trade unions to court to block strike action on minor technicalities.The current legislation puts a massive burden on trade unions and means trade union ballots are subject to far tighter regulations than general elections.The Bill will:
The Bill is having its Second Reading in Parliament on the 22 October 2010 and in order for this to take place 100 MPs must be present in the Commons. Write to your MP now asking them to make sure they are there! |
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| And please attend the demonstration and rally in support of the Bill on the 13th October | |||
Betrayal, Conspiracies, Sacrilege, Heresies
Just a couple of thoughts on the Pope visit:
1) The Catholic Church and fascism
There’s a piece by the smug, moon-faced idiot who edits CiF Belief, in which he attempts to close down debate while stampeding for the moral high ground. Contra Brown, it is entirely appropriate to raise the Church’s relationship with Nazism, because Pope Benedict gave a speech on it, in which he failed to acknowledge either the religious and spiritual aspects of the Third Reich or the role of his church in railroading war criminals to safety.
The speech itself reads like a CiF column. The fact is that, despite having the evidence, we atheists have lost the argument on this one. People will always believe that Nazism and Stalinism are atheist ideologies and atheist crimes. Sam Harris writes that ‘[t]he romantic thesis lurking here is that reason itself has a ‘shadow side’ and is therefore no place to turn for the safeguarding of human happiness.’ Against sentiment such evidence is useless. But it’s also worth repeating, whenever this lie is broadcast, Pascal Bruckner’s point that Nazism and communism were both overthrown by the secular, reason-based democracies of Enlightened Europe and America.
2) Celebrating the Geopolitical Epicentre of the Culture of Death
The visit kicked off with a comment from the Pope’s right hand man to the effect that multiculturalism had turned the UK into a third world country. Any American or European politician, making this Powellite slur on our country, would be condemned rightly as a racist. But Kasper’s words stirred no reaction from the pro-faith left, which will forgive and forget just about anything. Benedict’s Edinburgh speech was along the same lines with lots of pissing and moaning about multiculturalism, the marginalisation of faith, and the degenerate state of the UK. The British taxpayer is in the surreal position of paying to be insulted.
Recently there have been more and more clerics hectoring the nation about its deterioration into sexual permissiveness and metropolitan pretensions. Earlier in the month we had the archbishop of Westminster complaining that the passage of gay rights law had turned the UK into a ‘selfish, hedonistic wasteland’ and London into ‘the geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death’. What’s worse is that his condemnation of liberal, cosmopolitan Britain is being listened to with sage nods and serious expressions because the rest of us also, by some tragic perversity, love to denigrate this aspect of contemporary life in the UK.
The point is that if you condemn the Vatican’s reactionary statements on this you also have to condemn the intellectuals and cultural commenters who refuse to stand up for the UK’s diverse and urban way of life. Hedonism, intoxication, irreverence and sexual freedom should be celebrated and valued, and in time they may have to be fought for.
Read Laurie Penny in the NS:
But why on earth shouldn’t we congratulate ourselves? We are one of the most tolerant cultures on the planet, taking a stand, in the midst of domestic turmoil, against global religious oppression. Can’t we feel just a little bit proud?
If it is anti-Catholic to believe that child-rape ought to be eliminated, that stopping the spread of AIDs in Africa trumps religious squeamishness about condom use, and that human happiness is more important than dogmatic adherence to cobweb-crusted notions of purity and morality, then I for one am proud to be part of the geopolitical culture of death.
Shiraz Socialist 