'We will not introduce top up fee's and will legislate to prevent them'

Tony Blair Labour manifesto Pledge 2001

'I pledge to vote against any increase in fee's in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a FAIRER ALTERNATIVE'

Signed- Nick Clegg

Strange times in Blighty when (hashtag) Day 3 (or "dayX") saw the 'baying rabble of masked and hooded troublemakers' ( ©DAILY BILE)along with their accomplices the 'feral mob' (© DAV CAM) once more exert their civil right resulting in a police response that it is now apparent was neither civil nor right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=axWyu1t4rkE

The Met decided to redeploy the 'kettling' tactic of crowd control last witnessed at the previous Student Protest, during which schoolchildren and others where incarcerated (too emphatic?) in freezing temperatures, denied toilet facilities, food water or exit from Trafalgaur Square up until (in some cases) ten o clock in the evening. However in addition to this most counterproductive and intimidating of police options came a yet more medieval decision- to, with the intent of dispersing a peaceful crowd of protesters, instruct a charge of 21 horses headlong into the students. Now, let me stress that I am not a dogmatic ideologue who views every police officer as an architect of state brutality, but it is hard to dispel that perception when the curtailment of civil liberties is as forceful and flagrant as it was yesterday. Tellingly, the reportage of this incident has predominately been concerned with the one officer who was toppled from his horse amid the carnage, rather than any protesters on the ground subject to it.

I was unfortunately unable to attend yesterday's protest but have one previous experience of seeing a crowd 'kettled' from a restaurant window just off High Street Ken back in 2008. The demonstration being staged was a 'Free Palestine' protest in which a relatively humble sized crowd (certainly bearing no resemblance to yesterday's proportions) gathered to voice their grievances over the Israeli bombardment of the West Bank and Gaza strip in January of that year. Me and my family watched in amazement as this crowd of no more than 50 was advanced upon by a horde of officers wielding riot shields and rubber truncheons (some of whom where also on horesback) who proceeded to hem them in a semicircle and prohibit any movement. I took away from this singular example two observations which have acquired greater pertinence in recent weeks; firstly that the amount of police presence was entirely disproportionate to both the temperament and size of the protests being enacted and latterly that the experience of being tightly and arbitrarily restricted in a limited space served not to mollify the already peaceful protesters but in fact to aggravate them.

The final commons result on the Browne Report is as culpable as any major political event to spin because whilst it may inevitably lead many to crown the efforts of britains yoof/ youngsters/ whippersnappers (substitute accordingly) as 'futile' it was by no means a triumphant victory for the coalition. Although not quite the mass defection hoped for, 21 LibDem's favoured being able to sleep at night and disobeyed the whips. The impact of the mass demonstrations seems to have been to remind Westminster that the younger demographic whilst often foggy in its message and less clear still in its allegiances, is capable of defiance and activism. Teenagers across the country have slipped into the roles of protest co-ordinator's, sit-in and occupation manager's and militant critic's of government hipocrosy with minimal effort.

Although the media's lens may gravitate as ever towards the violent minority, to paraphrase Edmund Burke (of all people) although the Crickets in the night are the first you here they obscure the sounds of all the other wildlife underneath. The vast majority of the protests have been moderate and the examples of violence can be shown to be either products of the draconian police measures mentioned earlier or the intrusion of anarchist elements onto the movements fringes. Excluding the recent surge in party membership this does represent a largely bipartisan movement amongst which the dark shadows of the Iraq war, expenses scandal and recession are cast heavily over any political party attempting to capitalize on the outrage. Long may this movement elude the shackles of ideology! It is only in doing so and through sustaining their optimism and naivety that the views of the anti-cut militia amongst our generation will keep their place at the forefront of the opposition!

a possible introductory paragraph for a story about a globalwarming-sceptic geologist delivered in a monologue

“You can, and no doubt once this discussion has finished, will talk to me all you want about climate change and try ignite a rumble of unease in my stomach. If gorging me on facts about the imminent droughts, tornado’s, melting icecap’s, earthquakes, food shortages and the drying up of the gulf stream gives you a morbid twang of satisfaction then go ahead. If you want you can call me a ‘stoic ignorant refusnik’ when I upturn my palms and ask ‘and?’ in response. (indeed I believe I just saw Janet scribble those very words onto her notepad a minute ago) Because we haven’t ‘scarred the earth’ and we don’t need to ‘protect’ our ‘frail’ and ‘vulnerable’ ecosystem, things are going to pan out naturally. Trust man’s hubris to think that laying our asphalt coat on the earth and encrusting it with houses and cars, that embroidering its surface with coal factories and skyscrapers, allowing pesticides to seep into its babbling brooks and endangering its many species through centuries of hunting has inflicted any permanent damage on it. Just because we’ve killed, cremated and scattered god’s ashes doesn’t mean that nature hasn’t taken up that biblical force.

It’s not this feeble, sensitive edifice, requiring the patient adoration of an eco-conscious 5 foot creature who sees itself as the harbinger of mankind’s restoration to remain intact. Do you honestly think that it needs to do more than shrug to entirely eradicate us? That’ll it’ll even need to yawn to reduce any trace of man’s short dominion to ash, dust and the odd bone? No, the earths not bruised and weakened by our actions but simply napping, tolerating us whilst its alchemy of lava sits at its core awaiting an eruption of primal intensity. Do we truly believe that the homosapien with his posable thumb prised on the nuclear button has a greater right to occupancy than that of the Velociraptor? Well of course we do, and that’s why the extinction of the most majestic breed of creatures to knowingly have inhabited ‘our’ earth is labelled ‘pre’ history. It’s why the palaeontologist is not the same revered intellectual titan as the military historian. I don’t see how devoting endless pages of scrupulous documentation on mans folly is going to profit anyone, so why is prehistoric life marketed predominately as an interesting distraction for children, whilst knowledge of Stalingrad is a..”

he interrupted himself to stop and take a lengthy swig from the glass of water in front of him, swishing the fluid around his cheeks so they inflated like balloons. The attention of the room was what you’d call rapt, with the silence punctured only by a muted sneeze of the man propped up on the wall at the back and then the odd torrent of coughs that bubbled in succession as though acquiring an unstoppable momentum with each phlegm-soaked emission. The conference hall was packed right to the two exits at the back, with the room arranged in a kind of gradient of importance- journalists and advocates towards the front tailing further back to cynics and further back still to those ambivalent to Dr. Werther’s opinions but attracted by the large turnout.

Theres the polished asphalt, closed off by men in reflective wastecoats, permitting an uninhibited stroll across territory usually unchartered by people on foot.Theres no immediate danger present and furthermore very little likelihood of a renegade car defying the blockade to tear down those in the road, so why are the vast majority coyly sticking to the pavements? Perhaps they think its some kind of decietful trap designed by the authorities to lull the citizen into a state of unshackled freedom only to then apprehend them by once more opening the thoroughfare to the cars. Tricked once to often, the possibility of remaining stood stationery in a spot which ordinarily would see you ground beneath the churning momentum of a 4x4 without disrupting traffic, seems for the flummoxed christmas shoppers too much to process. So the sheer volume of families and clans engaged in their debates on the appropriate choice of present for grandad (could he navigate an ipod?) edge across the pavestones on either end of the road at such a gradual pace you have to pay attention to realise their even moving at all. They're cautious of what such a moment of approved rebellion could unearth in them, watch the glances those on the pavement shoot in envy at the few strutting along the road in brash certainty, embellishing their bravery with swaggers and sneers. I hear fragments of conversations all around swell into a tumultuous dawn chorus of anxieties, jokes and taunts, a girl near me says "and then i tried to save it but i couldn't'

'Theres an elderly lady who lives in my town on the helston road approaching the station. She has registered an impact on me in the last month, through a series of encounters which are all but identical in their tone and content, but for the changing of the seasons around us. The way it will go is that i'll be ambling in my usual state of mild delirium when a frail form in a blue nightie and a head of milk white hair will loom out of a doorway and ask in a quivering but pleasant tone "excuse me dear, what day of the week is it?" At which point on our three prior meetings i have replied after a brief moment of hesitation 'The day is Saturday'. Now, i travel that road every day, give or take a few exemptions, and yet this woman requires assurance about the day of the week it would appear only once a week. On the second meeting i caught a glimpse into the corridor behind her to see a staircase with a stairlift attached and numerous handles attached to surfaces, presumably to aid her balance around the house. A wave of pity started to crest in me as i considered that this brief encounter could be her only contact with the outside world, ambling over the doorsteps frontier into the crisp Winter morning to confirm that she is still compus mentis? But then another more callous thought occured to me, perhaps she is to be tested later to check whether her faculties are all there, the visiting doctor will ask her in a voice of benign reassurance "ok, so can you tell me what day of the week it is? and can you tell me who the prime minister is? very good Vera, now do you know how old you are?" Upon hearing the first inquiry i can imagine her face illuminating with the knowledge i had supplied on my trip up the hill earlier. However ludicrous this train of thought seemed i could not banish the feeling that i was dealing in a cartel of information for the uninformed, it appealed to my inner philanthropist i suppose. What frightened me most in each instance of our dialogue though was the genuine mental exertion i had to perform, i had to seriously consider what the day was. My insecurity rose up and i become disconcerted about having given a senile woman false information- after all if i had to think to affirm it was Saturday then where we not in the same situation? Give them thought then, the shoppers fearing to stray from their habitat in their existential angst and the lady grasping for the security, the familiarity of the weekday in the cold."

Was just watching a talk by Sheena Iyengar form the TED conference regarding ‘the art of choosing’ http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html and was not giving It my full attention until she said that:

‘When offered to those not accustomed to it choice does not entail a liberation but a suffocation by meaningless minutia', which essentially gave voice to something I’ve been feeling for a long time. An example of the above statement is the experiences of those in eastern Europe who have undergone the transition from living in a communist state wherein product choice was confined to an affirmation or negation of the state brand of soap, chewing gum, beer etc (to which in east Germany many interestingly still retain their loyalty) to now, under democracy, being subject to an overwhelming deluge of seemingly identical possible brands, from which to operate an autonomous choice.

For those of us who have grown up as a part of this late capitalist paradigm we have been able to develop an acute ability to sift through the various possible manifestations of chewing gum or ‘soft drink’ with such fluency that forming brand allegiances and counterbalancing the market choices available becomes an almost instinctive activity that can be a source of pride. It is then however that we will find, when we believe ourselves to have carved a secure niche of brand preferences and loyalties out of the swarm of those commodities and products we could have chosen, and when we begin to derive a vivid impression of our own ‘consumer identity’ as it where, that we are most susceptible to undergoing a crisis of confidence.

The dissemination of the Anglo-American ideal of choice and the implications it has in forcing its citizens to compile a portfolio of freely chosen deals, contracts, brand’s and assorted paraphernalia can make those subjected to this tyranny of possibilities faint-headed. I increasingly feel absorbed by Sartre’s phantasmagorical ‘nausea’, on heading into town, as I start to feel winded by modernity’s unceasing reliance on my personal jurisdiction. To use a common example, any visit to a corporate, or indeed any other, coffee shop now consists of the customer being asked to dictate a carefully scrutinised prescription of how one would like one’s caffeine hit assembled. Surely I am not alone in feeling that this compliance and egalitarianism on the behalf of the coffee makers is enormously tedious? For imagine now how refreshing it would be to remove all the requests and democracy from the transaction and put your faith in the barista to process and comply with the words ‘can I have a coffee please’- what I would give to be dictated my order at a restaurant! On a trip into town I began to feel sweat trickle down my brow, and my consciousness teeming with neurosis as I calculate the price margins that delineate the different brands. A single trip into town will see the consumer sent hurtling from the void towards an onslaught of possible choices, negations and affirmations from which they are required by the late capitalist machine to perform countless exertions of what is actually quite high-level cognitive scrutiny. Only because from an increasingly young age we are initiated into this bizarre ritual, distinguishing our preferred cartoon enterprise, favoured manufactor of sweets etc, does it seem to us to be a natural one. However as Iyengar wittily points out in the video, choice is not an organic phenomenon which is a mainstay every culture, and hence the west is wrong to treat those cultures, such as her example regarding the green tea in japan, which do not bestow upon the consumer a vast array of options, as being aberrations that run counter to the notions of democracy and liberty.

The truth is that I believe many of the people who would triumphantly champion our ability in Britain to freely vote on who governs us as one of the most admirable facets of our culture would still, like me, relish a little bit of autocracy when buying a coffee. Because when absolute liberty infects the marketplace you begin to feel trapped and not freed. Supermarkets, far from being bastions of self-governance are its anathema; countless research having told us that when the range of options provided exceeds 10 we become lazy and disengage from the decision we are making. Multiply this disengagement by one trolley load and it becomes apparent that a reduction in the multiplicity of choice (in reality just homogenous variations on a theme) offered by the market would not leave the modern consumer disempowered and obedient, but would re-empower them by allowing them to redirect their cognitive energies away from shopping.

Was a bit apprehensive about posting this- but then bore in mind that i am essentially yelling into the void/muttering to myself here, such is the scarcity of those tuned in to hear me (which is actually a comforting and not a discouraging thought- more in touch with the idea of a blog as a 'log' kept whilst aboard a ship. Full of insidious bickering about the crew and hastily sketched recounts of the journey's progress/ self-indulgent moaning about the hardship of life at sea, all written in a sinuous scrawl due to the rockiness of the cabin desk ) Besides i think my three 'followers' may soon stop being the devotees the phrase implies, and justifiably take a detour from my inanities whilst i'm not looking etc etc

Anyway i wrote this in a frenzied burst- my eyelids artificially pronged up by caffeine stimulation on sunday early in the morning following a first shift at my new job-

Dissection of a Saturday night.

The residue of nights passed clings to everything here, a testament to punters liberally dousing every surface they pass with a variety of spirits, sugars and saliva like deranged catholic priests. I’m now acutely aware of this as I reach out to grip a table for balance whilst trying to weave in and amongst the horde of sweating, lurching drunks, emphatically bellowing innocuous lyrics in their friends faces. I glance at my palm in horror and with considerable effort succeed in wrenching it from its glucose web, a squelch audible as it is peeled away. Having completed this act of escapology I turn to face my true purpose for having stepped out from behind the relative safety of the bar.

Stopping to find my bearings I’m struck by the myopia of the club where a gaze is diverted by a hesitant glimmer of familiarity in the face over there, a distinct note to RSVP in a cute girls face or the unwitting intrusion of a passing elbow to the nave of my back. Then it’s the glance that in your daze your unaware to have held and the pulsing exposure of the strobe light etching phantom forms around you; it’s a scene from which sobriety reels and staggers to escape clutching its head like Chatterton. Its just then as I feel the rapid advance of blood from my feet to my head that I glimpse what I’d been sent to identify, over there, just behind the couple dispassionately gyrating against each other like two sticks being rubbed together by a boy scout hoping to prompt a spark. So I route cautiously through the crowd, side-on sneaking through the narrowest of human corridors, ducking beneath biceps tensed for photographs and intermittently issuing a barely audible ‘sorry’. Then with a final swivel past a middle-aged woman arcing her head around a seemingly oblivious partners neck and I’m by the crime scene, a freshly trampled carpet of glass.

Crouched down sweeping up the detritus I feel as though I’m a courtyard in a cloister of high heels and trainers. I’m reluctant to leave this clearing within the brooding forest of legs, hemmed in by the refractions of the lit mirrors that line the walls. Feet trace the floor and swing inches from my head whilst I sweep shattered beer glass from beneath them and I entertain the thought that months of feigning invisibility have paid off and I am now as translucent as the shards I’m collecting. For after all the role of the employee at the lowest rung of a business is to maintain a contrite efficiency and a perennial apology for their consumption of space and time. I see it in the shade of confusion and hostility that enters the delirious expressions I encounter on my way back to the bar. It’s the most transient of sensations for the drunk when inhibitions sneak back into their mind, and their own humility is reflected to them in the furrows of my brow. Once this peculiar apparition has dissolved from view however they can continue to exile any reservations and resume dancing.

As the clock hands meet and the proximity to other bodies lessens a greater flamboyancy enters the moves of those on the dance floor; what little etiquette was in place is all but savaged as grown men entertain guitar hero fantasies, lunging to the floor optimistically before despondently calling on their mates to haul them off the beer drenched floor. Blokes who habitually trust the authority of the Suns sages jut their starch-collared necks forward in time to American Idiot, and bark orders for ‘every body to enjoy the propaganda’ Women wield imaginary microphones aloft, eyes clenched, pirouetting their unoccupied hand in the air and yelling something resembling ‘if you want it/ you should’ve put a ring on it’, the final word stressed in a spirit of empowered solidarity.

letter sent to but not published by the independent

" There is a vindictive and unappealing current running through the british liberal presses response to their arch-nemesis Tony Blair’s announcement that he will donate the proceeds raised from his, no doubt rather censored, forthcoming account of his political career to the British legion. Now I am not issuing a defence of his actions and reserve a particular breed of loathing for someone who led Britain into what was probably the most destructive and fruitless exercise in US jingoism since Vietnam, however I don’t think this should cloud my judgement on what is a commendable action. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s column in the independent was so drenched in vilification and bile that it could not give an impartial statement regarding Blair’s actions without tacking on a sentence clause further reinforcing that he is actually ‘as ever, phlegmatic and a trickster, flaunting his iron will and unassailable arrogance, and intimidating’ in case we’d forgotten. Or she is assuring us that whilst he might have seemed an enticing prospect in 1994 as Education Secretary “we know now that those eyes blaze with vanity and egotism, greed, ceaseless validation and money”

This is not confined to her particular column but permeates most political commentary, where journalists seem to salivate at the prospect even a slightest allusion to Blair’s name allows for unleashing a character assassination. Is this the way the free press in Britain conducts itself; to subject the news of a charitable donation (presumably of a sizable sum, given the books current sales) to an unrelenting torrent of bile, of which even right wing US hate-fanning pundits such as Glenn Beck and Bill’ O Reily would be proud? It has seemed since the Iraq war that to allow in a liberal paper that Blair had any redeeming features whatsoever is to condone the warmongering, kleptomania of his foreign policy. Meanwhile whilst this is going on, Cameron and Osborne are surreptitiously introducing the most deadly package of spending cuts to the Welfare State since its inception and the coverage they are granted is handled strictly with kids gloves. It has long been that serious leftist political commentary would rather laboriously tread over the same route of continual speculation about ‘were Labour went wrong’ instead of turn around to confront the current truth that we have a government out-Thatchering Thatcher to minimal opposition. So whilst she might reprimand herself for being duped by the charisma of the Blair spin machine during its formative years, it has been overlooked that the same is happening with Cameron and Clegg, particularly the latter whom most liberals believe will somehow forego his first cabinet position to ‘see the error of his ways’.

Instead of fixating on the litany of problems that admittedly lay within New Labour (the neglect of labour members opinions in favour of the vested interests of those in the deregulated city, the flattery of Washington’s Neo-cons and most catastrophically the oligarchic way that Blair sidestepped the cabinet) and to avoid sounding like a senile geriatric berating an old foe at a louder volume because he thinks hasn’t been heard,surely it is more profitable to focus on the reincarnation of the centre-left in the current leadership campaign. Acting as though what is evidently a stab at atonement (however awkwardly undertaken) from Blair is a ‘move both cynical and provocative’ is quiet frankly churlish. The action can be applauded without surrendering ones admonishment of his past conduct."

some kind of extract

His weeks drew on, months drew on, his life drew on, but not in any profound sketches or rococo splendour, no, they instead were the strokes accumulated on the pavement of the chalk artist. Playing with perspective, sure, eliciting a giggle or smile of recognition from a passer-by and habitually magnetizing a 50p piece to a hat, but never did these carefully weighed chunks of time halt someone in their tracks or tempt them to revaluate their own life. Well, he’d think, ‘tolerance of drudgery is simply further evidence of my increasing maturity. Look at how the prospect of a phone rant with the electricity provider constitutes an event in my parent’s weekly calendar!’ He’d watch the thinly veiled elation that the news of this approaching chance to bellow, condescend to and correct a faceless drone in a call-centre in Bengal provided for his mother with bemusement; but also with a wistful understanding that further growing-up would one day instil the same sensation in him. After all, the wisdom of the eleven year-old proudly cowering behind a barricade against the fairer sex, passing the time in the company of the Beano, now seemed just as mystifying. Indeed as he snoozed past 9 o clock on the 25^th of December that year, happily rolling his back to face away from the intrusive dawn rays, he could feel his younger self standing aghast at the door, foot tapping in impatient disapproval.

The grand life-plan was failing to materialize from amongst the routines, with every fresh pay packet enshrining what his parents had repeatedly assured him. That platitude, ‘lifes not all fun, you know’ so ubiquitous during childhood that he had become averse to its implications, now hung heavy over every day. It mocked him in his yawning reflection as he rode the bus to work and emanated from the white spaces of the note that the senior safety advisor had fastened next to the rota, which read:

“NOT SHUTTING FIRE DOORS MAY SEEM TRIVIAL TO YOU, BUT IN AN EMERGENCY IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. REMAIN VIGILENT AT ALL TIMES THANKS, SIMON”

Then as he tried to exploit one of the few privileges he felt he was owed, of finding shapes amongst the clouds on the bus home, that same message smirked at his inability to determine the whale that the couple in front of him laughingly identified from a white blob.

Nonetheless he maintained an understanding that he had been given a weekly allowance of ‘moments’, which would enter his account conveniently at its point of exasperation, the zenith of tedium, and then just as quickly evaporate. This week it involved drowsily walking out into the garden behind his house, which oversaw the town built up in the valley, in the early hours of the morning for a smoke. From this point he felt consumed by the vapour in the air, and beneath his feet sensed the ground becoming dewy in preparation of the mornings activity. As the ash eat the length of the cigarette and the smoke spiralled around him, he came to think of it as a fuse that would detonate the day’s regularity. So he looked down across the valleys suburban streets, arranged in orderly formation like a rather harmless militaries parade, with cars in garages awaiting ignition and leaves creeping across immaculate lawns in the breeze. Watching, he then began to distinguish the steady advance of one vehicle along the lifeless avenue. With the ash nearing the butt he realised it was a milkman on his rounds, placing a bottle upon each doorstep with a nocturnal solemnity. The man didn’t take another puff on his cigarette, he wanted the moment to remain so, and with the cigarette symbolising what it did he could feel the heat of the impending discharge of boredom. So he watched and waited. Observing this spectre haunt the empty streets, glazed in artificial light, he was in rapture that he’d never consciously connected this poltergeists movement to the rows of glistening fresh bottles aligned each morning on the doorsteps he passed. Then with a tangible lurch, as though winded, he lost that feeling of elevation and, beginning to shudder, stubbed the cinders out beneath his heel and walked back shivering into the house.