Economist and the earthly city

I am 5 days behind on The Economist (i.e. last Friday’s has not yet been opened). Either my bowels are moving more quickly than usual (the magazines are generally stored in the bathroom), or else it’s been a productive week in other areas of endeavour. Anyhow, as I finished off last week’s edition this morning, I was taken with the style of the obituary, as often happens. The page on Alexander Haig (American General, White House Chief of Staff under Nixon, head of NATO, foreign policy spokesman for Reagan, etc, etc) closed with a sweet metaphor from the General’s book Caveat, riffed by the journalist…

“The [Reagan] White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm? …It was impossible to know…

If someone evidently had the helm, General Haig saluted. If not, rather than let drift and uncertainty give any comfort to America’s enemies, he had acquired the habit of seizing the wheel himself.”

Grand sentiments, steely nerves, national business – all in a day’s work for the rich and powerful, I suppose. Even the little people like me can get dewy-eyed about this sort of stirring stuff, actual or fictional (as happened when I re-watched the ludicrous yet strangely charming cornfest that is Independence Day over lunch on Tuesday). But let’s be aware of the mythic and ideological guises of the state, the nation, human hierarchies, construals of enemies, and so forth. Let’s remember what really lasts, where the city with foundations comes from, who it comes from, and what really counts...

incomes in Britain

Found a fascinating article in the FT a few weeks ago that turned up again in this afternoon's tidy-up. All about the distribution of incomes in the UK.

"Middle class workers richer than they think", Tues 5th Jan 2010.

Based on 2007-08 prices, and also based on all people with incomes (whether pensioners, those on benefits, full-time and part-time workers).

Mean (average) weekly income per individual, £487 [=£25,342pa]
Median (central figure if you line them all up) weekly income per individual, £393 [=£20,436pa]
Mode (most common) weekly income per individual, c.£260 [=c.£13,520pa]

Other interesting facts:

A childless couple making £25,000 each are in the 87th percentile - i.e. only 13% of the population earn more. That means that most yuppie couples in Cambridge are unquestionably "rich" (especially given the rest of the world...)

Having a child means you need an extra 20% on your income to maintain a
similar standard of living.

47,500 people (the top 0.1%) make more than £350,000 per year!

More stats are available at www.ifs.org.uk/wheredoyoufitin, the people who did the hard work.

The Economist

Thanks to Mrs L, the old folk and her old folk I am enjoying a year’s subscription to this august publication. There is a high volume of adverts (the average seems to be around 30% of page space per issue) but they are often classy adverts, and the news material and comment is fascinating and considerably more international than your average paper.

So, I now know everything. Which is nice.

I know, for example, that in America, expectations about transport are different to what they are here (among the class I belong to anyway), and that The Economist’s anonymous writers can be quite witty…

Speaking of the aftermath of the under-reported hurricane September that hit the South with a one-two, p.60 of Oct 4-10, 2008 reads [tricolon with bathetic climax?]

Most of the Gulf of Mexico’s crude oil production halted before Gustav, and after the hurricans hit the refineries were slow to recover. As of September 29th, according to the Department of Energy, more than half of production was still shut down. Two pipelines serve most of the south-east, and severe shortages resulted. [one…] People started to fill up whenever they could, sometimes queuing for hours. [two…] Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said that in Atlanta and Charlotte and Chattanooga the situation was “like a third-world country.” [three!] People contemplated public transport and telecommuting.

Oh, the hardship, the hardship.

Constitutional fandango

Here in the UK we are endlessly deferring the question of constitutional reform, whether it's of the House of Lords or of the electoral system for the Commons. Clearly it is more important to deal with the mess of the lower house first, though of course MPs, when they bother, are more interested in tinkering with the upper house.

It's enough to make one despair.

In Zimbabwe we have just witnessed a remarkable election, the aftermath of which has seen the courts brought in simply to get the results published! The final paragraph of the Beeb's latest report makes depressing reading - the situation is darkly farcical at best.

Meanwhile in Turkey, the separation of powers has recently contributed to a constitutional crisis, with members of the judiciary voting to begin legal action against the executive (specifically, against the ruling party, recently returned at the polls with a significant majority) for violating certain constitutional principles. Zaman, a paper symathetic to the governing AK Party and its exceedingly moderate Islamism (which is really only an attempt to restrain the extremist secularism that has barricaded itself in certain corners of Turkish public life), is full of stories, which are well worth pursuing. They put the UK's constitutional and political weaknesses into perspective, they highlight the important principle that law is not ideoogically neutral (which Islam, at least, recognises, in contrast to the duplicitious thought-systems of Western liberal humanism and pluralism) and they teach the reader about a fascinating country.

Coincidence?

We are going through our CD collection from A-Z at the moment (partly to spare us from the burden of choice when we want some diferent music than Radio 3 has on offer, and partly to justify having built up such a bloated stash) and arrived at Scriabin last week. The only Scriabin discs I own are the complete piano sonatas (plus miscellaneous piano works) on a double-CD and the complete symphonies (plus piano concerto) in a 3-CD boxed set.

After listening to one or two of the symphonies, I flicked onto the radio to discover that the Beeb were broadcasting Scriabin's symphonies over the same time period that we were listening to them. How odd.

For someone who thinks that there is more to coincidences than meets the eye (though he's not quite sure what) take a look at the blog of author and chess Grandmaster James Plaskett. [First post and most recent post - wonder why he's dried up...] His eccentricity is charmingly English - posting liberally on anti-Darwinism and the defence of Major Charles Ingram (convicted of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in 2003), both of which causes I have heartily in support of, as well as on mystical codswallop regarding coincidences!

If defence of Charles Ingram seems a little odd to you, I suggest you read the superb essay by Plaskett on the subject. At the very least the jury should not have been able to return a guilty verdict since the evidence in the case, properly examined, cannot take us beyond reasonable doubt. It is also more than possible that the Ingrams were completely innocent.

History site bid for CB1 area scrapped

The headline jumped out at me as I was wrapping up some potato peelings the other day.

Basically, local property firm Ashwells are trying to make a killing out of souping up the moribund area about the railway station (and who can blame them?) and to sweeten friends in high places (is that too cynical?) were working with the County Council on a plan to turn an ugly but distinctive old flour silo and mill into a "Historical Resource and Cultural Centre" that would combine various local history records, archives, archaeological displays and the like. A serious public benefit, had it been carried out...

Never renowned for its speed, the local authority moved slowly on this (preliminary ideas for a heritage centre on various sites around the city have been floating around for about a decade, if not longer, and it would seem unfair to blame this on the heritage functions of the Council, who might well be expected to be a bit dusty, since there is cash sloshing around for project management and bringing across other expertise should the political will be there) and presumably the developer, fustrated by the failure of its initial (and grossly overambitious) planning application to the City Council (last year), realised that time is money and so this loss of time (and the recent deflations in the housing market) have led said developer to try to get more money by turning that spot into more offices it can let out. As the local councillor was quoted as saying (in the Cambridge Crier, March 21st, 2008), "It is very sad that the developer appears to have raised the stakes..." Very sad indeed.

There doesn't seem to be a formal statement about the breakdown of the plans beyond what was reported in the local rags. (The exuberant 2005 press release about the plans now makes for rather dismal reading.) And the Council's website has not yet caught up with this - the library and information service pages are still looking forward to a new Heritage Centre on Station Road. There is a certain irony that this information is found with local history information...

The future

In 2008 the Cambridgeshire Collection back into the Central Library on a temporary basis.

A new heritage resource centre is planned to open in or soon after 2009, combining the Cambridgeshire Collection and the County Record Office, Cambridge, on one site in Station Road, Cambridge. This is an exciting development, which will bring complementary collections together and improve and extend public facilities.

Further information about these plans will be made available in due course

It would be too tempting to paint a picture of a delightful and well-meaning but unsophisticated and un-savvy corner of the local authority relying far too much on the goodwill of developers so I leave that to the readers' imagination.

Full disclosure: I worked for several months on a tiny part of this project about two years ago, and am sad (though not entirely surprised) to see even my meagre contribution wasted.

no time for complacency

Democracy is not a panacea, in case you were wondering. For all the freedoms we enjoy in this country, there's a lot that's rubbish. The nature of the voting system we have could be called into question, for instance, along with successive governments' attitude towards its reform.

makevotescount.org.uk has sent a trenchant e-mail round in the wake of the release of the Government's review of electoral systems. (What's with that big right-left stripe on the cover? Are we meant to be thinking about rushing back into an ever-vanishing past under the auspices of a poorly integrated Union...?!)

MVC say:

We had not expected the review itself to be much different from what was published on Thursday. What has taken us by surprise, disappointed, even angered, us - and will hopefully galvanise all of us in our campaigning efforts over the coming weeks and months - is the Government's determination to downplay what is actually in the report and close down opportunities for the public to have their say. Voting matters and so do the systems used. Yet the Government no longer seems to care about voters' real world experiences and opinions of elections. That was certainly the impression given by Michael Wills when he claimed (in his Department's press release) that the "current voting system for UK general elections works well". The voting system may be working well for him and other MPs, but not necessarily for voters. He would struggle to substantiate that claim - either from polling data or from the review itself - if he was looking at the issue more objectively from the voters' perspective. The Government is in danger of treating voters with contempt, by not going beyond the academic exercise of the review and now shutting out parlimentary and public debate. For us "democracy isn't deskbound". Together we need to push the Ministry of Justice to take the debate beyond Westminster and the confines of parties and politicians who have a vested interest in the status quo. And we need to encourage Gordon Brown to show the leadership needed to take this issue forward and help realise the new politics that he has said he is keen to usher in.

Sad, but vested interests (in this case the MPs themselves, though the Lib Dems are to be commended for their stand on PR) do have a tendency to arrange things to suit themselves. Conspiracy theories not necessary: greed and inertia survive Ockham's razor and explain rather a lot...

Religion and Politics

A starter. One of the leading Catholic thinkers in America gives more than a glance to this. How to piece this together with libertarianism is another matter...!

Arab right to return?

Something biased to make you think.

The largest banner ads around the article are for the dating agency www.singlemuslimcom. Is that ironic, or what?

reading the "debates"

between various commentators who left a little message at the bottom of this related article lambasting the contraception industry has left the usual nasty taste in the mouth. Certainly the libertarians have come out of the woodwork to attack any pro-family or pro-self-control stance.

Perhaps more profoundly, however, this debate shows the logical conclusion of the rejection of God. We end up with not merely the hidden practice but the public celebration of the idolatry of self and of short-term gratification. Without a robust biblical ethic many of the voices calling for liberalisation are strong ones. In fact, so are the voices calling for Victorian morality and all the bad stuff that entailed. And so are those who argue for a strange mix of freedom and authoritarianism (such as Polly Toynbee's calls to chop the family and replace it with the state and the leftist elite) because the moral basis for making any arguments has collapsed. The whole debate must eventually reduce to 'might makes right'.

Is that too pessimistic?

why are they all in the Guardian?

To be fair, it's not all the Guardian's fault. It is the newspaper that most resembles a newspaper (not that the competition is all that spectacular). But this story was quite foolish. Please read it...

Doctors call for free condoms in pubs and taxis to protect against sexual diseases (18 Dec)

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Something to clear up first. The headline is misleading, since the good Prof said "it might make more sense to give condoms away in pubs, clubs and taxis". This was apparently a suggestion of "doctors", though only one doctor is quoted making this suggestion.

The idea that giving a binge drinker a condom at the point at which s/he is drunk is the answer to the problem of STDs and unwanted pregnancies is, frankly, ridiculous. How many inebriated people who are prepared to sleep with near strangers are going to (a) be in a position to remember that they have this condom, (b) remember how to use it and (c) actually put that into practice?

"Oh, here's a free condom. That gives you a couple of quid extra to spend on booze now you don't have to bother to use your brain and visit that vending machine in the toilets". Nice.

Do these fools really think that lack of access to contraceptive devices (which don't protect against all STDs anyway) is the problem? At least someone was willing to suggest that excessive alcohol consumption might be the problem (Linda Tucker, co-author of the report). But what about the cultural dissociation of sex from marriage?

What a silly question.

"Boris Johnson would destroy London's unity"

said somebody with an OBE who is black and who has suffered as a result of racist violence. Yet that hardly justifies the comment being the front page "news" article of Saturday's Guardian! How is that news!? If someone wrote this in the Kiddiminster Weeky Advertiser would you be impressed... 'A hostile opinion to the mayoral candidacy of Mr B Johnson, Con., was expressed yesterday... blah, blah...' Come on Guardian, you can do better than front-page ad hominem. It's not as if the article actually said very much beyond that except to quote bits of Johnson's journalism out of context. If we were looking for a balanced look at the candidates we might have expected some comments on Livingstone's bloopers, but in any case we weren't - we were looking for NEWS on the front page of a respectable NEWSpaper!