My colleague Damian Thompson has just laid in to Stephen Fry with a vengeance. Here’s the case for the defence, written a few weeks ago after the row over Fry’s Twitter comments:
I see that Stephen Fry is in trouble again, temporarily driven from Twitter by a revolt among his vast army of followers following his intervention in the Daily Mail-Stephen Gately affair. Though no Twitterer myself, I am conscious through more traditional channels of a recent rise in anti-Fry sentiment. And not just in the press, where he is now routinely mangled. He has, I think, over-exposed himself, to coin a Fryesque double entendre. And he shouldn’t have called Jan Moir a “repulsive nobody”, if only because it lays him open to suggestions that he thinks her views invalid because she is not as big a celeb as he is, which I’m sure was not his intention. (With his contention that the Daily Mail is “a paper no decent person would be seen dead with” I have no problem.)
So did he have it coming to him? I don’t think so. Not just because Stephen Fry is very clever, very witty, and widely admired for his humane and liberal views (though I know some see him as the very model of a kickable bien-pensant). The main point about him is that he is transparently a good man. The late Auberon Waugh, whose memory I revere, maintained that the only real distinction between human beings is that between the nice and the nasty. Not all the twitterers and bloggers in the world can pin the label “nasty” on Fry. There is no malice in him, or if there is he has hidden it very well.
Yes, I know he can be maddening. Fry at his archest can make even my loyalty wobble. The American humorist P J O’Rourke coined the term “endearritating”, actually for Dr Ruth Westheimer, but it fits Fry like a glove. But I don’t think venom ought to be directed towards anybody so fundamentally benevolent. Let’s do what we can to support nice people. There isn’t exactly a superfluity of them around.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
Message for Guy Fawkes' Night - blow up the Government if you want - but don't expect it to change anything
“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
EU Directives on the top,
Health and Safety in the middle,
And burn the bloody lot.”
I’m sure there’ll be millions of us singing something like the above this Guy Fawkes Night. But we might as well save our breath to cool our hot buttered rum.
I’ll tell you what worried me most, as a Labour man. I feared a real libertarian Tory campaign promising bonfires of regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork, with details all worked out. It would have been perfectly possible to attach a research team to each front-bencher, identifying individual areas where everyone’s money and time was being wasted in the department the spokesperson was shadowing. Directly and openly identifying police paperwork surplus to requirements. Compiling a coherent action plan from the literally millions of ridiculous elf ‘n’ safety stories that have emerged over the years. Diversity surveys and compliance monitoring to be challenged to justify their existence in a balloon debate with schools, hospitals and pensions. Inviting citizens to write in with examples and suggestions – a “Bullsh*tWatch” campaign. They’d have swept the country.
Phew! I needn’t have worried. Yes, these things will occasionally be picked up as a stick to beat the Government with; but it’s not as if there were any real prospect of a new Government changing anything. If anything were likely to be done, Mr Cameron would surely have told us by now. What he did was to stand up at the Tory Conference and say, in the vaguest terms, that he will cut the cost of the Civil Service.
But we all know how well that will work. After his first Cabinet meeting, the Ministers go back to their departments with their instructions: “Sir Humphrey, the Prime Minister has told me to cut X, Y and Z.” The rest is television history. Whitehall will deal with this as easily as John Terry with a speculative long ball into the box.
Do I believe we could do with a 25 per cent Whitehall and local government headcount cut? Yes, with knobs on. Could it happen? No, there is no conceivable enforcement mechanism, and too many livelihoods and careers depend on this overstaffing. And they all have existences to justify.
Many critics of the present government blame over-regulation on the authoritarian tendencies of the Labour Party. But those tendencies are endemic to politicians, and are in any case not the key factor. Do you really believe that a down-to-earth bloke like Alan Johnson speaks up in Cabinet to say “We really must act against the scandal of parents looking after each other’s children, and giving them lifts to Brownies?” No – there are just too many people justifying their salaries by extending the scope of legislation, monitoring compliance, closing loopholes etc., and forcing this rubbish on the Minister, as did Sir Humphrey. If only civil servants were as lazy as is sometimes rumoured, we’d all be better off. Paying them to lounge around doing nothing would save almost as much as sacking them altogether.
So elect a new government if you must. But don’t expect it to make any difference. Not without more of the sort of plain speaking which no one these days feels able to get away with.
EU Directives on the top,
Health and Safety in the middle,
And burn the bloody lot.”
I’m sure there’ll be millions of us singing something like the above this Guy Fawkes Night. But we might as well save our breath to cool our hot buttered rum.
I’ll tell you what worried me most, as a Labour man. I feared a real libertarian Tory campaign promising bonfires of regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork, with details all worked out. It would have been perfectly possible to attach a research team to each front-bencher, identifying individual areas where everyone’s money and time was being wasted in the department the spokesperson was shadowing. Directly and openly identifying police paperwork surplus to requirements. Compiling a coherent action plan from the literally millions of ridiculous elf ‘n’ safety stories that have emerged over the years. Diversity surveys and compliance monitoring to be challenged to justify their existence in a balloon debate with schools, hospitals and pensions. Inviting citizens to write in with examples and suggestions – a “Bullsh*tWatch” campaign. They’d have swept the country.
Phew! I needn’t have worried. Yes, these things will occasionally be picked up as a stick to beat the Government with; but it’s not as if there were any real prospect of a new Government changing anything. If anything were likely to be done, Mr Cameron would surely have told us by now. What he did was to stand up at the Tory Conference and say, in the vaguest terms, that he will cut the cost of the Civil Service.
But we all know how well that will work. After his first Cabinet meeting, the Ministers go back to their departments with their instructions: “Sir Humphrey, the Prime Minister has told me to cut X, Y and Z.” The rest is television history. Whitehall will deal with this as easily as John Terry with a speculative long ball into the box.
Do I believe we could do with a 25 per cent Whitehall and local government headcount cut? Yes, with knobs on. Could it happen? No, there is no conceivable enforcement mechanism, and too many livelihoods and careers depend on this overstaffing. And they all have existences to justify.
Many critics of the present government blame over-regulation on the authoritarian tendencies of the Labour Party. But those tendencies are endemic to politicians, and are in any case not the key factor. Do you really believe that a down-to-earth bloke like Alan Johnson speaks up in Cabinet to say “We really must act against the scandal of parents looking after each other’s children, and giving them lifts to Brownies?” No – there are just too many people justifying their salaries by extending the scope of legislation, monitoring compliance, closing loopholes etc., and forcing this rubbish on the Minister, as did Sir Humphrey. If only civil servants were as lazy as is sometimes rumoured, we’d all be better off. Paying them to lounge around doing nothing would save almost as much as sacking them altogether.
So elect a new government if you must. But don’t expect it to make any difference. Not without more of the sort of plain speaking which no one these days feels able to get away with.
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
As an ex-diplomat, I volunteer to join an EU diplomatic service and sit around doing nothing
I may be Labour, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the Lisbon Treaty much. Any more than I liked Nice. Or Maastricht. It is increasingly clear that European institutions have turned into a huge juggernaut, built and set in motion by European nations, but over which they now have no vestige of control. As for the democratic deficit, it is now reaching black hole proportions.
Not that I’m dead against a degree of European integration: it makes obvious sense in the age of globalisation. But it should have been bottom up, not top down. Above all, we should have stopped and redesigned the whole bang shoot from scratch when the picture changed so radically in 1989. But by then the wheels of the juggernaut were already unstoppable. So now here we are and here we stay, no matter who wins the 2010 election.
However, a naughty and delicious thought has been germinating. As well as the Blairs and the Milibands and whoever else gets the plum jobs, the Treaty of Lisbon provides for the establishment of an EU diplomatic service.
This is not an entirely new thing, of course; the EU has long maintained separate representation in the world’s major capitals, and there are already large numbers of Brussels-based officials working as diplomats. But I can’t imagine they have a fully staffed diplomatic service ready to roll. They must be drafting new people in from somewhere, presumably transferred or seconded from national diplomatic services for the most part. But maybe, just maybe…
I tried this idea out on my son, who perceptively replied “But you don’t want to go through all that again, surely?” I pointed out that it was not diplomacy which I had disliked, it was work. Contrary to popular prejudice, British diplomats have to work quite hard. The FCO has long-established traditions of high competence and efficiency (there are exceptions, but they are the sort that prove the rule) and there are still plenty of old-style martinets in the higher reaches to enforce them. The idle and the disorganised are soon found out (no predictable jibes please – I lasted 20 years).
But Eurodiplomacy has had no time to establish such traditions. It is all fairly new, and the men in Brussels can have no clear perception of exactly what they can expect from the out-stations. A further obvious point is that the Eurodips will come from a wide variety of cultures, some of which are, shall we say, a good deal less Stakhanovite than others. To put it bluntly, there could be some very cushy little niches out there.
Would it be dishonourable of me? I don’t think so. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Many of us are less than enthralled by modern capitalism; but for now it’s the only game in town, so one has to come to some arrangement with it to earn a living. All work at bottom is either vocation or prostitution. If you’re going to sell out, you may as well get a decent price.
So – FOR HIRE, reconditioned vintage diplomat, one careful owner, still under fifty, 20 years experience, German and Mandarin speaking, will eat and drink anything, adaptable to siesta culture, impenetrable bullsh*t no problem, all offers involving fat pay packet and expense account considered. Apply now to beat the Christmas rush.
Not that I’m dead against a degree of European integration: it makes obvious sense in the age of globalisation. But it should have been bottom up, not top down. Above all, we should have stopped and redesigned the whole bang shoot from scratch when the picture changed so radically in 1989. But by then the wheels of the juggernaut were already unstoppable. So now here we are and here we stay, no matter who wins the 2010 election.
However, a naughty and delicious thought has been germinating. As well as the Blairs and the Milibands and whoever else gets the plum jobs, the Treaty of Lisbon provides for the establishment of an EU diplomatic service.
This is not an entirely new thing, of course; the EU has long maintained separate representation in the world’s major capitals, and there are already large numbers of Brussels-based officials working as diplomats. But I can’t imagine they have a fully staffed diplomatic service ready to roll. They must be drafting new people in from somewhere, presumably transferred or seconded from national diplomatic services for the most part. But maybe, just maybe…
I tried this idea out on my son, who perceptively replied “But you don’t want to go through all that again, surely?” I pointed out that it was not diplomacy which I had disliked, it was work. Contrary to popular prejudice, British diplomats have to work quite hard. The FCO has long-established traditions of high competence and efficiency (there are exceptions, but they are the sort that prove the rule) and there are still plenty of old-style martinets in the higher reaches to enforce them. The idle and the disorganised are soon found out (no predictable jibes please – I lasted 20 years).
But Eurodiplomacy has had no time to establish such traditions. It is all fairly new, and the men in Brussels can have no clear perception of exactly what they can expect from the out-stations. A further obvious point is that the Eurodips will come from a wide variety of cultures, some of which are, shall we say, a good deal less Stakhanovite than others. To put it bluntly, there could be some very cushy little niches out there.
Would it be dishonourable of me? I don’t think so. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Many of us are less than enthralled by modern capitalism; but for now it’s the only game in town, so one has to come to some arrangement with it to earn a living. All work at bottom is either vocation or prostitution. If you’re going to sell out, you may as well get a decent price.
So – FOR HIRE, reconditioned vintage diplomat, one careful owner, still under fifty, 20 years experience, German and Mandarin speaking, will eat and drink anything, adaptable to siesta culture, impenetrable bullsh*t no problem, all offers involving fat pay packet and expense account considered. Apply now to beat the Christmas rush.
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Did corruption in Chinese universities cause the suicide of a brilliant young academic?
The Chinese government is not notable for accountability or responsiveness. And therefore, when the lapidary notice appeared in the official press that the 31 October meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress had announced the replacement of Zhou Ji by Yuan Guiren as Minister of Education, it was hardly surprising that no further comment followed.
The Chinese blogosphere, and the expat academic population, claim to be a great deal better informed. They are absolutely buzzing with news of the recent suicide of a young academic at the prestigious Zhejiang University, just south of Shanghai. Dr Tu Xuxin, who had completed a Master’s degree and then a PhD in geotechnical engineering at Northwestern University in the USA, had returned to China to take up a senior position at Zhejiang. Three months later he jumped head first off the top of one of the university buildings.
The story is that Dr Tu fell foul of endemic corruption in Chinese universities. In his six-page suicide note he claimed that he had been lured back to Zhejiang on the basis that the university, already one of considerable reputation, was offering 100 newly-funded senior academic jobs, of which he had been promised one. When he arrived home, he discovered that the promises he had received were worthless. The salary range he had been encouraged to expect was £20-30,000: he was given £5,000, with no prospect of improvement. Having brought his wife back to China with him, he found her heavily disappointed and blaming it on him. The suicide note spoke of “the reality about the world of academics and research in China: cruelty, treachery, and apathy.”
Sympathy rippled around the Chinese-speaking world: but some of it was tinged with realism. A contributor to the longhoo.net site, while sympathising with the poor man, put it thus:
“Dr Tu had made the mistake of not fully researching how things are done and pursued in the academic scene in China. If anything, he should’ve been better prepared to handle the difference in expectations. Those that have lived, studied, and worked for some time overseas are easily blinded by gushes of patriotism for their home country, and thus wistfully buy into the idea that they can make huge contributions on grounds of their better talents and abilities. However, such wistful thinking is naïve in that they haven’t fully grasped the networks of connections that are the unspoken rules of the academic circle in China. Partition and usage of research funds in Chinese universities lie with the discretion of the privileged few – those with the connections. Dr Tu wasn’t prepared for this: the American system he had worked with was all about fairness and talent.”
At the same time, a story from three years ago is gradually surfacing on the net. In Yongzhou, in Hunan province, video evidence has come to light allegedly showing Zhang Yaoyin, an 11-year-old girl, being beaten to a pulp with an iron bar by her teacher, in front of the class, and then thrown out of a fourth-floor window to her death.
In any case, Education Minister Zhou Ji has resigned, or at least been transferred to an inferior post, and my Chinese friends attribute his resignation to at least one of these affairs. For the honour of China, let’s hope they’re right. China needs proper accountability, not just for sustained economic success, but for full acceptance as part of the civilised world. May Dr Tu Xuxin and Miss Zhang Yaoyin rest in peace.
The Chinese blogosphere, and the expat academic population, claim to be a great deal better informed. They are absolutely buzzing with news of the recent suicide of a young academic at the prestigious Zhejiang University, just south of Shanghai. Dr Tu Xuxin, who had completed a Master’s degree and then a PhD in geotechnical engineering at Northwestern University in the USA, had returned to China to take up a senior position at Zhejiang. Three months later he jumped head first off the top of one of the university buildings.
The story is that Dr Tu fell foul of endemic corruption in Chinese universities. In his six-page suicide note he claimed that he had been lured back to Zhejiang on the basis that the university, already one of considerable reputation, was offering 100 newly-funded senior academic jobs, of which he had been promised one. When he arrived home, he discovered that the promises he had received were worthless. The salary range he had been encouraged to expect was £20-30,000: he was given £5,000, with no prospect of improvement. Having brought his wife back to China with him, he found her heavily disappointed and blaming it on him. The suicide note spoke of “the reality about the world of academics and research in China: cruelty, treachery, and apathy.”
Sympathy rippled around the Chinese-speaking world: but some of it was tinged with realism. A contributor to the longhoo.net site, while sympathising with the poor man, put it thus:
“Dr Tu had made the mistake of not fully researching how things are done and pursued in the academic scene in China. If anything, he should’ve been better prepared to handle the difference in expectations. Those that have lived, studied, and worked for some time overseas are easily blinded by gushes of patriotism for their home country, and thus wistfully buy into the idea that they can make huge contributions on grounds of their better talents and abilities. However, such wistful thinking is naïve in that they haven’t fully grasped the networks of connections that are the unspoken rules of the academic circle in China. Partition and usage of research funds in Chinese universities lie with the discretion of the privileged few – those with the connections. Dr Tu wasn’t prepared for this: the American system he had worked with was all about fairness and talent.”
At the same time, a story from three years ago is gradually surfacing on the net. In Yongzhou, in Hunan province, video evidence has come to light allegedly showing Zhang Yaoyin, an 11-year-old girl, being beaten to a pulp with an iron bar by her teacher, in front of the class, and then thrown out of a fourth-floor window to her death.
In any case, Education Minister Zhou Ji has resigned, or at least been transferred to an inferior post, and my Chinese friends attribute his resignation to at least one of these affairs. For the honour of China, let’s hope they’re right. China needs proper accountability, not just for sustained economic success, but for full acceptance as part of the civilised world. May Dr Tu Xuxin and Miss Zhang Yaoyin rest in peace.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Are the Chinese racist?
Yesterday The Observer reported an alarming row over a TV talent contest in Shanghai. One of the leading contestants, a 20-year-old girl named Lou Jing (pronounced Low not Loo), has attracted enormous opprobrium from all over the country. Some of the comments in the Chinese blogosphere are almost unbelievable. Sounds familiar, you might think. But the only allegation levelled at her is that she has dared to appear on television while being of mixed race, her father being a black African who was not married to her mother.
For a start, Lou Jing is extremely lucky to be alive. I thought I’d seen it all in China, but I’ve never seen an African/Chinese mixed race person there. You don’t actually meet all that many people born out of wedlock at all. This is not, as the prissy blogosphere would have it, because of the superior virtue of Chinese maidens. It is because illegitimacy is so socially unacceptable that (at a guess) 99 per cent of such pregnancies are terminated. If the mother suspected that the pregnancy had resulted from an affair with a black man, I would have said until today that that figure was 100 per cent. And this 20 years ago! Lou Jing’s mother is one extremely brave woman.
And so we come to the big question: how racist are the Chinese? The China Daily quotation used in the Observer piece – “anyone who marries a foreigner is deemed a ‘traitor’ to his or her race” – is vastly simplistic. First of all, the modern PC “his or her” is inaccurate. There are sexual as well as racial psychopathologies at work here. I am quite sure that no Chinese family objects to a son bringing home a blonde daughter-in-law. But for some reason the proportion of women to men marrying foreigners has until now been probably north of 100:1.
But even as regards daughters things have changed. (Slowly: as recently as 2004 my Chinese girlfriend, now my wife, had the police knocking on her door on a Sunday morning after some neighbour had grassed about my frequent visits.) To the sexual and racial prejudices has been added a third: economic status. Even if not all white men are rich, they will be assumed to be, and a woman who has travelled and hooked a white guy has automatically raised her status thereby.
I will confess to slightly cold feet the first time I was taken to see my prospective in-laws in Chongqing. I was assured that there would be no problems, but I knew that they were solid conservative Mao-era party stalwarts and I wasn’t so sure. Furthermore, we were met at the airport by my fiancée’s sister, whose small son cowered in terror. Actually, the whole family was extremely kind and welcoming – even the little boy, given a few hours to adjust – and I have never felt a breath of hostility on the grounds of my race or nationality. Later this month they will acquire their second English son-in-law. (The remaining daughter is married to a Canadian. But a Chinese-Canadian isn’t a foreigner at all.)
But I have asked my wife whether she would have been prepared to marry a black man. Emphatic negative. She is not personally prejudiced, and has adjusted happily to multicultural Lancashire – but she would simply not have been able to do it. It is the social conditioning: she would be too fearful of what they would say back in Chongqing. Everyone in China “knows” that all Africans have HIV. And, if a child were to be born, she could never have emulated the self-confidence of Lou Jing’s mother.
The social status of foreigners among the Chinese depends solely on their perceived economic standing. Once I was walking around a market town on the China-Russia border, and noticed that the locals were being a lot less polite than is normally the case. I realised, from some unpleasant expressions being bandied about, that they thought I was Russian – there were plenty of ragged Siberians mooching about. Once I had explained that I was British, attitudes changed noticeably.
So it’s not just racism. But it’s not not racism either. I have posted a few times on Chinese economic activity in Africa. Not that it’s necessarily politically sinister; but the phenomenon worries me. I can foresee a habit arising of expat Chinese entrepreneurs despising and maltreating their African workforce, culminating in a wholesale massacre of Chinese in Africa. Believe me, it could happen.
For a start, Lou Jing is extremely lucky to be alive. I thought I’d seen it all in China, but I’ve never seen an African/Chinese mixed race person there. You don’t actually meet all that many people born out of wedlock at all. This is not, as the prissy blogosphere would have it, because of the superior virtue of Chinese maidens. It is because illegitimacy is so socially unacceptable that (at a guess) 99 per cent of such pregnancies are terminated. If the mother suspected that the pregnancy had resulted from an affair with a black man, I would have said until today that that figure was 100 per cent. And this 20 years ago! Lou Jing’s mother is one extremely brave woman.
And so we come to the big question: how racist are the Chinese? The China Daily quotation used in the Observer piece – “anyone who marries a foreigner is deemed a ‘traitor’ to his or her race” – is vastly simplistic. First of all, the modern PC “his or her” is inaccurate. There are sexual as well as racial psychopathologies at work here. I am quite sure that no Chinese family objects to a son bringing home a blonde daughter-in-law. But for some reason the proportion of women to men marrying foreigners has until now been probably north of 100:1.
But even as regards daughters things have changed. (Slowly: as recently as 2004 my Chinese girlfriend, now my wife, had the police knocking on her door on a Sunday morning after some neighbour had grassed about my frequent visits.) To the sexual and racial prejudices has been added a third: economic status. Even if not all white men are rich, they will be assumed to be, and a woman who has travelled and hooked a white guy has automatically raised her status thereby.
I will confess to slightly cold feet the first time I was taken to see my prospective in-laws in Chongqing. I was assured that there would be no problems, but I knew that they were solid conservative Mao-era party stalwarts and I wasn’t so sure. Furthermore, we were met at the airport by my fiancée’s sister, whose small son cowered in terror. Actually, the whole family was extremely kind and welcoming – even the little boy, given a few hours to adjust – and I have never felt a breath of hostility on the grounds of my race or nationality. Later this month they will acquire their second English son-in-law. (The remaining daughter is married to a Canadian. But a Chinese-Canadian isn’t a foreigner at all.)
But I have asked my wife whether she would have been prepared to marry a black man. Emphatic negative. She is not personally prejudiced, and has adjusted happily to multicultural Lancashire – but she would simply not have been able to do it. It is the social conditioning: she would be too fearful of what they would say back in Chongqing. Everyone in China “knows” that all Africans have HIV. And, if a child were to be born, she could never have emulated the self-confidence of Lou Jing’s mother.
The social status of foreigners among the Chinese depends solely on their perceived economic standing. Once I was walking around a market town on the China-Russia border, and noticed that the locals were being a lot less polite than is normally the case. I realised, from some unpleasant expressions being bandied about, that they thought I was Russian – there were plenty of ragged Siberians mooching about. Once I had explained that I was British, attitudes changed noticeably.
So it’s not just racism. But it’s not not racism either. I have posted a few times on Chinese economic activity in Africa. Not that it’s necessarily politically sinister; but the phenomenon worries me. I can foresee a habit arising of expat Chinese entrepreneurs despising and maltreating their African workforce, culminating in a wholesale massacre of Chinese in Africa. Believe me, it could happen.
Legalising cannabis could make things worse
Another big row about drugs policy – like all the others, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This one centres around the sacking of Dr David Nutt, an adviser to the Home Secretary, for public disagreement with government policy. Radio phone-ins all day have been full of rants: experts know much more than ministers, the latter should listen to them, Alan Johnson should have been sacked instead, etc. etc. The present government can no more do anything right than could John Major’s in 1996.
But the fact is that expert advisers are solely employed to give expert analysis and recommendations; they are not responsible for the political and social consequences of these, whereas ministers are. If ministers are apt to attach too much importance to possible cheap shots in the tabloids, those are political and social consequences too, and can’t be ignored altogether.
What interested me was that Dr Nutt’s departure followed so closely on Jacqui Smith’s stellar performance on Thursday’s Question Time. Ms Smith was jolly courageous to go on at all; as she must have expected, she appeared to a slightly rougher reception than that recently accorded to Nick Griffin. By the end of the programme she had turned it right round: she was getting full endorsements from Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, Plaid Cymru chief Elfyn Llwyd, and most of the audience. All by fearlessly holding the line on the drug policy argument. Dr Nutt was out next day. If she saves her seat, she will owe it to that programme.
I don’t have any coherent views on all this. All the drug arguments I’ve ever heard make sense for thirty seconds and then evaporate into a vague miasma. I’m very glad I’ve got two children through to adulthood – and in South London, too! – without any drug disasters. I know that I drink more than is good for me, and that this disqualifies me from pontificating. The argument I’ve been most impressed by in thirty years of cogitation was the late Sir Kingsley Amis’s: alcohol has probably preserved society from falling apart under the stresses and strains of modern life, and, more to the point, it is now part of the warp and woof of society, claims which more modern drugs cannot make. But then, you may correctly say, Sir Kingsley was parti pris; parts of his Memoirs are a masterpiece of alcoholic denial.
What I don’t understand is the way the legalisers keep bringing forward the argument that alcohol is a bigger social problem than cannabis, but that this is not properly recognised because alcohol is too popular for its banning to be conceivable. It’s a cogent argument, but doesn’t really support their case. If it is true, maybe it would be better to suppress cannabis, to stop that becoming so widely used that it becomes a huge and insoluble social problem – just like alcohol.
But the fact is that expert advisers are solely employed to give expert analysis and recommendations; they are not responsible for the political and social consequences of these, whereas ministers are. If ministers are apt to attach too much importance to possible cheap shots in the tabloids, those are political and social consequences too, and can’t be ignored altogether.
What interested me was that Dr Nutt’s departure followed so closely on Jacqui Smith’s stellar performance on Thursday’s Question Time. Ms Smith was jolly courageous to go on at all; as she must have expected, she appeared to a slightly rougher reception than that recently accorded to Nick Griffin. By the end of the programme she had turned it right round: she was getting full endorsements from Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, Plaid Cymru chief Elfyn Llwyd, and most of the audience. All by fearlessly holding the line on the drug policy argument. Dr Nutt was out next day. If she saves her seat, she will owe it to that programme.
I don’t have any coherent views on all this. All the drug arguments I’ve ever heard make sense for thirty seconds and then evaporate into a vague miasma. I’m very glad I’ve got two children through to adulthood – and in South London, too! – without any drug disasters. I know that I drink more than is good for me, and that this disqualifies me from pontificating. The argument I’ve been most impressed by in thirty years of cogitation was the late Sir Kingsley Amis’s: alcohol has probably preserved society from falling apart under the stresses and strains of modern life, and, more to the point, it is now part of the warp and woof of society, claims which more modern drugs cannot make. But then, you may correctly say, Sir Kingsley was parti pris; parts of his Memoirs are a masterpiece of alcoholic denial.
What I don’t understand is the way the legalisers keep bringing forward the argument that alcohol is a bigger social problem than cannabis, but that this is not properly recognised because alcohol is too popular for its banning to be conceivable. It’s a cogent argument, but doesn’t really support their case. If it is true, maybe it would be better to suppress cannabis, to stop that becoming so widely used that it becomes a huge and insoluble social problem – just like alcohol.
Sunday, 1 November 2009
The Wii Fit Plus: a computer game the Government wants you to play
The first computer game with the explicit endorsement of the Department of Health has just hit the shops. It is called the Wii Fit Plus and is meant to enable you to achieve a sylph-like figure without removing your eyes from the screen. And it comes with the opposite of the Government Health Warning on your fag packet.
I derive this information from my younger son, just short of his twenty-first birthday and possibly the world’s leading expert on these devices. He is very much the target market for the Wii Fit Plus, weighing seventeen stone (but then so do I, and he’s taller). It shows you various exercises to do, and – this is the innovative bit – you wear some sort of attachment on your body, so that the machine knows whether or not you are doing them correctly, and precisely how many calories you are burning off, encouraging you with word and demonstration the while. If this sounds rather reminiscent of Winston Smith and the telescreen in the opening chapter of 1984, do remember that so far it is all entirely voluntary, and you can tell it to sod off just like you do the lady on the satnav.
Let’s not brood too long over what future Harriet Harmans might make of it. It sounds a bit sad, but I can see there is something to be said for it, if one is a fitness fan doomed to live under sodden English skies, or else too grossly fat to risk being seen in public in one’s sports gear.
However, the idea of an endorsement by the Government is rather a new departure. (Though I can’t help fearing that in the current political situation that may be rather a kiss of death.) Let us hope that (pause to look up name) Mr Andy Burnham is seen disporting himself with his Wii on public service advertising in the run-up to Christmas. And the mind boggles at whatever other government departments may jump on the bandwagon. Encourage Pocket-money Prudence with an Alistair Darling Piggy-bank. Or what about a sustainable Christmas tree graced with an angelic Ed Miliband? One thing is certain: any military toys endorsed by the Ministry of Defence will have fallen apart by Boxing Day.
I derive this information from my younger son, just short of his twenty-first birthday and possibly the world’s leading expert on these devices. He is very much the target market for the Wii Fit Plus, weighing seventeen stone (but then so do I, and he’s taller). It shows you various exercises to do, and – this is the innovative bit – you wear some sort of attachment on your body, so that the machine knows whether or not you are doing them correctly, and precisely how many calories you are burning off, encouraging you with word and demonstration the while. If this sounds rather reminiscent of Winston Smith and the telescreen in the opening chapter of 1984, do remember that so far it is all entirely voluntary, and you can tell it to sod off just like you do the lady on the satnav.
Let’s not brood too long over what future Harriet Harmans might make of it. It sounds a bit sad, but I can see there is something to be said for it, if one is a fitness fan doomed to live under sodden English skies, or else too grossly fat to risk being seen in public in one’s sports gear.
However, the idea of an endorsement by the Government is rather a new departure. (Though I can’t help fearing that in the current political situation that may be rather a kiss of death.) Let us hope that (pause to look up name) Mr Andy Burnham is seen disporting himself with his Wii on public service advertising in the run-up to Christmas. And the mind boggles at whatever other government departments may jump on the bandwagon. Encourage Pocket-money Prudence with an Alistair Darling Piggy-bank. Or what about a sustainable Christmas tree graced with an angelic Ed Miliband? One thing is certain: any military toys endorsed by the Ministry of Defence will have fallen apart by Boxing Day.
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