Doing okay in the polls ... has some popular, left wing policies ... yet there are questions surrounding the leader's competence. We've heard the story many times before, but on this occasion it's the Green Party and Natalie Bennett under the spotlight. In late January there was the Andrew Neil interview where she had certain difficulties outlining her party's position on the citizen's income. And today was her train wreck with Nick Ferrari on LBC, which you can listen to here if you're yet to hear it. The thing is, as awful as Ferrari is, his tone was measured (some might say gentle) throughout, and it's precisely that that made it so devastating. And as we know from Lord Fink and Malcolm Rifkind, the fashion in politics at the moment is to make a mistake and then compound it. Here's Baroness Jenny Jones helping make Natalie's day that little bit worse. While this is a second media stumble in a month, I don't think this says much about Bennett's competency as a leader. Say what you like about her, regular slots on Question Time and various other politics programmes have done little to stymie the rapid growth in members and opinion poll scorings. Does today's trainwreck matter? Not really. Like many others I winced by way through the LBC interview, but I'm in that tiny minority who pay attention to the comings and goings of campaigns and Westminster whimsies. Others not so engaged might have thought it a bit stilted and awkward, but had forgotten about it within five minutes of broadcast. The kids are unlikely to play excerpts to each other in the playground tomorrow. Furthermore, Bennett explains it all in terms of having a "mind blank". That happens sometimes, as the poor souls forced to listen to me drone on at work will tell you. However, what was so painfully obvious was Bennett did not have a handle on her brief. Whether that's because she was having a bad day, or her crib notes were poor, or because the Greens have yet to do proper costings on their pledges (which, as we know, will be in the manifesto), it looked very bad. Yet when the campaign cranks up all of his will be but a footnote. Journos are a predictable bunch and will try catching her out again in future. As we speak, I bet she and her team of friends and advisers are looking at ways of properly polishing up. The second question, of course, is will it have any discernible impact on Green support. We will find out later in the week. I suspect not, though. This is not a Gillian Duffy moment, nor "the day the Green Party surge hit a cliff", as Adam Bienkov put it.
It's long been established in the political science literature that the growth of Green parties are related to long-run shifts in class structures and values systems in affluent societies. As such the core Green voter tends to be "post-materialist". Their political participation is value rather than interest-oriented. In Germany the Greens were able to intersect with this growing constituency and build a substantial party with some serious electoral clout. In Britain, the same broad strata also emerged but they tended to be ranged across the Labour Party, a section of which has always been an alliance between the labour movement and professional associations, and from the 80s onwards the SDP/Liberals and latterly the Liberal Democrats. With the collapse of the latter and the "under-promising" of Labour, the Greens here have finally been able to make inroads into this layer. Because this grouping has rejected the interest-based game of conventional politics in favour of something seemingly more radical, committed and would-be Green voters are unlikely to be phased by Bennett's lack of polish. Indeed, it might elicit sympathy and help secure that vote intention. This then is but a blip. A bit of raucous fun for partisan saddoes, a bit of a face palm for some Green activists. In the grand scheme it will matter not a jot.
Didn't they do well? Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw have done a blinder dragging Parliament's reputation through the muck yet again. Fair play to The Telegraph too, who teamed up with C4 Dispatches to complete the sting. Fortuitous timing too, this has helped push the paper's recent difficulties down the memory hole. Yet Rifkind and Straw, deary me. It is true that neither men were engaged in Parliamentary rule-breaking of Denis MacShane/Elliot Morley proportions, but it was very, very bad for all that. Writing to ministers on behalf of paying clients, that's cash for questions by other means. However, Straw apparently getting paid to sort out Ukraine and EU regulations for his client are, on my understanding, *within* the rules. And there are some politicians who do not understand why Parliament's standing is so low. Back when the MPs' expenses scandal was all the rage, I noted it wouldn't be long before second jobbing became an issue. It's only taken five years but we're finally here. I was very pleased to see Ed Miliband quickly seize upon it, though to be fair he has been tapping this drum for a couple of years. True to form, our leadership-averse Prime Minister has ruled out doing anything. Contrary to the BBC headlines, the Labour leader has not called for a ban on MPs' second jobs. Instead he wants a crackdown on paid directorships and consultancies. Quite right too. For example, I'm guessing few people would object to Tory MP Peter Beresford carrying on working as a dentist. Likewise, my ex-boss still teaches one module at his pre-Parliamentary place of work. Ditto for those current and soon-to-be Members who churn out a column or two for the national press. Provided everything is properly declared and does not interfere with Parliamentary duties, why ever not? Consultancies and directorships are wholly different. A business only takes a MP on in arrangements of this sort if the relationship "adds value" to the company. In other words, gives them a commercial advantage. Hence from the outset the arrangement is potentially corrupt and corrupting, placing the MP in a conflict of interest between their private arrangements and public duties. It also distorts the democratic process, such as it is. Some 100 Tory MPs last year trousered thousands of pounds apiece from services rendered to a wide variety of businesses. These services may genuinely call on whatever business experience and acumen they have. It might also involve advice on how to get around bits of legislation, what's likely to be on X minister's policy agenda, etc. Crucially, their proximity ensures a congruence between their respective habits of mind ensuring that business interests have a preeminent influence on party policy making and the common sense of Tory Parliamentarians. This corrupting web of back-scratching is one of the means by which the Conservative Party stays in touch with its base. It draws sustenance from it, hence why Labour is dead right to attack it. As it is when it comes to clamping down on things, there are always loopholes, dodges, and workarounds. I wonder, for example, how many spouses and partners will suddenly find themselves standing in for good members on company boards instead? Still, eradicating second-jobbing while ensuring "proper jobs" taken by MPs are properly scrutinised and regulated is one step toward giving politics the steam clean it desperately needs.
When you're involved in politics you grow accustomed to hearing some very silly things. This is doubly so in the rarefied world of political comment. I don't get paid for my pearls (some people spot trains in their free time, I do this), yet the pressure to have something unique and interesting to say is inescapable. If all this blog did was regurgitate The Graun and FT, there would be few takers (cf. Socialist Worker and The Socialist). This becomes a compulsion if you have to grind a living from your keyboard, as a small but privileged number of writers do. If you've scaled the heights of a Polly Toynbee, Andrew Rawnsley, or even a Peter Oborne, access to the indiscreet chatterboxes of Westminster give your articles an edge those not so positioned fail to match. They instead have to stump up analyses no one has done, or tackle politics from an oblique and seldom-considered angle. John Gray, the noted conservative philosopher, hardly rubs shoulders in the Z-list stable with the likes of me, but the laws of the field apply to him as much as anyone else. And so his over-long critical essay in the New Statesman, Misunderstanding the Present: Ed Miliband Wants to Govern a Country that Doesn't Exist (Thrifty Tirades of Gray, it ain't) seeks to capture the comment-hungry public with an interesting thesis: Ed Miliband has spectacularly misread the state politics is in. There are two interlinked theses here. That Britain is ready for a Thatcher-style transformative government (it isn't) and that large numbers of voters are hungry for a change to Britain's political economy (they aren't). The 1979 playbook should be closed and left for historians and undergraduate essay writers to pick over: the bandwagon Thatcher was able to hitch her programme to and then later steer, albeit with unforeseen consequences, has departed the scene. There is no analogous conjuncture happening now, which means Ed's attempt to recast the shape of Britain in a more collectivist mode has hit the buffers before the engine has caught. And because this is out of step from where the people are, his project and, implicitly, Labour's electoral prospects are doomed. I think Gray's analyses of 1979 and 2015 are mistaken. Taking Britain's break with the post-war consensus first, readers unfamiliar with the period could be thinking that Thatcher's Tories were elected on a wave of popular enthusiasm. Labour, paralysed by infighting, blighted by unions who allowed rubbish to pile up in city streets and had left the dead unburied, and snorting line after line of overblown statism and authoritarianism, were out of touch and out-of-step with where most people wanted to be. Thatcher's promise was to break with all that. A nice story and one right wing tabloid editorials have wasted no chance repeating in the 36 years since. However, it's not true. Looking at contemporary polls Labour and the Tories regularly swapped lead positions in 1978. By year end Callaghan's government had developed a modest but consistent lead, until the notorious Winter of Discontent sunk Labour's chances. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and Thatcher certainly didn't. The Tories romped home with 44% of the vote, while Labour fell from 39% to 37%. Hardly indicative of a huge anti-Labour backlash. The other assumption is that the Tories entered that general election with a worked-out programme for reconfiguring Britain, which a plurality of voters then endorsed. Flicking through their manifesto suggests such a reading. Then again, all Tory manifestos dating back to 1966 more or less say the same thing. Blah blah unions, blah blah individual sovereignty, blah blah evil socialism. The voting public who paid such things any mind were already familiar with this kind of rhetoric, hence it was unlikely they knowingly voted for a decade of dislocation and bitter battles. Anecdotes from the time seem to back this up. Over the years I've asked various activists who were around whether Thatcher's election was seen as a big deal, and apart from the novelty of having a woman as PM they all said it was initially seen as just another Tory government no different from its predecessors. Likewise, in her memoirs Thatcher was certainly committed to changing things but a coherent scheme only emerged after she had taken office. Also, a reading of 1979 might suggest the stars were against what was to follow. No one would have been writing about reconfiguration of British capital via open confrontation between state and the labour movement. This was not yet five years after the miners had arguably brought Heath down. Large numbers of people might have been fed up with strike action, but cutting down the institutional power and scope of the labour movement was as unthinkable then than a resurgence of Liberal Democrat support is now. What Gray is guilty of doing is crushing 1979 beneath the condescension of almost 40 years of history. He's telescoped the (Westminster) common sense of 2015 and read it into insurgent intentions of seventies politicians and voters where no such things existed. Coming up to date, Gray argues Ed Miliband sees himself as the Prime Minister who would rewind Thatcher's legacy. The problem is there's no appetite for such a project in wider society. There are two things here. Firstly, I don't know if Gray has been paying attention to the same Labour Party policy announcements as everyone else. It seems unlikely, because the Labour 'offer' - to use the awful managerial term - is characterised by deliberate caution. It doesn't so much break with the increasingly dysfunctional neoliberal settlement as push at its limits. The energy price cap (not freeze, John), the abolition of the bedroom tax, bringing together the NHS with a National Care Service, crackdowns on tax dodging, etc. can and will make a difference to the lives of millions, but are there as transformational as Gray supposes? Because complementing these policies are commitments to social security bashing, border tightening, and austerity-lite that are very much Westminster shibboleths. It's unfortunate the first two happen to be supported by broad swathes of the population and are capitulated to accordingly. In short, whatever Ed's ambitions are - and I happen to agree with Gray's characterisation of them - the programme going into the election falls short of it, which has its own sets of difficulties as per the SNP and the Greens. "Under-promising and over-delivering" is Ed's favourite phrase among party audiences, and it has a certain logic. Because where Gray is mistaken is the assumption that Ed and the Labour leadership don't know that people are sceptical of things changing. They do, they encounter it every constituency surgery, every door knocking or phone bank session, every time they open the pages of the press or have a focus group in. The caution shown is a perfectly understandable response to electioneering in this sort of environment, however much a lefty like me might disagree with it. The second point is spend some time on the doorstep, hang around with people thinking of lending votes to UKIP, the Greens, the SNP, or are not going to bother at all, how politics articulates interests and engages with voters is crying out for change. Look at the lives of millions of working people, trapped in precarious jobs and/or low pay. See how lopsided the economy remains toward finance and services and away from manufacturing. Look how everywhere outside the South East and London has been left to their own devices. Look how capital has basically been on investment strike since the 2008 crash while inequality has soared. Look at how the Conservative Party has degenerated to the point it should not be allowed to run a bath, let alone a country. The economic and political contradictions are piling up, whether people are aware of them or not. If this isn't a conjuncture demanding a settlement of one sort or another, I don't know what is. It is surprising that Gray does not recognise this. After all, his philosophy is of the view that history is not progressive but cyclical, that indeed tragedy and farce return for encores after the main event. Ed Miliband isn't Margaret Thatcher. When he becomes PM in May, his programme will unfold on a pragmatic basis just as hers did. As the political tensions and economic difficulties stored up break, in their turn each offer opportunities for embedding that further and deeper, or taking society in a regressive direction. Our job as labour movement people is to ignore the counsels of despair, which is what Gray's essay essentially is, and work hard to make sure that our people, the overwhelming majority of people, benefit.
Ruminating on some heavy duty blog posts tonight. And it's Saturday, so let's go from one 80s moment to another. Never Can Say Goodbye is one of I think only two songs to have appeared in my infamous top 100s twice. This ditty's first time was at number 21 in the Top 100 Dance Tunes of the 1970s. It then repeated over a decade later as neither tragedy nor farce when The Communards' cover took it to number 10 in the 80s list.
I'm sure you'll agree, it's a shit tonne better than the original.
The past really is a foreign country. Can you imagine if the BBC or ITV ponied up to Labour Party conference and asked to transmit a live debate between Progress and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy? It's unthinkable. Yet, in 1982 something similar did happen. At the year's party conference in Blackpool, the right won a majority on the NEC after much arm-twisting and shenanigans - some of which is outlined in John Golding's must-read, The Hammer of the Left. Immediately moves were afoot to curb the influence of the Militant Tendency (today's Socialist Party) who were then ensconced in the party. The NEC resolved to de-fang Militant's party-within-a-party by having them register as an official Labour-supporting organisation and, as a result, see much of their apparatus dissolved (famously, by the mid-80s Militant employed more full-time activists than the party itself). The debate below which was broadcast in a prime time slot features the eternal general secretary, Peter Taaffe (50 years and counting), and the then soon-to-be deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, Tony Mulhearn. For the right representing the official party line saw Austin Mitchell, who is stepping down in May and has made a name in recent years as a boorish buffoon, and John Spellar who lost his seat in 1983 before getting returned again in 1992. The short film below is probably the only time representatives of both sides sat down and debated each other in a medium that has been captured for posterity. As such it's quite an important piece for labour movement geeks and far left watchers alike, regardless of your view of the issues. It is interesting how both sides were right. Militant's charge that the right wanted them slung out by hook and by crook was correct, as subsequent rounds of expulsions demonstrated and, much later, memoirs admitted. Likewise, the right's claim that Militant was an undercover revolutionary socialist organisation with all the trappings associated with it was also spot on.
More significant is how this film shows the distance travelled in politics in the 30-odd years since. TV Eye didn't broadcast the debate because everyone was a little bit funny or strange in the early 80s, or that the general public were just better informed and found such stuff riveting. What it demonstrated was that the labour movement and its internal goings on mattered in a society where its social weight and cultural presence was a good deal greater than today. The Labour right vs Militant debate was coveredbecause at stake was the future direction of our movement, and hence the impact a victory for either side would have on wider society and particular the balance between capital and the state, and labour. It took the hammer blows of the miners' bitter defeat and subsequent wars of attrition against the organised working class to push our movement back to the present point of cultural marginality. Small wonder capital and the mainstream parties obsessively worry about reproducing working class people. The class war policies pursued by Thatcher curtailed its capacity to do so autonomously. Anyway, enjoy this slice of labour movement history - if enjoy's the right word.
There were many things in The Telegraph's behaviour over yesterday's resignation of Peter Oborne I find annoying, but none so more irritating than a moment in their press release. The offender is highlighted in italics:
Like any other business, we never comment on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business. We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary.
How have you refuted Oborne's allegations, Telegraph? I see no point by point rebuttal. Here, for example, is an example of refuting. It's me giving a Dan Hodges' piece a going over line-by-line. He offers an argument, I refute it with things like logic and evidence. What it does not mean is to deny or disagree. If one of the readers thinks I'm wasting my time in the Labour Party, I deny that is the case. It is only refuted (at least to my satisfaction) if I put forward a cogent, convincing response that grinds their argument down and proves it to be nothing more than a jumble of bruised and bloody words. What's this? I looked at the Oxford Dictionaries site ran by Oxford University Press (which is not the same as the OED), the screen filled with something else:
Refute (Synonyms) 1.1 Prove that (someone) is wrong: his voice challenging his audience to rise and refute him 1.2 Deny or contradict (a statement or accusation): a spokesman totally refuted the allegation of bias
Since the sam hell when? I didn't get the memo when the meaning for refute suddenly annexed 'deny' or 'disagree with'. Anyone else spot it? I haven't had the chance for an in-depth investigation, it's 23:15 hours for heaven's sake, but I have been probing the Daily Mail website in the hope it might be useful for once. And so it has. Near the bottom of the archive there are three pieces of interest. In Jacko speaks out on charges (November 24th, 2003), the paper writes "The Thriller star released a statement on a website set up to refute the allegations, which are believed to come from a 12 or 13-year-old cancer sufferer.". I'll go with that. The late Michael Jackson may or may not be guilty of heinous crimes, but getting the usage of refute right wasn't one of them. Similarly, in Rail union anger over track error (October 23rd, 2003) they write "The engineering firm strenuously denied allegations of impropriety and said it would strongly refute any allegations that documentation had been falsified." Bang on. Then there is this. In Blair: I Did Not Mislead MPs (dated July 8th, 2003), a report about the Iraq war fallout, the Mail writes "Giving evidence to the House of Commons liaison committee, Mr Blair was asked about allegations that the House had been deliberately misled. Mr Blair responded: "Obviously I refute that entirely."" Why am I not surprised that New Labour Newspeak is a key person of interest in the investigation? The MO fits perfectly. Take 'refute' and drop it liberally into party political discourse whenever 'disagree' or 'deny' would be the appropriate word, and you have a line repeated over the course of the subsequent news cycle. Saying you "refute any allegations", implies you have indeed made a refutation, albeit not in the footage employed in reports. As most people hold with the "classical" definition of refute, on the surface it appears that Blair - or any other agency uttering the corruption of the word - have sallied forth a rebuttal when nothing of the sort has occurred. It conjures up the existence of an absent support and absolves them from having to produce a real refutation. It's a sad, cynical way of trying to bend perception and reception through its deliberate misuse. It's semantic trickery, pure and simple. That may or may not be the root of the decoupling of refute from refutation, but regardless of how often it is deployed its sounds incredibly jarring and clumsy. Keep 'em peeled, because when someone is claiming to 'refute' something, chances are they haven't.
Good on Peter Oborne. Good on him for telling the Barclay Brothers to stick their job. Regular paid writing gigs are hard to come by for journos, so to spurn what is one of the cushiest jobs on Fleet Street for a matter of principle shows him to be a writer with value and integrity, however much regular readers and me disagree with Oborne's politics. There are some fascinating parallels between the pen portrait he draws of life at The Telegraph and the sorry state the Conservative Party find themselves in. As I've argued previously, the Tories have become dislocated from their core business support and now represent the most backward and socially useless sections of British capital, along with a still hefty but sure-to-dwindle residual support. Beholden to the city and uncompetitive, labour-instensive sections of business their horizon no longer encompasses the interests of capital-in-general and as such end up adopting policies harmful to the collective business interest. The clamp down on overseas student visas, austerity generally, and the toying of Britain's relationship to the EU for party political advantage immediately come to mind. In short, the Tories and the people they represent have become decadent, and now represent a danger to themselves. Before Thatcher the Tories were careful never to attack the roots of their support. Now their tear them up with glee abandon, unknowing and uncaring it is they who will ultimately pay the price. The short-term is all and everything else can go hang. Now for the situation at The Telegraph. Oborne writes lyrically about the paper as if it was an Enlightenment salon straight out of Habermas's musings on the public sphere. It never was, of course. The paper has always been a reliable friend of Conservative reaction. It is a rag whose rotten soul is suffused with entitlement, the defence of privilege, vicious contempt for the poor and, particularly, the labour movement. In this The Telegraph has unswervingly served its class well. Yet there has always been space in its pages for more thoughtful conservative thinkers and writers. Because, ultimately, a paper articulates a range of (broadly) similar interests it has to have space to allow alternative perspectives and dissident voices - within a certain range - to appeal to a wide readership composed of those varied interests and perspectives (tedious Trot tabloids, take note). Furthermore as a broadsheet paper, a fully paid-up member of Britain's so-called quality press, one can justifiably expect a certain adherence to a set of ethical standards and professional probity. Oborne resigned because the freedom to do journalism, to make judgement calls based on it was fatally undermined by commercial pressures generally and the advertising relationship with HSBC in particular. The Barclay Brothers and their hapless lackey, Murdoch MacLennan, get both barrels. They are intent on undermining the long term health of the paper in the pursuit of short-term gain. Oborne mentions the fake 'woman with three breasts' story they stuck up as clickbait, but there are plenty of others that are entirely incongruous with the paper's character. But who gives a shit as long as the clicks keep rolling in? More serious is the claim which, devastating if true, that Telegraph journalists were ordered to destroy evidence of alleged HSBC wrongdoing at behest of senior management for commercial reasons. As Oborne rightly notes, the unspoken covenant the paper has with its readers does not exist as far as the bosses are concerned. And as standards slip, ethics are compromised, and the paper is seen to bend to the will of a market leader in tax dodging, the long-term readers who provide a stable subs and sales base are getting pissed up the wall. The roster of political writers under Benedict Brogan - gone, along with Ben himself. The foreign news desk - gone. The sub-editors who know the difference between 'refute' and 'disagree' - put out to pasture. The paper is eating itself for the sake of shareholder value, and there will be little left after the feast. Gluttony today, starvation tomorrow has become their guiding principle. The Telegraph's entirely self-inflicted woes are a microcosm of the wider crisis of Conservatism. Their kind are unfit to run a newspaper, let alone a country.
There are some important milestones in video gaming. Like literature, music, and film, it has its seminal moments. What counts are a game's brilliance, their originality and ingenuity, their impact on what came after, and whether they helped shift hardware units attached to them. Very quickly off the top of my head, in the six years between 1985 and 1991 there were three such games. Super Mario Bros launched with the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America in the wake of a market crash and widespread suspicion of video games. Mario's scrolling platforming, its gameplay, and its secrets helped turn that situation around and transformed the US into Nintendoland. The second came at the end of this period: Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is important because it demonstrated the power of the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive while Nintendo were still milking their NES cash cow. It broke their market dominance while in Europe the game sealed the doom of the various 16-bit computer platforms. It reinvented the platformer and touched off the 16-bit console wars. Our third game was conceived in the Orwellian year of 1984 in the dusty backrooms of Moscow's Academy of Sciences. Between the brain of its creator, Alexey Pajitnov, and the Western and Japanese markets where games were big business lay a tortuous path. After mucho shenanigans, court intrigue, and the like, Nintendo secured the rights and packed it in with their newest machine. I am, of course, talking about Tetris, the last game that arguably launched an entire genre of games console: the hand held.
I can still remember its playground debut. The gaming snobs with their PCs, Amigas, Atari STs, and MegaDrives did look down our noses at Nintendo's bland-looking box. A monochrome screen, naff name, and games that cost fifteen to twenty quid? It was like a throwback to a more primitive era instead of marking the dawning of a new one. If it had to be handheld, Atari's ill-fated Lynx and Sega's Game Gear seemed to have the right idea - both offered full colour graphics for starters. And how we larfed when a peripheral-producing firm called Nuby hit the scene. You see, 'Nuby' was a bit like nubby, which was a schoolyard term for crap. Yet for all the opprobrium and snarking the trash talk ceased when a Game Boy got passed around accompanied by Tetris. Whisper it, some of those snobs quietly invested in machines of their own. It's not hard to see why. Tetris is an utter monster of a game. I didn't understand what the fuss was about until I took a Game Boy and played the bloody thing. Once you press start and the now familiar playfield comes into view with the irritating yet iconic music (which, forsooth, became a chart hit courtesy of Andrew Lloyd-Webber), the first set of tetrimino blocks float down the screen. You move it around this way and that before settling it at the bottom. Then the next comes and then another. All the time you're manoeuvring and cajoling your blocks into place so one complete line spanning the screen is complete and it disappears. Because that's the challenge if you've spent the last 25 years in a cave. You can complete multiple rows at once for megapoints, but the higher your pile of blocks rise the more likely the game will end. Oh, did I forget to mention that the more lines you put away the faster the rain of teriminos gets? Tetris is a game of pure playability, an utterly absorbing video game pathogen of one-more-turn syndrome. It's simplicity was its demon influence, the hook that lured in far more under-age kids than illicit drinking ever did. I haven't played it for years, but just writing about it makes me want to dig my aged Game Boy out and take the cart for a spin. Tetris taught the console-buying public and game manufacturers an important lesson, which has to be relearned time and again. What matters ultimately is not flashy graphics and kick ass sound. As nice as they are, good, memorable, classic games have to be utterly compelling to play. If a system has the best games, regardless of how powerful it is it will win out over its competitors. As the Game Boy went on to prove in subsequent years.
Tetris is an undisputed classic, but it's also a title that exemplifies the difficulty writing about video games. You can write about the history of Tetris, its canonical providence, its gameplay, but that's it. Beyond biographies and reviews the simplicity and the plot-free slotting together of abstract shapes resist further writing and levels of interpretation one might indulge while writing about contemporaneous arcade-stylegames. I'm going to have a go anyway. First off, Tetris can be read as an analogy of the state the Soviet Union had always been in since its inception. Stay with me. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the ruinous civil war, the reconstruction and organised chaos of the Five Year Plans and collectivisation of agriculture, and the do-or-die war with the Nazis, and the ever-present threat of nuclear stand off with the states, the USSR was always a square peg to the round hole of great power relations. What Tetris condenses is the anxiety surrounding the Politburo's ceaseless quest for peaceful co-existence in a US-dominated capitalist world. The random falling of blocks are the ceaseless froth of machinations at the UN, the fickleness of third world allies, opposition at home and in the satellite countries, relations with China. Every line made by the player is an accomplishment that temporarily stabilises the play field, which is immediately challenged again by an appearance of the next block. Unfortunately, it's inevitable that previous false moves raise the level of blocks ever upwards as they start falling faster. The contradictions left unresolved in earlier moves accumulate and conspire to sink you. The game emerged at a conjuncture when that was happening to the USSR, a process that had exploded out into the open by the time kids across the West were slotting Tetris into their Game Boys.
The second is a great deal more boring. Tetris can be read as an analogy for life itself. The blocks you twist and turn before you slot them into place are the extraordinary and banal challenges we face in everyday life. The problems mount as you cannot fill the lines, just like the unresolved experiences and situations that potter our individual biographies. And as the games reaches the end, as the blocks touch the ceiling and it's game over, all that's left momentarily is an individual configuration of uncleared blocks before they are erased. Tetris isn't a life and death matter, but it has a good go at representing it. What is interesting about Tetris is its abstraction. You could make the argument that it is the first entirely abstract video game. Consider all that came before it. Nearly all video games before 1984 owed something to practices that existed outside in other media. Pong was abstract table tennis. Breakout involved a bat and ball that demolished bricks. Space Invaders spaceships and aliens. Even Qix (AKA Volfied) dressed itself up in pseudo-science fiction garb. Tetris, based on the manipulation and slotting together of abstract shapes from mathematics, completely eschews the conventions of in-game representation adopted by predecessors and contemporaries. The only concession made are high scores. Aside from that, it is to gaming what Jackson Pollock was to art: there is no reality or logics beyond the game or the work they depended on for meaning - it is entirely self-contained. To get on with Tetris demands you accept its own simple terms of reference and submit to the purity of its play. It's perhaps the nearest a game has ever got to a work of art, and has done so by accentuating its radical specificity as a video game.
The guns aren't entirely silent, but it appears that the ceasefire in East Ukraine is mostly holding. In a conflict that has claimed at least 5,000 lives and threatened to consume even more, the deal struck in Minsk between the Merkel/Hollande-backed Ukrainian government and the pro-Russian rebels assisted by Putin will hopefully hold and the business of rebuilding the shattered east begin. Yet consistently, perhaps echoing the feeble isolationism of Dave and the gang, comment on what's happening is shockingly poor. It basically amounts to a) Putin being nasty, and b) wanting to expand Russia's border by hook or by crook. Crimea was his Austria, East Ukraine his Sudetenland. If the West don't stand up to him Russian tanks could be rolling down the Champs Elysses this time next year. Nonsense, of course. Putin is playing a dangerous game, but it's not one that remotely invites comparison with Hitler's plans for conquest. There are three things that strike me about the war in Ukraine. Firstly, I'm not entirely convinced that Putin is in control as much as Western watchers think, and he would like to pretend. The bulk of rebel fighters are Russian-speaking East Ukrainians and, anecdotally, irregulars fighting in a personal capacity, but with more than a nod and a wink from the Kremlin. For example, fighting has continued without pause in Debaltseve, where Ukrainian army units are surrounded by rebels. Was Putin party to a ceasefire he knew was going to hold save for a small and relatively insignificant military target? Or is it the case that fighters on the ground will carry on regardless? Also, what's true of the rebels applies to Ukrainian forces too. Or, to be more accurate, Ukrainian and allied troops. It seems they too have their own irregulardetachments, which raises questions about who they are accountable to and whether they're following orders from Kiev or pursuing their own objectives. There is slippage on both sides, and it's that imperiling the ceasefire. The second is the viewpoint that Putin is reasserting Russia's place in the world, beginning with the near abroad. This is undoubtedly the case. Putin wants to be the man that tears up the post-Cold War settlement a victorious NATO imposed on a pitifully weak Russia. Whereas previously nothing could be done as former client states and allies flocked to the EU and the military protection of the Americans, Russia's new found energy wealth and partial modernisation of its armed forces allowed the projection of power to prevent any further Western encroachment. The bloody morass East Ukraine has become, and the accidental-on-purpose incursions into British airspace and Swedish coastal waters are hardly the most sophisticated semiotica Moscow could have used, but it gets the job done. Yet he needs to be careful. As we know, war is something that can be stumbled into. The problem is, while Putin was happy to play the high wire act and absorb damaging economic sanctions the collapse in energy prices, whether cooked up by Saudi Arabia in cahoots with the Whitehouse or not, is bad, bad news. Not that the economy was in great shape anyway. All of a sudden, the $720bn renovation of the armed forces is looking shaky. Another of Putin's considerations is that Russia must avoid a damaging, long-running war. Chechnya and Georgia were one thing, but overt military intervention in Ukraine threatens pitting a largely conscript army against a motivated and increasingly well-armed opposition. Shades of Afghanistan? The bottom line for Putin is the security of his own power and authoritarian rule. Confronting the West reaps him some political capital, but further investments threaten diminishing returns as Russia's other problems mount. He doesn't want to add thousands of tricolor-draped coffins to the regime's difficulties. What then does Putin want? Formed within the internal security bowels of the decaying Soviet state, he's imbibed the objectives of the gerontocracy that used to run the place. He wants firm government, secure borders, a non-violable sphere of influence, and to strut around the world stage like a power not locked into demographic decline and an economy dependent on primary industry. Unfortunately, the intellectual poverty of British political discourse demands this comes with the customary disclaimer. It is preferable that Ukraine stays together and graduates to EU membership. I'd like to see a thorough democratisation of the Russian Federation and for it to take up a seat at Brussels also. I also believe that what should matter when it comes to recalcitrant national minorities wherever they're found is the aspirations and hopes of the people on the ground, not the convenience or otherwise of lines on maps and spheres of influence for the bigger powers. That also applies to the geographical contiguous Russian minority of East Ukraine and Crimea. No amount of paid-for agitators sent by Moscow can whip up a sense of common identity and hard-done-to grievances if they don't already exist. It has to be said: the job of analysis is always to understand and explain what's happening, which is different to excusing and apologising.
It's been a bad week for the Tories. This is supposed to be the month they pull ahead and seal the general election deal. Fat chance. The HSBC tax dodging scandal, the £15,000/head black and white Tory fundraiser, the facing down of Lord Fink by Ed Miliband after initial threats to sue, then Fink handing over another victory by admitting that "everyone" (i.e. his well monied mates) avoided tax, the Conservatives have got to be praying that the political fates won't send them another week like this. Right on cue, in the desperate scramble for anything to change the record here comes their great, trite hope: the removal of social security from the obese, the alcoholic, and the drug-addicted. Less fanfare has greeted their quiet trial of sanctioning in-work recipients of income support if they don't work a set number of hours, a measure they've ruminated on before. When the heat turns up on the rich all the Tories can do is kick down at the poor, and it typifies the programme they will be taking to the country: an entirely negative agenda packed with lies and scapegoats. You can't help your background, but you can learn from it. I grew up a working class Tory, and so whenever commenting on the decrepit state of the Conservatives a feeling of gratified schadenfreude warms me from tip to toe. The same isn't true for the 15 year old buried in the brain: he looks on with abject horror. Whereas the Tories of the Thatcher and Major years had the good grace to at least pretend an association with and a paternalist care toward the proles, there is none of that under Dave and the gang. They don't even pretend to represent the entirety of business any more, beholden almost entirely to the hedge funds, to the magic men of the city who conjure billions from the flux of global finance, and do make it disappear equally quickly in cataclysmic blasts of economic chaos. The labour movement talks a lot about the dislocation of its base. For the Tories it's even worse, so bad that only a few siren voices dare speak it aloud. The blue party are hated to a degree not shared by any other by millions of people. In that particular poll they'll always be well out in front. The broad coalition they constructed during the post-war boom, of protecting privilege by conceding the hoi polloi its council estates, its living wages, and its industrial bastions in the nationalised industries was broken on the Nottingham pit heads. Yet Thatcher did more than hit the labour movement a concussing blow. As she smashed up and sold off the industries underpinning the post-war order whole branches of capital were lopped off and left to rot. Other sections of capital, that part of it looking to the longer view were also alienated. As the various factions tussled over the body of the Tories during the 90s - ultimately to be won lock, stock, and two stinking barrels by the most short-termist and backward fractions of capital - New Labour came to be the preferred party of British capital-in-general up until the stock market crash brought them a glimpse of their own mortality. Bits of capital showed their gratitude to Gordon Brown for saving their system by drifting back to the Conservative fold. But not all of it did. What Blair and Brown achieved, unbeknownst to themselves, was they rendered the fracturing of capital under Thatcher permanent by providing, albeit briefly, an alternative ship when the original was holed beneath the waterline. This background helps explain why the Tories are so useless and cruel. The front bench team share between them the stupidity, venality, and incompetence that makes them so loathsome. The same can be said for the wider party too, and its UKIP mini-me. For a whole social movement from above, for that is what the right is, when we're talking about how common place its character defects are we're talking about a sociological phenomenon, not individual psychological foibles. Think about it. Where are the Tory intellectuals? There's Conservative Renewal, the group around Phillip Blond, Peter Oborne, Tim Montgomerie, and Spectator people like Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman. And in the chamber itself? Jo Johnson, Robert Halfon, Sarah Wollaston might be squeezed into the category of 'Tory decent' but that's it. The one thing all these right wingers share is their marginality from mainstream conservative thinking because they are politically sane. The rest are at the mercy of what passes for commonsense in these circles: hold down pay, pare back employment rights, savage any means of support outside of the wage relation. Taken together they believe that magically the conditions for sustained economic growth will emerge, thereby keeping the great unwashed mollified, and allow them to carry on as if they were born to rule. The qualities the modern Conservative Party select for are the traits that see a country run by and for city interests find helpful. Tories are stupid, but they're stupid for a reason.
