No one enters into the world fully formed. We are made and make our own history, but not under circumstances of our choosing as someone fairly influential once noted. That is true for you, me, and murderous scum who rampage through offices shooting journalists and cartoonists. Media comment has noted the so-called professionalism of the shooters - they knew when best to strike, where the staff would be, who to murder, and how to withdraw before the authorities arrived. How does one get to the point where, against the teachings of your own religion, you acquire automatic weapons and head out to kill people for writing critical words and printing disrespectful doodles?
We live in the age of spectacular terrorism, of atrocities committed with an eye to rolling news coverage and social media. If the September 11th attacks were acts of semiotic terrorism, as the late Jean Baudrillard argued, that has been the commonplace since. Bali, Madrid, London Underground, Utøya; public spaces, safe spaces forever burdened with the memory of mass murder. The killing of Lee Rigby and the slaying of hostages by the Islamic State rabble are no different. Maximum senselessness and over-the-top brutality puts a rocket booster under their propaganda ensuring it reaches a wide audience. In a sense, there might even be an arms race. Which group, which cell, which would-be martyr can pull off the most audacious outrage?
There is more to this than securing coverage, however. There's a display of macho narcissism - look at us, we're the real deal. As disgusting as it sounds, whatever the gunmen are doing now they will be proud. It's also about weakness. The crimes committed by IS fanatics in their desert boltholes substitute for not facing Western troops. It's a way of getting at the main enemy without getting at them, and conveying on themselves a sense of power that does not really exist. Something similar happened with today's thugs. They selected a soft target and all that stood between them and their massacre were two unarmed police. Theirs was - hopefully a vain - attempt to shut down a bête noire for Islamists, but one that nevertheless was a substitute, a stand-in because the centres of power in Paris, London, and Washington remain beyond their reach.
The attacks also smack of anarchist terror attacks, or what was once known as the propaganda of the deed. Fundamentalist Islam does not have a mass following in France, and those willing to countenance the murder of journalists count number far less than that. This mediaeval hocum is never getting traction - despite what the absurd-sounding novel Submission has to say about it - so our gunmen believe that their murdering journalists will act as a catalyst to cohere disaffected Muslims around their views. If, for example, in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo the Western presses reprint some of their anti-Islamic cartoons, the killers win because some Muslims will be antagonised by the move. If across the West the fires of Islamophobia are stoked, they win again. Especially in France where the fascists of the National Front won't miss the opportunity to whip up bigotry, hate, and fear. If Muslims come under siege, the thugs will feel it's been a job well done. If in the name of terror prevention governments act true to form and assume more swingeing, authoritarian powers it will be Muslim kids on the sharp end of police attention. It will be Muslims bearing the brunt of surveillance and petty interference in school and other education settings, the workplace, and so on. Again, they win.
We must refuse to play the jihadis' games. The mass demonstrations against terror and in solidarity with the slain are a poignant, beautiful, inspiring start. For them to open their arms to Muslims, to emphasise the common values the vast majority shares, whether they happen to be Christian, Muslim, or of no religion at all, and to ridicule, dismiss, ignore, and distance those for whom tragedy is an occasion for dog-whistling; to resist more draconian legislation, armed cops, and policing by profile; to live by liberty and fraternity - that's how the scum will lose.
With the polls bouncing all over the place and only a few daft enough to make predictions about the general election, there's a lot of coalition talk doing the rounds. The SNP and Greens - wisely - have ruled out any arrangement with the Conservatives. And Farage has ruled out a deal with Labour (thanks for that, Nige: it makes it that bit easier for us to paint your lot as a Tory home from home). Dave hasn't said no to a kiss-in with UKIP, and Ed has said nothing at all. With a majority for either of the two main parties looking a big ask, the manoeuvrings between the major and the minor parties is set to be the stuff of soap operas. A dull and uninspired story line, yes, but the personal relationships between leading figures are about to be pored over like never before.
There is one possible coalition combination, however, that dare not speak its name. It is so unthinkable and electorally toxic that few if any politicians would dare ponder it. That would be a grand coalition of the left and the right, of the Conservatives and Labour sitting around the same cabinet table. Awful, but plausible? I'd been meaning to write about this for a couple of weeks since reading Miles's prediction last month, and then on Friday former Dave speechwriter Ian Birrell ventured the possibility too. A perspective each from the left and the right. Is there anything to them?
Miles's argument is quite short: there is more uniting the two main parties that divide them. On issue after issue there is a unanimity of opinion. Springing to mind is the unseemly gutter wallowing of immigrant bashing, feeding an irrational fear of crime in long-term decline and, you might add, scapegoating everyone who has to get by on social security in some way. They also share a diagnosis of deficit dementia, a supernatural belief in the power of markets, and an equally pious faith that the cold war holdover of Trident remains appropriate. Ian's piece suggests that the post-election alignment of forces might be too tricky for a coalition to be built, let alone held. The price UKIP would likely demand would be an EU referendum in short order, something Dave is unlikely to accept. The SNP, as argued by Atul Hatwal, would use their position to secure another referendum in the short term too - a price too high for a Labour-led administration. Whoever wins are possibly prisoners of their backbenchers too. Throughout this parliament, the Tory story has been one of Dave dealing with his revolting MPs. He might have had to treat with a few rebellious ones too, fnar. There's no reason to believe they would show discipline should he head up another coalition. And some backbench Labourites who, on the whole, have not been unseemly enough to manoeuvre openly so far might choose to be more conspicuous if Ed gets his feet under the Prime Minister's desk.
Looking at these circumstances first, are they insurmountable? In his excitement, Ian overlooks one possible coalition partner: the Liberal Democrats. In the worst case scenario, the coming LibDem wipeout might see them reduced by about half to between 20 and 30 seats. A well-deserved kicking to be sure, but still enough to be a going concern in future coalition building. Some in their parliamentary party would be quite happy to carry on with Dave, though I suspect another deal with the Tories would cause Dave even more bother with his back benchers than governing alone as a minority government would. As for the LibDems, it could well kill them. Their passage to rehabilitation requires a strict detox regimen. Either going alone in a pick 'n' choose arrangement with one of the main parties sitting as a minority or, weirdly, buddying up with Labour in a coalition could do both these things.
Secondly, there is the assumption that either of the two main parties would be unwilling to give minority government a try. The SNP managed it in Scotland, so why not at Westminster? In this, the alignment of forces would more likely favour a red than a blue government. Labour would have a hard time getting austerity-lite measures through the Commons, but its doubly unlikely the Tories could get their demented class war policies through against a chamber that would otherwise be majority centre left. It would be easier for Labour to arrange support on investment and other progressive policies with the SNP, Plaid, Green(s), Galloway (if he's still there) and the Northern Ireland parties, and more objectively viable than the alternative.
In the absence of either a Tory or Labour-led coalition, I cannot see how a period of minority government for either party would not be preferable to getting into bed with one another. But let's consider the pull factors. The main one, of course, is beyond the constipated braying of both sides of the House, there are many relationships criss-crossing the political divide. There are plenty of personal animosities - Dave/Ed, Osborne/Balls, Hunt/Burnham, Smith/Reeves, etc - but the use of junior ministers/shadows and other chamber underlings ensures that cooperation proceeds smoothly when deemed necessary. Most of the time. Plus there are various other warm relations that ignore the floor between. On the level of personality alone, it's not impossible.
And what about policy? As Miles notes, there is commonality between austerity and austerity-lite, trident, foreign policy, etc. I think this overstates the case. While superficially similar there are substantive differences, and these go beyond the obvious like the bedroom tax, the selling off the NHS piece by piece, and so on. It's about capital, or rather the relationship each party has to it. Since New Labour broke the hegemony the Tory party had over (big) British business the Tories have had a difficult time reasserting it. Despite the forest of legislation easing capital's obligation to employees, the threat to double down more on workers' rights and the tax giveaways of this Parliament, they still haven't got everyone on board. Just as significant slices of the electorate are exasperated with politics generally, so there's a phalanx of business dismayed and flabbergasted by Tory short-termism. The sections of capital that would benefit from the Tories now is the city and its legendary inability to see beyond a nose so inverted it has given them collective brain damage, and low skilled, labour intensive industry - a unity of ostensibly the most voluble and dynamic sector of British capital with the slowest and least competitive. Whereas the Tories are mounting a sectional appeal to business, Labour is trying to personify the wider, longer-term interests of capital as a whole. Its pledges on capital investment, housebuilding, taxation, and the rest seeks to bring more organisation to British capitalism where the state actively intervenes not just to create markets but stimulate them too. This is why the front bench have been at pains to deliver a fully costed raft of policy promises, and why they are so bullish about having it audited by the OBR. With this as their programme, the structural sickness of British capital - low productivity, short termism, infrastructure, training and education needs, lack of firm industrial policy direction - the antidote is what Labour is offering business. The price, however, is for capital to abandon Tory short-termism.
Here's the problem for a coalition government between the two parties. Prior to the 2010 general election, the LibDems offered a programme more suited to the medium and long range interests of capital. Joining with and accepting the Tories as a senior partner, this was completely buried as they subsequently positioned themselves as the narrowest most sectional government in British politics since the 1930s. The contradiction between the two policy orientations was resolved by relative weights of numbers and the abandonment of LibDem scruple for comfy chairs in ministerial cars. That cannot be the case with a Tory/Labour coalition, especially in the absence of a national crisis that may provide foil for such a coming together. That's why I am confident a German-style grand coalition will not get beyond speculation.
Though one should never say never in politics. Be sure of this, if it did come about a coalition would destroy the Tories and Labour as they are presently constituted. There's a ready made alternative to the right the former's MPs and activists can decamp to. And for Labour's part, a Ramsey MacDonald-style expulsion of those bits of the PLP going along with a coalition can reasonably be expected. The bulk of the members and all of the affiliates, and most MPs too (yes, including Progress ones) will fight tooth and nail to keep hold of the party name. The full time apparatus - yes, it is a thing - would not go along with such a lash up either. The ironic irony to end all ironies is after the dust has cleared, once UKIP is swollen and Labour has ditched the 1931'ers, in all likelihood any governing coalition left may well be a minority government.
This is the nuclear option for both sets of party leaders, but one that lobs the missile up only for it to land back on their own heads. Dave will not press the red button nor will Ed press the blue, regardless of the state Parliament is in after the election.
Those lovely folks over at Daily Express TV have hit on a relatively untapped vein of hate. Marry together your idea of the undeserving poor sponging off the hardworking tax payer with fat people and you have the perfect scapegoat: someone who cannot work because they are obese. Channel 5's Benefits: Too Fat to Work is an exercise in demonology dressed up as concern porn, and befitting the quality publications of the station's proprietor the facts of the matter - such as only 12,000 people out of a population of 60m plus are officially deemed "too fat to work" - cannot be allowed to get in the way of an hour long exhortation to mock, condemn, and hate so we can feel better about ourselves.
There is Rachel Lacy from York, a 20 stone woman who's been unemployed since the summer. She is not in receipt of disability-related payments, really wants to work but states that her job-hunting is hampered by her weight.
Amy Johnston is an 18 year old woman who weighs in at 32 stone. She receives £120/week in social security support - £71 in what I can only assume is non-work related support group Employment Support Allowance and a top up from Disability Living Allowance. She's looked after by her mum, who was out of work at the time of filming.
Then there are the stars of the show, Stephen Beer and Michelle Coomb (pictured). Steve is 31 stone and has a number of health complications arising from his weight, whereas Michelle is 23 stone and doubles up as his carer. Both are unemployed - she hadn't worked for 20 years whereas Steve stopped working in 2008 after getting incapacitated by a stroke.
Because this is tabloid television, it makes every effort to portray our guests as utterly undeserving. And it does that by making them out to be shammers.
In Amy's case, it's the big bottles of coke stowed away in the cupboards. For Rachel, to save public money in the long-term she's elected to have a gastric bypass so she can slim down, be more healthy and find a job more easily. Yet the narrator refers to the £6,000 operation as "paid for by the state" and as a "tax payer funded procedure". This is prefaced by a "some people commit to diet and exercise" to lose the weight, implying - of course - that Rachel is but a sponger who can't be arsed to help herself.
The true venom is reserved for Steve and Michelle. They got what they call in Big Brother fandom a "bad edit". As the camera pans their living room, we notice the gadgets. Laptop, check. Tablet, check. Telly and cable box, check. Sauntering down the community centre for a slimming club weigh-in, he lost one pound and she five pounds in the previous week. How to toast the achievement? WIth a takeaway, of course. A large doner kebab for Steve and a mound of spicy chicken for Michelle. The narrator caustically notes, "£11.50 spent - best to keep it quiet". Later on, Michelle heads to the shop to buy bolognese and Steve is shown struggling to chop mushrooms. He collapses exhausted on to the sofa, and shows no such difficulty eating the meal and his ice cream dessert.
The narrator helpfully cuts in at all times with gems like "the taxpayer forks out £8,000/year for Steve's carer" - a woman who comes and attends to him twice a day. He gets about town on a mobility scooter "paid out of his benefits", and the £3,000 wedding the programme works towards (and ends with his hospitalisation because of a blood clot on his lung) evolves from "the wedding" to "the benefits wedding" to the "big fat benefits wedding". How we larfed.
Steve is ideal scapegoat fodder. He receives "£2,000/month in handouts" (he doesn't), he's profligate (because he orders one takeaway and spends £16 on some shopping), and doesn't help himself by not taking his diet seriously (more of which below). His, and that of his fellow guests, have had an image crafted carefully to enrage the audience, to make them objects of hate. Channel 5 took their characters and sliced and diced them for entertainment.
Too Fat to Work is condemn-a-little-more-and-understand-a-little-less in its almost purest (and most puerile) form. The show (to call it a documentary demeans the genre) doesn't explore why Amy, Rachel, Steve and Michelle people are obese. With Amy, her mum suggests it's because she was too busy with work to feed her properly when she was younger. Pulling 13/14 hour shifts were not conducive to family life, so she was fed convenience foods. With Rachel, there's a hint that depression might be the root of her weight problems. When we first meet her she talks about her pet rats and how feeding them means she has no choice but to get up in the morning. That sound like someone not struggling with depression to you? And for Steve, there is a moment, an almost a cast off suggestion that his difficulty with controlling his appetite is associated with his stroke. A struggling overworked and underpaid mum trying to bring up her kid. A woman coping with depression. A man whose impulse control was damaged by a stroke. Are these people worthy of your condemnation?
Weight and obesity in the UK is, if you forgive the pun, a big problem. 66.6% of men and 57.2% of women aged 20 and over are either overweight and obese. The obesity figures for the under 16s are 26% of boys and 29% of girls, up from 17.5% and 21% respectively in 1980. When one person in your community is obese, it's probably because of some medical reason or individual quirk. If there are masses of people who are and their numbers are growing, you've got a social problem.
People always make choices, of course. Choice, however, is always conditioned by circumstance. The obesity rates are up for all kinds of reasons - sedentary lifestyles, less physically demanding jobs, relatively cheap fatty/salty foods, convenience culture and dual income households, the increasing prevalence of depression and mental health problems, body image pressures, all these are doing their bit to make weight a social problem. Yet rather than look at these issues and learning how they conspire together, we have shitty programmes like Too Fat to Work taking a public health issue and using it to attack the "generosity" of social security provision and the individual moralities of people living with obesity. It's pure bait and hate, dividing and ruling.
Meet your new hate figures. Same as the old hate figures.
Sorry to get snoring boring about Tony Blair once more, but I have to say a few words about the silly phrasing Neal Lawson used while penning a New Year's message to the former Labour leader. The first rule of polemic is not to hand your opponent a shield that can parry your blows, and that is exactly what Neal did. By dropping in "your majority was too big" and "but in hindsight the wrong people were voting Labour", he allowed himself to be painted as both a naïf and someone not serious about electoral politics. No wonder the remaining friends of Blair, such as John Rentoul, Dan Hodges, and some over at Uncut were able to make hay. They were able to body swerve the core of the argument - that Labour was always going to win in '97, that the New Labour guff was unnecessary, that in power Blair was dismally unambitious and championed British capital to the exclusion of all else. A good job for them too because it's an inconvenient truth some would prefer not to deal with.
Is there anything to this wrong type of voter claim? For Neal, Blair bent over backwards to keep his tent as broad as possible. The hairy-arsed trade unionists, who didn't have anywhere else to go, were made to sit in the corner like an embarrassing relative. The prime spots were reserved for the rich, whether they paid their taxes or not. It was the nearest politics has ever come to a group hug, but as Neal puts it "what meaningful project includes everyone?" Quite. Neal however gets it the wrong way round. As a socialist and a Labour person, I am intensely relaxed about the wealthy supporting us. It would be a good thing if Tory-leaning voters wherever they are took their ballots and scribbled their crosses against our candidates. I want these people to vote for us. The problem with Blair is not so much the constituency he attracted, but the programme he ran on.
New Labour didn't win three elections on the trot because it was New Labour. It won because it was a much better option than the alternative. In 1997 at the height of Blair mania, Labour polled half a million less votes than Major's Tories did five years before. I was around then, I don't remember a tsunami of true blue enthusiasm crashing over the country before or after. By 2001, New Labour's vote fell to beneath the amount Kinnock polled nine years before and not a great deal more than 1987's performance. The hype surrounding Blair's political genius is just that.
New Labour's programme was preferable at all times to the burnt offerings overcooked by Major, Hague, and Howard, but ultimately it did heavy damage to the party's medium and long-term interests. A lesson long ago learned by the Tories is never to attack your constituency. Under Blair, his fawning in front of business and dull managerialism saw the introduction of policy after policy that made life for working people more insecure. It was under his watch that the great pension roll back took hold, where employers - public and private - were given licence to take payment holidays, allowing them to later claim the funds were unsustainable. Schemes were closed, pension entitlements reduced, and retirement ages raised. It was under Blair that marketisation and outsourcing came into play, undermining the living conditions and security of workers who should be Labour's natural constituency. Under New Labour British manufacturing was allowed to spiral down further, destroying hundreds of thousands of relatively well paid and secure jobs. Too many times low paid and insecure agency work filled the employment gap. And when people were out of work, they were harassed and threatened with forced labour on workfare and a punitive sanction regime. The difficulties Labour are experiencing now and why many millions of the people our party was set up to represent won't give us time of day now is because then it ignored them.
I want the "wrong voters" to support us for the right reasons, not because we're stuffing their mouths with gold because we're kicking our people in the teeth. The "right reasons" in 2015 is not a programme calling for the nationalisation of the top 100 monopolies and the raising of the red flag above Buckingham Palace. It is a practical strategy putting insecurity and combating it at the start, and makes the argument that Britain can only prosper if people feel secure and comfortable in themselves. Hardly radical stuff, really. Only a programme of this kind can undo the damage the Blair period did to our party. Our future lies in knitting our constituency and our class back together.
A new year and the plugging service for new(ish) left, radical, and labour movement blogs resumes.
1. 999 Call for the NHS (Unaligned) (Twitter)
2. @clkh_ Charlotte Hall (Labour) (Twitter)
3. Clarity News (Unaligned) (Twitter)
4. Occasionally Called (Unaligned) (Twitter)
5. Ootsy's Offerings (Unaligned/Feminist) (Twitter)
6. Staff at Shelter (Unaligned/workers in dispute) (Twitter)
7. Shamocracy (Unaligned) (Twitter)
8. The Norwich Radical (Unaligned) (Twitter)
9. The Utopian Firefighter (Unaligned) (Twitter)
10. Unison South East (Unison) (Twitter)
11. Vox Femina (Unaligned/Feminist) (Twitter)
12. Waller73 (Labour) (Twitter)
After a drought comes the flood, sort of. A dozen blogs for your consideration and, hopefully, I'll have the same amount for you next month.
As always, if you know of any new blogs that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for blogs that have started within the last 12 months. The new blog round up usually appears on the first Sunday of every month. And if it doesn't, it will turn up eventually!
Reading the music press, artists are forever banging on about the influence of this or that musician and how their roads to music-making came via raids on parents' vinyl collections. No one will admit to the uncool commonplace of having folks who listened to CDs or, even worse, matured on a diet of Now That's What I Call Music. Nor another particularly important but much-overlooked newcomer to the scene in the 80s: video game music.
Readers here know I like my beats 'n' bleeps, and this came about partly because my mum sat me in front of TOTP just as the New Romantics and electronica were breaking through. Equally as important to the formation of my impeccable taste were video games. I lost all interest in music when we inherited our first home system (a rubber keyed Spectrum 48K if you must know). When my fascination with games waned music became more important, but the years of being battered by Speccy, C64, Amiga, and MegaDrive sound chips left an indelible impression.
I wasn't the only one. Beyond internet-based pseuds, a cadre of future musicians and producers were steeped in this stuff too. Part one of the documentary below, Diggin' In the Carts peels back the uncharted impacts numbers of mainly unknown, obscure Japanese video game music composers had on Western culture. It's a touch American-centric - the 80s in Britain were ruled by 8 and 16-bit computers; Nintendo and Sega came much later - but is absolutely fascinating for the discerning geek. A recommended watch.
Cancer is the best death, apparently. As a medical practitioner and former editor of the British Medical Journal, one supposes Dr Richard Smith knows what he's talking about. His argument is almost philosophical, making the case that a long descent into the grave allows for the wrapping up of one's personal affairs and prepares friends and family for life after you. Considered in isolation from the traumatic experiences this disease causes millions of people every year, I suppose there's a certain logic to it. Though I'm not too sure about "wasting" billions on curing cancer. The pharmaceutical industry and its doings are far from unproblematic, but the war against disease is a good war. It should be up to individuals when to call it a day after all.
Published simultaneously was a study claiming that the majority (two thirds) of adult cancers are the results of bad luck. You have wonky genes, or one of your stem cells might slip up somewhere. It is, however, worth noting that we're talking *types of cancer* here, not cancers in total.
As Owen points out, cancer - like a great deal of disease - has been individuated. The rise of lifestylism and the markets that feed it are constantly reinforcing the message that health is a matter of personal responsibility. If you don't want cancer, then eat well, do your exercise, and avoid smoking, boozing, and fatty foods. Treat your body like a holy shrine, not a drip tray catching the run off from a revolving hunk of doner meat. That's the hegemonic set of ideas washing about health policy, public health discourses and the common sense of lifestyle gurus. Contrasting the biologically random chance of cancer puts paid to some of the guilt tripping this industry, for that is what it is, thrives on. That, however, only goes so far. Cancer is social.
Take Stoke-on-Trent, for example. According to the 2012 Public Health Report for the city, it is the 16th most deprived local authority area in England (out of a possible 326). 60.3% of people live in areas among the top 25% most impoverished areas in the country. About half of that (31.3% of total Stokies) lived in the top ten per cent of most deprived communities. In 2008-10, the life expectancy for men in Stoke was 76.2 and women 80.2, whereas for England as a whole it was 78.8 and 82.6 respectively. Of the main causes of death in 2011, 72.9% was made up of respiratory disease, circulatory disease, and the biggest was ... cancer. It accounted for 31.7% of total mortality across the city. The equivalent figure for England is 28.1%. Among the under-75s, the average cancer mortality rate per 100,000 was 141.6. A historic low, but significantly greater than the same statistic for the country as a whole (112.5). There's considerable variation within the city too. In Meir Park ward the rate was 78.4 whereas Bentilee and Ubberley returned a figure 0f 191.8. The difference? Wealth. If you live in a wealthier area, you're a third more likely to survive a cancer diagnosis.
As befits the age, the story our culture tells about cancer is one of individuals battling against the disease, as per Stephen Sutton, or folks rallying around to to raise awareness. What it refuses to talk about the bigger picture, how diagnosis and survival is very much linked to one's material circumstances. The danger is talk of cancer being entirely random disappears the awful truth: that regardless of type it is mediated by social conditions. That makes the war on cancer more than just a medical matter. It's a political question too.
Like a grinning whack-a-mole, Tony Bloody Blair has popped up again with his ever-so-helpful pearls of wisdom. The groove hasn't changed for 20 years. Centre ground, blah blah, too leftwing blah, don't scare business. Someone pass me a mallet. In his Economist interview, he suggested that left/right battles are always won by the Conservatives. The not so subtle subtext being the Labour's "leftism" disarms the party and it will lose. Take a leaf out of his book; only grey managerialism can defeat hard right Tory governments. In that case, some might say Blair has nothing to worry about.
As Wednesday wore on the retraction came. He'd been misinterpreted, apparently. Of course he was.
I've never liked Tony Blair, but nor do I feel a visceral hatred toward him. And now he's in a position where the only thing he can damage is the morale of those Labour activists who carry a candle for him, he's an unwelcome irritant. His repeated interventions smacks of an egotist annoyed by a thin popular legacy, an absence of a fond consensus regarding his works. Contrast this with the remarkable rehabilitation of Gordon Brown, for instance. Placed before this relief, one might venture that there's something of the spite about Mr Blair.
Unfortunately, too many in the business and dubious pleasure of political comment still take Blair's pronouncements seriously. He won three elections don't you know, a feat unparalleled in Labour Party history. Under him the party became a properly professional outfit with a crushing focus on winning. At one point he had the Murdoch press, the Express and Star, and even the Daily Mail under his thumb. Yet politics moves rapidly and it doesn't take long to get completely out of touch. Having an inkling about the real world was never Blair's strong suit anyway. His time at the top was one lived in a rarefied world bounded by Number 10, the media, focus groups, and a grovelling cadre of underlings. A universe with its own set of physics, one in which the world of real people appeared to orbit Westminster, a conceit inverting the true nature of things. Yet all that looks like a life on zero hour contracts with a coal shed for a crib compared to Blair's trajectory post-2007. Since leaving office, Blair has made his millions hobnobbing with Murdoch, Bono, and Nursultan Nazarbayev, better known as the bloody despot of Kazakhstan. What would he know now about middle England, let alone the situation facing people who've seen their living standards decline?
The centre ground doesn't exist. It's a construct. It might be a useful one occasionally, an ideological weapon to paint your opponents as extremists - as Ed Balls does so today, but it is not a fact of political life unless one or more political parties act as though it is. For Blair, the centre ground was always what he said it was: something avoiding connotations of "old Labour" but did not quite match whatever the Tories were arguing that week. Such an approach won over Tory voters in the marginals, but at the price of doing heavy damage to the Labour Party's medium and long-term interests. It's this that precipitated the crisis official politics is facing.
If you think about the centre ground as a point in the political spectrum most people's views are located, you're treating with a nonsensical chimera. A majority does, wrongly, believe austerity to be necessary. And yet are also appalled by the excess of big business, know life is tough, and expect something to be done about it. They also want the NHS protected and the housing crisis eased. You might argue this positioning is well to the left of the government's impoverished small-state ambitions. Then on matters of immigration and Europe, the public in general are more in tune with the Tory positions: keep out as many of the buggers as possible, and renegotiate the relationship followed by a referendum. Both are wrong and are even against the interests of British capital in general, but that's where folks are. Being slap bang in the middle of politics now means trying to reconcile irreconcilable views, and the one party orienting toward both positions is ... UKIP.
Sadly, this won't be the last time Blair tries to stir it during the lead-in to the general election. His directions alternately signpost the brick wall and the cliff's edge, but alas none of that will prevent a gleeful reporting of his comments by the hostile press or prevent their exploitation by a Tory machine desperate for any old crap it can fling the opposition's way. If Blair wants to do his party a service, he can help by keeping his trap shut.
I know at least two people have been looking forward to this year's independent bloggers' list. Sure, it's a bit different from the curmudgeonly elder sibling, but that's all for the good. Here's where blogging folk are keeping it real and (mostly) doing it because it's a passion, not a payslip. If you want to geek out over definitions have a look at last year's. If the commentators list is the top 40 as revealed by Radio 1 every Sunday afternoon, then think of this as your alternative/indie chart tucked away in the pages of the NME.
Enough of that. Here's the list for 2014. How did you fare?
1. (><) Alastair Campbell (287k followers)
2. (><) Tom Watson MP (158k followers)
3. (><) Guido Fawkes (139k followers)
4. (><) Louise Mensch (88.3k followers)
5. (><) Iain Dale (54.3k followers)
6. (><) Left Foot Forward (49.6k followers)
7. (+2) Eoin Clarke (37.2k followers)
8. (><) Harry Cole (36.8k followers)
9. (+47) Wings Over Scotland (36.6k followers)
10. (-3) Political Scrapbook (35.3k followers)
11. (><) The F-Word (32.4k followers)
12. (+15) Bella Caledonia (30.8k followers)
13. (-3) Caroline Criado-Perez (29.8k followers)
14. (-2) Open Democracy (28k followers)
15. (><) Douglas Carswell MP (27.3k followers)
16. (-3) Richard Murphy (23.9k followers)
17. (NE) Alex Andreou (23.9k followers)
18. (><) Labour Left (21.1k followers)
19. (+5) Mike Smithson (18.3k followers)
20. (NE) Exaro News (17.7k followers
21. (-5) New Left Project (17.6k followers)
22. (-4) Labour Uncut (15.4k followers)
23. (+45) Derek Wall (15.4k followers)
24. (-3) Archbishop Cranmer (14k followers)
25. (><) Another Angry Woman (13.9k followers)
26. (+2) Libcom (13.5k followers)
27. (-5) LibDem Voice (13.4k followers)
28. (NE) Ann Pettifor (13.4k followers)
29. (+10) Pride's Purge (13.3k followers)
30. (-4) Boycott Workfare (13.3k followers)
31. (-2) Jon Worth (13k followers)
32. (+18) CiF Watch (12.9k followers)
33. (-14) The Commentator (12.5k followers)
34. (+9) Coppola Comment (12.2k followers)
35. (+7) Disabled People Against Cuts (11.7k followers)
36. (-12) Mark Thompson (11.4k followers)
37. (-5) Lenin's Tomb (11.3k followers)
38. (-4) Carl Gardner (11.2k followers)
39. (-3) Diary of a Benefit Scrounger (10.8k followers)
40. (+11) Unlearning Economics (10.3k followers)
41. (NE) The Occupied Times (10.3k followers)
42. (-9) Angela Neptustar (10.2k followers)
43. (-7) Benefit Scrounging Scum (10.1k followers)
44. (-7) Boris Watch (10.1k followers)
45. (-5) Paul Flynn MP (10k followers)
46. (-16) Cath Elliott (9,978 followers)
47. (-6) John Redwood MP (9,904 followers)
48. (-10) Eric Joyce (9,467 followers)
49. (NE) Sarah Ditum (9,217 followers)
50. (-6) Hopi Sen (9,185 followers)
51. (+1) Chris Williamson MP (8,943 followers)
52. (+20) Euro Rights Blog (8,938 followers)
53. (-5) Michael Meacher MP (8,733 followers)
54. (><) The Enlightened Economist (8,592 followers)
55. (-10) James Cleverly AM (8,508 followers)
56. (-9) Kate Belgrave (8,473 followers)
57. (-4) Big Brother Watch (8,467 followers)
58. (-3) Adam Ramsay (8,397 followers)
59. (-13) Mark Pack (8,318 followers)
60. (+9) Lallands Peat Worrier (7,875 followers)
61. (+3) Scriptonite Daily (7,204 followers)
62. (><) David Hencke (7,138 followers)
63. (-6) Luke Akehurst (7,042 followers)
64. (NE) Old Holborn (6,997 followers)
65. (-2) The Void (6,911 followers
66. (NE) Glosswitch (6,843 followers)
67. (-9) A Dragon's Best Friend (6,540 followers)
68. (+11) Welsh Not British (6,140 followers)
69. (+17) James Bloodworth (6,126 followers)
70. (+5) A Burdz Eye View (5,810 followers)
71. (+3) Left Futures (5,441 followers)
72. (-2) Counterfire (5,370 followers)
73. (-2) Zelo Street (5,259 followers)
74. (-1) Chris Dillow (5,182 followers)
75. (NE) Mainly Macro (5,125 followers)
76. (+2) James MacKenzie (5,026 followers)
77. (+4) Stephen Tall (4,949 followers)
78. (NE) Karen Ingala Smith (4,493 followers)
79. (+10) Flip Chart Fairy Tales (4,422 followers)
80. (NE) Quiet Riot Girl (4,414 followers
81. (-4) Emma Burnell (4,347 followers)
82. (-2) The Cornish Republican (4,311 followers)
83. (><) All That Is Solid ... (4,155 followers)
84. (NE) Hannah Mudge (4,135 followers)
85. (-9) Heresy Corner (4,117 followers)
86. (-2) Liberal England (4,021 followers)
87. (><) Caron's Musings (3,987 followers)
88. (NE) Tim Worstall (3,789 followers)
89. (+2) Bright Green (3,605 followers)
90. (><) Anna Chen (3,570 followers)
91. (-6) Laurence Durnan (3,548 followers)
92. (+1) Ceasefire (3,387 followers
93. (-11) Lisa Ansell (3,373 followers
94. (+3) Mum V Austerity (3,349 followers)
95. (NE) Vox Political (3,097 followers)
96. (-2) Rob Marchant (3,031 followers)
97. (+1) Liberal Burblings (2,765 followers)
98. (NE) The Way I See Things (2,652 followers)
99. (NE) 100 Miles from the Sea (2,490 followers)
100. (NE) Luna17 (2,443 followers)
Compared with last year's assemblage, there has been some settling down. Near the top this has been taken to its logical conclusion: meet Stasisville. It's quite difficult to see how this could move any time soon. There's your usual smattering of new entries and a couple of rapid climbers, such as Wings Over Scotland and Derek Wall. I'll have what they're having. But this being an indie list which is mostly about fun (yes, among us are strange people for whom writing is fun) there's a tendency for some bloggers to just stop. By my reckoning, 10 or so bloggers have packed it in. A shame, yes, but there is a life full of wonderments beyond the screen. So I'm told.
I leave others to tease out some of the patterns to this list, such as matters of gender, ethnicity and political colouration.
Once more, I cannot pretend to completionism. There are bound to be folks I've missed, so if there's somebody who should be here and isn't do let me know in the comments beneath and I will update as and when. Remember, this is not a list about quality. It's solely a rank ordering of bloggers by Twitter followings.
Most read this last month were:
1. Top 100 Tweeting Politics Commentators 2014
2. The Sun vs Russell Brand
3. Man Haron Monis: It's Not About Islam
4. How Not to Start a Trending Topic
5. Market Socialism: Basic Ideas
No prizes for guessing that my annual link-baity list came tops in December. It does so every year. And the rest speak for themselves.
As I'm a touch hung over from last night's festivities, I'll eschew the usual rambling and leave it there.
